Megamind: Mega Team Unite
Project Time Scale: 15 months
Team Size: 13
Role: Game Designer
For the first six months, I was the sole designer on this project, managing the GDD and leading strike teams for combat design, level design, tech design, AI, UI and cutscenes. A designer was eventually hired to take over the level design, and close to Beta, an additional designer assisted with UI and cutscenes. Throughout the project I held a high level of responsibility, working within a small team of highly skilled staff (mostly seniors).
Some highlights from an Alpha build of the game
Game Description
Megamind was a four-player, single screen arena fighter for the Wii. It was targeted at a younger audience with simple controls that were easy to learn but difficult to master. This created just the right level of engagement and escalation of difficulty, even for adults. It could host any number of players from one to four, with AI replacing non-human heroes. It also contained three levels of difficulty that were focus tested: Easy for the youngest, most inexperienced kids; Normal for teens; and Hard for experienced players or adults.
Platforms: Nintendo Wii
Tools: Ned (THQ in-house editor), Maya, Visual Studio
A boss fight
Level Design
Levels were built in an iterative, collaborative process in strike teams that consisted of a designer, artist, programmer and sound engineer. After an initial concept meeting with the Producer, the designer directed the strike team to whitebox and iterate the level until it was fun - within the space of a single, six week milestone - then lock it down for the artist to polish.
Each level consisted of three arenas, each with a unique gameplay mechanic. Furthermore, each arena was spaced out over three rounds in which its main mechanic was varied or its physical layout was altered or dynamically animated. This cleverly increased the amount of time players could spend in an arena, while also creating more interesting variations of gameplay and an escalation of difficulty. Getting the most bang-for-buck out of these arenas was essential due to short timeframe and small team size of the project.
The Capture the Crown arena game (similar to CTF)
Combat Mechanics, AI & UI
I designed, built and balanced nine playable characters and about a dozen NPC types. Within the combat strike team, we delivered one PC and several NPC types per milestone. Each "villain" in the game first appeared as a boss at the end of their themed level. After defeating that boss, the player earns their respect and they join the "Mega Team", becoming unlocked as a playable character from that point on.
I was also responsible for designing and implementing the AI using behaviour tables with a single AI programmer. During our first showcase demo to the wider THQ studio, we played the latest build on a projector for ten minutes, then afterwards wowed everyone by announcing that only one human was actually playing the game - the other three "players" were actually bots. Almost everyone thought it was four humans playing. This was a testament to how natural we had made the AI behave, which we modelled after real human behaviours from observational playtesting.
The UI underwent several iterations. Initially, there were power meters for charge attacks and super attacks, as well as individual text-based scores. Through focus testing with the target audience, we found that kids did not even notice these UI elements due to the intensity of what was going on in the combat space. For this reason, we went minimalist with the UI, providing a pie chart for the score so that users could quickly glance at it to see the colour of the leader. In addition, we did away with metered attack costs and simply used charge up timers with visual effects on the character along with a "ding" sound in the Wii remote speaker. This simplification worked much better in subsequent focus tests.
The King of the Hill arena game (similar to Domination)
Conclusion
Megamind was one of the most fun and rewarding projects I've worked on, and many other colleagues who worked on it have said the same thing. It suffered zero turnover for the entire project. I believe this was because the project was run very smoothly - it had good direction, good communication from top to bottom, a lot of skilled senior staff, and high levels of trust, team involvement and responsibility.
If you enjoyed this blog, please hit the like button.
Thank you for reading :)
