character gameplay designer

Shrek Super Slam was made by Shaba Games in San Francisco.  For about 9 months, I was on loan to Shaba Games helping them complete this title.  My first assignment was Ogre Fiona.  At that time, I don't recall having a whole lot to go on for her designs.  We knew human Fiona was a formidable fighter so the direction I opted for was for a more brawler type.

Ultimately, her moves were probably too slow compared to the other characters so she was not able to sustain the intended pummelling but I think the animations look and flow nicely.

Gingerbread Man - or Gingy - was my second character.  He was a lot more fun to work on.  As a Gingerbread man with a candy cane, he had a lot going for him.  I believe that when I started on Gingy, he was about 20% complete which amounts to having a few basic moves in including his Smash.  He kit was all about being small, fast, and simple.

Huff n Puff is another character I designed.  I recall mostly wanting a character that had unique movement mostly inspired by coming up with every which-way to use his puff breath which was pretty much all he has from a narrative perspective.  His aerial move is most likely Jet Li Once Upon a Time in China inspired but I can't recall exactly from what move.

I will admit that Humpty Dumpty is weird.  I remember getting his idle animation from animator Steve Ekstrom and it was both funny and disturbing.  I would mime this animation from behind a post or corner lurking over the lead designer Tom Teuscher.  His move sets was intended to make him difficult for your opponent to predict, both in attacks and movements.  Some of the end of combo finishers were just about making something silly happen (eggs, birds).

Some other characters I worked on included Anthrax and Cyclops.  The latter I did not design but instead inherited from another TFB designer who left the on-loan program earlier than I did.  Anthrax was designed to be opportunistic and evasive. One bit of hindsight with her design that would be learned in the later Skylander titles was the importance of hit-boxes.  She probably could have used bigger hit- boxes.  I recall we could scale body parts but we could not scale her horn, only her entire head which did not look good.  In retrospect, I should have used a visual effect to fill in the negative space allowing for a bigger hit box.  By being a slave to the visuals, she ultimately came out as a weaker character but her superior movement made her fun to play.

In 2016, Shrek Super Slam became a competitive eSport.

One fun thing about Shrek Super Slam is that I did the graphic design layouts for the majority of the instruction manual because we simply didn't have anyone else to do it.  Left to their own devices, Activision was going to have some company contracted to do what would most likely be a generic manual layoff.  This was also at the end of an era where manuals were disappearing from games or would be 4 page minimum legal disclaimers or corporate declarations.