lead character gameplay designer
Following Skylanders Trap Team, I was immediately promoted to lead. Moving forward from Imaginators Toys For Bob would move away from the TFB Tool and TFBscript and adopt Vicarious Vision's development environment. As such one of the first tasks we had was porting over our Trap Team characters into their engine. While important, the work didn't warrant its own page but does mark the first game in which I served as a lead on. Other tasks involved brand consulting, character review/feedback, and other support tasks. Another footnote for this part of my career was some early work with the Beachhead team on Skylanders Battlecast. I did an early first pass on what Eruptor's card abilities might look like, some brand consulting, and later on we would play builds and give the team feedback.
Moving on the Imaginators, this was the most ambitious project Toys For Bob had ever taken on. 20 Senseis, 11 palyable Villain Senseis, 10 categories of Imaginator elemental abilities, and 10 Imaginator Battle Classes. That is over 50 characters worth of work! The pipeline for Imaginators was a bit challenging as the concept team had to split their efforts between nailing down how the Imaginators would all look while juggling establishing the looks of the Senseis. We knew we were pressed for time so the introduction of the (initially) 10 Villain Senseis was a way we could get more characters in without having to go through the concept and art process for them. Those assets were all available and could be prepped for production in a fraction of the time a brand new Sensei would take.
This of course also gave us the opportunity to introduce a fully playable 11th Villain Sensei in Kaos! At the beginning, we debated which Battle Class Kaos would be but similar to how the Trap Master version of Kaos controls all elements, we decided that Kaos would control all the Battle Classes. Talented designer, Jesse Kuroki would deliver and jam as many Kaos references as we could possibly fit into his kit including doom sharks, giant floating heads, doomlanders, summoning objects from earth, and giant hands that may or may not resemble the Master Hand from Smash Bros.
On the Imaginator front, I organized the initial designs, battle classes, powers, and upgrade schemata for the Imaginators. We obviously had 10 elements to work with and initially had 12 Battle Classes. The two cut classes were a Whip Master class (hello Boom Bloom!) as well as a Pet Master class (hello Air Strike!). If I recall correctly, the original Sensei count was 2 Sensei each in 12 Classes for 24 Sensei but production realities required that we cut some characters. Boom Bloom was folded into the Ninja Class while Air Strike would find a home with the Brawlers. Unfortunately we were unable to keep our perfect ratio of two Senseis per Battle Class as the balance and progression designers felt it was important to keep a Brawler and Sorcerer in the starter pack and with the special Crash Bandicoot starter set, the Bazooker and Quickshot classes fell victim. With my character gameplay team, we created a giant board with a bunch of abilities to explore what we would do with Imaginators. Everyone on the team would contribute to implementing these powers and do-everything-designer Jan Stec would head the Imaginator implementation and carry Imaginator powers on his shoulders and over the finish line. I think everyone did a great job!
leadership & management
As a lead I ran the character gameplay design department at Toys For Bob. In this role I oversaw the development of all the Skylander characters, their abilities, upgrades, and all aspects required for their implementation ensuring everyone on the team had work to do and goals to meet. I championed a similar and consistent effort across the team to achieve a high level of quality in every character we made. I reviewed the team's work, provided and managed tasks (i.e. JIRA project/issue management softwares), and tracked our asset pipeline (assets provided by other departments) was to keep it in sync with our schedule. I would meet on a regular basis with production and other leads to ensure the overall schedule was on track, review priorities, and make adjustments as issues came up.
Additionally I was responsible for hiring (reviewing candidates and creating design tests), onboarding/training, career development, skill development, and conflict resolution.
ambush
Ambush easily has the most complicated animation set-up of any Skylander I have created. I really wanted to a fluid sword fighting style that had the complexity of a game like Dead or Alive 2. I remember that game specifically for being not as technical as say Street Fighter 4 but the characters always looked great when you randomly spammed the buttons. The game was great at just making your character feel like a powerful fighter and that was what I wanted to go for for Ambush. His fighting style was heavily influenced by Chinese Wushu martial arts. I did a lot of reference research, drawings, and collaborating with my animator. Ambush has a series of wushu inspired stances. The stances were originally mapped to be branching off points for different attack animation paths that would all loop back into one of the other cycles but the amount of animations needed for this was just too many and the gameplay impact wasn't high enough so the design was simplified while still maintaining that fun martial arts combat flow that I think we achieved.
Ambush's secondary attack was another adventure but more in the visual effects vector. The way I described this move was that Ambush would shoot out tree branches that would grow out and create a second copy of himself at the other end while the original copy was either absorb through to the other side or just wilted. I collected a bunch of Captain Yamato mokuton no jutsu reference from the Naruto series for reference. Working with AAA dust, lens flare, and flying trash creator Jerry Chan, we tried so many different looks starting with wood based effects. We next tried vines before finally arriving at bamboo. The effect was really hard to pull in a way that Jerry and his lead was satisfied with but in the end, I think the bamboo theme really pulled all the parts together and gave Ambush a cohesive visual theme.
Wow, I'm realizing just how much there is to say about Ambush so some quick final notes. Spinning Bamboo Piledriver = Zangief. Mark of the Angry Tree upgrade was trying to introduce the concept of stocks from MOBAs. Meditative Strike which grants you bonus damage when you hold one of his in between attack stances/poses was me asking "what if players don't always spam the attack button?" And finally, there are generally a lot of cool combos you can pull of with all of Ambush's abilities. I hope you had fun playing him!
tide pool
Tidepool was a hero I started but as burden of being a lead started growing, I eventually had to make the call to delegate the work out. It was a tough decision since she was such a cool character to work on! The basics of what I had laid out remained intact as Senior Designer Adrian Ledda took on the task to complete Tidepool and her powers. Adrian would polish up Squid Toss placements the Tidepool creates, fully flesh out the Squid Pistol Kata upgrade with our animator Kathryn Taccone, and her Sky-Chi power was 100% Adrian. I think he did a great job with her. The one fun story was that her soul gem upgrade - Emergency Shell-met Defense - was originally her secondary attack. It just wasn't fun enough so all of the work put into that was just turned into a very robust soul gem upgrade. We normally don't put that much complexity and different moves into a single upgrade but in this case, a failed prototype was turned into a bonus for players.
DR. KRANKCASE
From a pure gameplay mechanics point of view, Dr. Krankcase was the most solid of the characters I worked on for Imaginators. All of the moves just worked together so well. He really gives Bat Spin some serious competition for best Skylander I've worked on. I'm big on systems and all of Dr. Krankcases abilities worked together. Dr. Krankcase had a goo gun that left puddles behind, a simple spin attack, and created Hat Bots by lobbing his hat out. In his basic upgrades, his spin attack would activate interactions from spinning into goo puddles as well as Hat Bots and each path further built upon those interactions for some serious crazy fun.
bad juju
Bad Juju has more complicated mechanics that are better suited to an advanced player but Bad Juju has a special place in my heart. The explain why, I need to start with her mechanics a little bit. The original concept was inspired by Orianna from League of Legends. What was interesting and worth exploring was the idea of having an object whose location mattered for gameplay. I started with that one point and took it off in my own direction. It was in the paper prototype stage that I was thinking about what this object would be and it really boiled down to what sort of assets I could get for this character. Our modelling department had something like 2000 Imaginator parts to create on top of all the character and enemy models so their time was at a premium so I generally wanted to keep all asset requests as simple as possible while getting the maximum effect. I knew I wanted Bad Juju to have a connection to this object and I knew reusing Bad Juju's textures would save the artists a lot of time. I was also randomly thinking of my mom at the time so I started sketching out a baby for Bad Juju. I was going to make her a mom! While brainstorm ability names, I kept repeating "Juju" over and over again until "Juju Junior" just rolled out and I knew I had it. The theming just worked out everywhere.
Bad Juju definitely wins the sentimental award but I really love how the mechanics worked out. I really love the Voodoo Curse upgrade - enemies hit by Juju Junior are marked and when one marked enemy is damaged, all marked enemies get damaged! I could go on and on about Bad Juju. What really made this character however was the audio and this was partly by design. I knew creating a relationship between Bad Juju and Juju Junior in the mind of the player was of the utmost importance. The two had to seem like a team, a mother and a son so when their dialogue and call-and-response was finally added to the game, things suddenly clicked for a lot of Bad Juju's detractors in the company. People went from luke-warm to "oh my god!" My favorite reaction to this is from a German Youtuber who is just doing a character analysis/review and several minutes in suddenly realizes what is happening and loses his mind. Jump to about 2:55 in the link. This Skylander is for all the mothers out there!
GRAVE CLOBBER
If Ambush has technical achievement in animation, Dr. Krankcase has achievement in design, and Bad Juju has achievement in character and relations, Grave Clobber gets the trophy for goofy unbridled fun. The biggest challenge designing Grave Clobber was we had a character who appeared in Trap Team as an earth element villain, outwardly has undead mummy vibes but for multiple strange reasons (he made a cool toy and we need to fit an open slot so...) he became a Water Element Skylander. I knew very early on that I needed a theme to pull so many disperate parts together and quickly arrived at taking his Mayan mummy vibe into the Luchador direction. In looking up luche libre moves, I found/recalled a move called the Splash. I have no recollection of what I was thinking of when I came up with what I called a Sar-croc-phagus but that ultimately inspired the Gator Geyers. I knew Sar-croc-phagus was way too hard to say so that name would not last very long but true to their origins, they are indeed crocodile sarcophagi. With those three basics down, everything else came quite naturally. Grave Clobber definitely has a bit of Zangief and Mike Haggar from Final Fight in him.
IMAGINATOR SORCERER CLASS
Beams. All I can remember is beams. That's not entirely true but it takes up a large part of my memory. Imaginators was our first game using Vicarious Visions' tool and figuring out how to get beams to work took a lot of effort and patient guidance from my good friends at VV. Lightning posts and Sticky Balls were also things I needed figure out but ultimately all worked out and I feel I was able to give this Battle Class a unique kit to customize from.