Final Blog for Lab Brawl

During this semester I worked as an intern for the second semester class that was making a Super Smash Bros. style game using the Unity engine. I worked in various areas, starting with the environment team and then was switched over to the character team. I was also somehow cast as Lead Design for the game, basically in charge of systems design. In keeping with how the game was constructed my final report is going to be bouncing around the game, giving a review of what I did in the Development of the student created game Lab Brawl.

The first week into the project when discussing the things that needed to be created and implemented into the game we spoke briefly on the idea of a story line, which is nearly non-existent in Super Smash Bros. We agree that this was not something that was needed, but if someone wanted to create one to do so in the design document.

The next day I gave a brief overview of a possible story-line and then added it to the design document, which i was able to change and modify as needed as Lead Design. The story line was not used in the final build, but it covered two separate story lines. One for the scientist character and on for the other three characters which were supposedly mutated animals. It consisted of victory and defeat scenarios for each character, including very painful deaths if the player failed to defeat the final boss, called Chimera, while playing as the scientist.

The first team that I was assigned to work with was the environment team. The first item of business having been a stage to fight on, or rather, in. As one of the core game elements was to be that the game stage rotated the stage itself had to be playable from all sides. To allow this type of gameplay I created a box with various tables and boxes, as place holders for cages, in 3Ds Max. This was used as the main arena with the characters fighting inside of it. I also created two platforms that, though not used in the final build, could be placed and used as floating platforms to avoid the effects of the spinning level.

I also created a short animation and created the background for the start screen. After having created these I was changed over to the character team.

The first thing that was needed was to create a rig for the characters, so i created a base rig to fit a base mesh character which had been made. There were a few problems with the base mesh which needed to be fixed and after which I gave this base mesh back to the other character modelers to shape and expand on to fit both the character Ratenstien(speed) and Catrina(balanced). I then created a simple rig to fit the base mesh character which could be shaped and placed inside of the edited meshes and then tweaked to match the new meshes and then be used to animate.

I was then tasked with setting up all of the damage points and percent damage for attacks in the design document. I created the class layout portion in the design document as well as the combat movement section, defining what controls would be linked to that movement, including base movement, attacks, and special abilities. Though I did not create the initial set-up for the power-ups I determined what they would do and by what strength they would perform at.

After having revised the rigs for Ratenstien and Catrina and creating one for Army-Dillo(power) I was tasked with modeling the Chimera(boss). It took me a few days to model the Chimera fully, since the addition of two more heads and what would have to be an animatable tail and pair of wings are not simple, and then had to find the best way to rig the character. After having made the bones and skinned them to the mesh I proceeded to set-up controllers for the wings to make them easier to animate. Following that I spent a large chunk of time animating him, constantly referring to the pipeline animation document for the order of his attacks, though not the same timeline. I also left out a few of the animations which weren't needed for him, as he was the boss and something ledge grab made little sense for him to have, especially when he had massive to lift himself back onto the stage if he fell off.

(images/videos of Chimera)






By the end of the time spent on the Chimera he had a texture, color map, full animations and full movement of his wings, tail, heads, and the rest of his body.

For my internship I needed a total of 60 hours. Between making Lab Brawl and working with the fourth semester game design students I have well over the needed amount, though I've lost track of the actual number of hours.