Eugene Tam
Game Developer

                  Heading into my first major team based game development experience, I have been tasked to work with a group of teammates selected by my lecturers. My team consist of 2 artist, 1 designer and 6 programmer, we were given 14 weeks (Include Pre and Post Production) to develop a 2D PC game. It was honestly one of the most stressful environment that I worked in before, going into a completely unfamiliar team with very diverse development cycle and my inexperience in managing a team was extremely tough for me.

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     The initial idea for the game – Mechaman was a team base power ranger - like shoot/beat em up and having the special team up wacky mecha fighting part as the boss fight. I was fully supportive of the idea because of the team base shoot em up part serve as a very solid gameplay experience that most player will be familiar while the team up mecha fight are something very fresh and fun for us to explore and develop to make it fun.

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                 Three weeks into the development cycle, the team decided to make a big change which is to scrap off the shoot em up part and make the mecha fight into the full game. The first draft mechanic for the game was having two player cooperating to control each side of a mecha to fight against monsters. With this each player have literally equal control over the mecha and if any player overpowered, the mecha will be stun hence it make sure the players don’t dominate each other during the gameplay.  After several discussion with the team, I decide to divide the role of the players to combat pilot and movement pilot, in this case they won’t have the constant annoyance and frustration where every misclick of a button might lead to a major penalty.

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                  A lot of game mechanics and design decision was then made based on this core gameplay mechanic, this include the introduction of synchronize bar, input device changes and enemy’s AI. I added in synchronize attack into game even with the already existence of normal and combo attack (can be perform by combat pilot alone) to encourage player to work together to execute stronger attack or dodge certain enemy’s attack. Player can also perform a special attack when they gather enough synchronize point to fill up the bar, this serves as a very strong motivation point for the players to communicate constantly. The addition of synchronize attack means that multiple input will be entered constantly hence I decide to change the input devices from keyboard to console controller to prevent the possible keyboard ghosting (PC can’t register too much keyboard input at the same time) problem.

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                    Having only play plenty of staple human character fighting game like street fighter, king of fighter and injustice, I was making plenty of bad decision and call when I am designing the move set for both the mecha and the monster. A lot of initial move set was too organic which is too ridiculous and flexible for a mechanic or bulky monster character to perform, hence I did some research by watching several episode of the classic Ultraman and the movie Pacific Rim. I found out that a lot of combat move perform by the character are raw and rely heavily on brute strength instead of martial art technique, I then adjust the move set for the player mecha based on those key concepts. Designing AI for the monster was definitely a fun and practical training for me, the key design that I apply for the monster’s behavior are supposed to force the player to learn and adapt. I will break down each attack of the monster and its purpose into a table to help you understand its intention.

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Development Mechaman was certainly a difficult but fruitful experience, I have definitely level upped in both designing and managing a big team. It was a big risk having a lot of changes during the development process but the risk was unquestionably a risk worth taking to aid my growth and sharpen my skills. Although the game was clearly not execute as how I planned but the fact that the team and I are capable of constantly come out with solution to compensate was something to be proud of.