senior character gameplay designer
Skylanders Spyro's Adventure was barely out the door before we began a whirlwind development cycle on Skylanders Giants that would only last 11 months. For comparison, Spyro's Adventure saw a development cycle of around 30 months. First and foremost was for Toys For Bob and the character gameplay team to come up with what our newest feature was going to be. I believe some rejected concepts from Spyro's Adventure were revisited and turned into our first new premium character, the Giant Tree Rex! I was the point man for defining how Giants felt in combat. Other groups would come up with some of their in level interactions such as chain pulls, rock lifting, and barrier breaking. Additionally, I led the design effort for developing Wow-Pows - special upgrades given to Series 2 Skylanders (detailed below).
Skylanders typically come with some affordances such as a giant hammer or ice saber. Tree Rex has a glowing arm cannon with spikes. It is a familiar starting point where a Skylander designer is given a not-quite-blank-canvas and must bring it to life. In this case I had the assignment of defining what made Giants Giants. In addition to big moves, we added great amounts of screen shaking, subtle amounts when you walk with big bassy sound effects and foot print effects appearing on the ground. One challenge was getting them to feel like they moved fast without making them actually move too much faster than most of the other Skylanders. Their larger scale meant they covers more ground per footstep and a faster movement speed would make them unbalanced in PvP modes. His Titanic Elbow slam was Hulk inspired and Tree Rex's soul gem (a woodpecker nested on his back that pecks nearby enemies to death) was a particularly amusing upgrade to have made.
When I saw Swarm's wings, there was a very deliberate design direction I wanted to pursue. Flying in Spyro's Adventure was not that useful, especially with level design cutting deep water terrain from their toolkit. I wanted to make flying matter for Swarm and opted to give him modal combat. I recall there was a lot of iteration to get his flight right. Not just the flight but getting the firing controls feeling good. Swarm would try to look on to targets and fire at where I thought the player intended to aim but play tests showed when there were no enemies around, they found his strafe flight very jarring so when he has no target around, Swarm's yaw would slowly turn towards the players velocity heading. Pop culture notes: Swarm has a melee combo and a two-handed X shaped projectile that are very Wolverine inspired, his bug form was definitely influenced by Shino Aburame, and his soul gem upgrade - "Bee is for the Butt Stinger" harkens to the Spathi Eluder Butt Missile. Sadly, "Butt Missile" as a name was turned down.
Hot Head was designed around one simple mechanic: cover enemies in oil and light them on fire. In later Skylanders, we would get feedback from the German localization team that this was not ok but during Skylanders Giants, I guess the development was so rushed through that this one slipped through. I had originally asked for one fire hand and one oil hand but they two was determined to look better with two fire grill hands so we just made it work. No one seems to question it! Hot Head's Sizzle Shower ability was visually inspired by Jiraiya's Fire Rasengan ultimate jutsu as seen in Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm. Some other fun facts, the Eternal Flame upgrade puts a dragon on his fire hand while the Hot Oil Treatment upgrade puts a squid on his oil hand. Hot with a Chance of Meteors is definitely a Spirit Bomb and his Hot Rod soul gem transformation is a shout out to Robotech's Cyclone motorcycle. One fun easter-egg I had put in on Hot Head was that if holding his primary attack, after about 10 seconds, he would begin a modified monologue referencing a very obscure part of Ninja Turtle history. Sadly it was removed by the audio director at the 11th hour but I put it back in for Trap Team. Imaginators would go on to use a new engine/tool so Trap Team is the only game you can find this easter egg in.
Jet Vac's original design was very different from the end result. When designers first pitched various Skylanders for Giants, balance designer extraordinaire - Rich Davis - pointed out that the air element was lacking melee characters. Inspired by the Benihisago (Crimson Gourd) artifact used by Ginkaku in Naruto Shippuden, mixed in with a little bit of Kirby, Jet-Vac was originally meant to pull enemies close and wallop them over the head with his vacuum gourd. I had nicknamed him the Gourdian - a name that did not go over very well with others. Even after getting the character designs from I-Wei Huang who did all the Skylander drawing concepts at this point in the franchise, animator Dan Ross and I tried to keep the original design intact before yielding to the inevitable: Jet-Vac had a gun. The final nail in the Gourdian Coffin was when Jet-Vac was named a starter pack Skylander and the starter pack was found lacking a projectile hero. To compensate, I gave Jet-Vac's projectiles a significant amount of push back on enemies. Some upgrade notes: Eagle-Air Battle Gear = Battle of the Planets / G-Force / Gatchman reference again and Jet Vac exclaims "Barrel Roll" when doing his Flying Corkscrew move because... you know.
Since the Giants were the big stars in Skylanders Giants, our concept artist I-Wei Huang spent most of his time trying to nail down their look. As such, when it came to the core Skylanders, the designers were able to create more ability-centric designs rather than being being confined to provided visuals. While Hot Dog started his journey this way, his destination - at least visually - was far off the mark. My original idea for what would become Hot Dog was to have a Tae Kwon Do like martial artist who kicked fireballs out of his feet. In development, I was using Flameslinger's model for the placeholder art and the idea was coming along nicely. The fire wall animation was to have this Skylander make the wall with a leg sweep and force in forward with an explosive martial arts move. Alas, I was given a dog. That's just how it happens in game development sometimes. If you imagine all of Hot Dog's moves on a martial artist, it makes a lot of sense but props to our talented animation team for making it all work on a dog. This would be a blessing in disguise as I would be able to fulfill my random ambition of making a dog who shoots bees when he barks. It was not terribly obvious that this was happening so when Hot Dog got a series two Wow-Pow, I made sure to make the bee more prominent.
Fright Rider has a similar tale to Hot Dog except that I-Wei nailed exactly what I was going for. The original concept was simply a guy riding an ostrich and creating a really wacky character around that basic image. There's certainly a bit of Looney Tunes Bugs Bunny burrowing through the ground in his secondary ability. This hero was more about creating an interesting character and toy over making compelling and unique gameplay however... the burrowing ability was pretty cool - and full of bugs I had to fix!
Pop Fizz was a hero that I inherited from another designer. His design was mostly complete by this time and my contribution was mostly cleaning up and polishing his Potion buddies and Beast Form melee combos as well as fleshing out all the interactions in his Mixologist upgrade. Pop Fizz was a really interesting character that I was glad I got to work on. Fun fact - Pop Fizz is voiced by Bobcat Goldthwait.
wow-pows & series 2 skylanders
Given only 11 months to make Giants, we only had enough bandwidth to create 16 new characters (8 Giants, 8 core characters). To generally have more toys in the set to sell, we came up with the idea of Series 2 Skylanders. Part of this was the toy teams desire to make higher quality toys. Spyro's Adventure was our first rodeo and in some cases, the toys were really rushed. I believe the starter pack toys in Spyro's Adventure had to be factory final in January or February of 2011, about 6 months before our game was code final. As such, the first Spyro toy was not really representative of what we wanted visually for Spyro. Better looking toys did not seem enough though so we sought to add value in game in the form of a new super upgrade we would dub the Wow-Pow. Overall, I feel like Wow-Pows did not hit their stride until their appearance in Swap Force. I've omitted per character comments for this section as it only encompass one upgrade versus an entire character.
SPYRO
credits
This was the same system that I set up for Skylanders Spyro's Adventure. I trained a junior designer to set it all up and it came out looking great. I personally like the writing from the first game better. It has a better Deadpool-breaking-the-fourth-wall feel to it.