LEAD character gameplay design
By the time we got to Skylanders Trap Team, this was our 3rd... or 3.5th rodeo in Skylands. My #2 on the character team Jesse Moore had left for LucasArts so I was the defacto-most-experienced designer on the team. The process should have been much smoother but the stakes were getting bigger. All-in-all, I think Trap Team has some of my best hero design work of all the games. Additionally, boss design was added to my responsibility list which I had not touched since Madagascar 2. I was able to take all the steps that would lead to a promotion at the end of the project.
Looking back at Snap Shot, he was one of the most difficult Skylanders to design. Part of it was once again bearing the burden of trying to figure out what a Trap Master was but with traps and villains entering the picture, this was not a question I could answer as easily as I could with Tree Rex and the Giants. Everyone had an opinion on what it should mean to be a Trap Master and I did my very best to accommodate everyone's ideas so Snap Shot must have seen a dozen different versions in the search for what a Trap Master would be. In the end, the efforts would directed towards the villains and what rewards you got after capturing them rather than focusing on the act of catching them. I did some of my best scripting for these experiments including a lock-on strafing system that would figure out Snap Shot's actor heading relative to a target and perform animation blending between forward, right, back, and left walks. The upper torso would animate separately trying to rotate towards the target to certain thresholds before blending to a different walk direction. It was extremely complex and extremely satisfying when I got it all working.
Tasked with making the first light element Skylander, I designed Knight Light around the idea of a hero who could create their own debuff zones. In his upgrades, I really took to the theme of "light speed." This was partially influenced by how the Fourth Hokage from the Naruto series moved. This was also something seen in the Dragonball series where fighters moved so fast it appears that they teleport. Even though the implementation of Knight Light's teleporting attacks is rather simple, the end product is quite "flashy" and "striking."
BAT SPIN
Bat Spin is one of those Skylanders that I was able to design up front and have the concept art team create a character befitting her powers. I knew I really wanted a female vampire-type of character and I was really intrigued with the idea of a hero who could use their projectiles after they were fired. These persistent game object - bats in her case - would make her other abilities more effective. From a design perspective, this is probably one of my favorite works. Her upgrade path would turn out to be so insane (she gained 3 bat buddies each with a unique ability that made her into an unstoppable force) that I used it as a new bar to aspire towards for Skylander upgrades. This of course gave me a conundrum: Skylander upgrade paths should be equally appealing. Ideally no one path is the better path so how would I make a second path just as compelling as the first? The answer was more bats and I dare say the second upgrade path I made topped the first. I am really pleased with how this character and her toy turned out.
High Five was a character that came to me with finished concept art. As a dragon(fly), I felt compelled to keep to breath weapons and the racer 5 number on his head seemed to imply speed so I put two abilities I thought I would never put together for fear it would be too overpowered - fast projectiles and fast dashing - and made High Five's kit. For the primary projectiles, I would revisit the unfulfilled Mycon Plasma Spore projectiles that Wrecking Ball was originally supposed to have. These would create a cloud of poison gas that grew bigger in size but dissipated in damage. High Five's kit really became about high risk high reward. This was best expressed in his Buzzerker Overdrive upgrade. It was controversial to have in a kids game but I sought to make deep gameplay experiences even in kids titles. Much like how no one liked the idea of Trigger Happy using actual coins to shoot his gun, people did not enjoy the idea of spending HP to do more damage. To offset this, I made the cost temporary spawning apples that would restore your health after your attack, but restoring your health was optional. Using berserker mechanics, High Five would actually get stronger and faster the lower his HP was and the max charged version of his Overdrive Fly Slam attack did the highest amount of damage seen in a Skylander game to date (the playable Doom Raider bosses and especially Kaos would make short work of those damage numbers however but that was justified by their ephemeral nature). While Bat Spin was a great Skylander that all could easily enjoy, High Five was a great Skylander for the more advanced min-maxer players out there.
Cobra Cadabra (I came up with that name!) was a character I had designed to be deeply rooted in music. He has some of the most complex mechanics of any Skylander made but I made them optional so that players could opt into the added challenge for added damage. Simply put, if you pressed the attack button to the beat of the music, you would get a different colored double damage projectile. I would also have his animations bounce to the beat of the music as well as these snake baskets that he is able to summon pulse damage with the beat of the music. This was done by accessing the BPM of each level's music. Cobra Cadabra's tertiary attack definitely has some Donkey Kong Country vibes (which would come to full realization with Donkey Kong's appearance in Skylanders Super Chargers) as he flies from basket to basket. A developer anecdote, Cobra Cadabra's Master of Puppets- I mean Baskets path was originally meant to have 15 baskets at once but after much number crunching, it was deemed unsuitable for the GPU to allow 2 players to have 30 baskets at once.
Rocky Roll started off in development as a bronzed copy of Boomer that I called the Metal Mage. His abilities involved creating metal balls that he could combine into various weapons such as a giant metal hammer or a metal battling ram. When the concept was delivered to me, it would be an understatement to say there were certain challenges presented to me. First and foremost was how to get the Roll part of this hero working. The answer was simply lots of math, having multiple copies (one for physics calculations and one for visuals) of the boulder to pull of certain visual shenanigans, and constantly attaching/unattaching the boulder every frame. The main parts of Metal Mage made it into Rocky Roll although his Boulderdash ability which seemed to be a requirement for any hero running on a boulder meant there were some casualties in the original design. One fun set of upgrades that were cut due to lack of art resource (or perhaps an overly ambitious designer) was that Roll was supposed to consume boulders to evolve into 3 forms. While form 1 made it into the game, forms 2 and 3 (as originally designed) did not. In form 1, Roll grows arms and becomes an instrument of blunt damage. Form 2 was supposed to have Roll grow four legs and become a tank while Form 3 would have Roll ironically grow one giant leg and jump around like a giant pogo-monster with Rocky piloting from atop. This was to be a reference to the Big Eye hopping robot from the Mega-Man series but not everything you want always makes it into your games. Nonetheless, Rocky Roll turned out great. Forms 2 and 3 sort of exist but just as bigger versions of form 1. Rocky Roll's upgrades make reference to the Moh, a geological measurement of hardness in stones.
mINIS
Minis dated back to the original Skylander Spyro's Adventure game. They were treated as pets that just followed you around but for Trap Team we would bring them all back (with some additions) as fully playable characters. This work required a lot of file organization and general porting that I undertook along with another designer. We would each pitch in whenever one of us had time for the various tasks required for 16 different minis.
bosses
Trap Team is very much about capturing villains and turning them to your side. As such we felt it was necessary to have a major boss for each of the elements which is were the Doom Raiders come in. Initial designs had trapped villains as AI controlled buddies but ultimately we decided getting to play these villains was going to be more fun for the player and create a stronger connecting for the player to their traps. Being a Skylanders game, it was quite evident that we would need a major villain for each of the 10 elements we were to have in the game (two new elements - Light and Dark - to be secretly introduced in this title). These bosses were not only epic encounters for the players, but they would be playable characters players could use once they were defeated and contained within an element-matching trap.
CHEF PEPPERJACK
Jump to 6:25 in the time code to skip straight to the boss fight. Chef Pepperjack was a boss that I prototyped and laid out the basic flow for. Super talented designer Chris Nelson would go on to complete most of the heavy lifting for this boss fight but I would constantly check in and play versions of the battle and give feedback. I'm really happy with how this fight turned out and the subtle cues we added to help the player out such as the flame beams glowing to indicate a possible direction change. If you've played the nightmare mode version of this battle, congrats if you beat it!
golden queen
Jump to 1:00 in the time code to skip straight to the boss fight. Back in the NES days, games like Contra, Castlevania, and especially Mega-Man always rewarded players with boss fights, but in modern times we find that boss fights tend to be really expensive to create. There is usually a lot of programming and creation of assets required to pull it all together. Because of TFBscripting's power, I was able to solve the programming issue with sheer amounts of determination to make the most epic boss fight I could and while each element is not as polished as I would have liked, the sum of the parts really brings together something I am proud of; and epic TWELVE phase boss fight. Each part builds upon the next teaching players about each of the mechanics (with some small change of pace segments in between). Ideally we can have all these mechanics introduced during the level leading up to the boss fight but alas, only breakable floor blocks were reused. The tiling system was developed by Chris Nelson but I did all the logic for how they formed and got destroyed. On the asset side, I was able to reuse mostly existing assets blowing most of my art budget on getting the giant version of the Golden Queen made which while a different asset also reused existing art on hand.
credits
The third go-around with my credits system. This time there was no need for me to get involved. Besides the scrolling credits and moving objects in the background, I failed to mention in previous posts the credits level also handled cycling through times of day and transitioning through different soundtracks. It's cool seeing the credits running so smoothly after so many games!