Kimball Brooksby - Game Designer

Character Kit

Problem:

The impetus for this project was to study and explore how different factors affect the game feel of combat games. As the main way the player interacts with the game, the player was our focal point for crafting our game's feel.

Goals:

Seamless Control - Central to the game feel was making the controller disappear in the hands of the player through both the actions the player's character could take and the actual buttons the player could press.
Opportunities for Mastery - Another core aspect of the game feel we were trying to craft was offering up a set of moves with enough depth to take the player on a meaningful journey of mastery and discovery as they experimented with the abilities of the character.
Power Fantasy - Parallel to providing opportunities for mastery was seeding in opportunities for the player to express power over their foes in a manner of their choosing.

Process:

To start, I got my team together to discuss our inspirations and where we wanted our game to land in relation to them. Our axis for comparison were combat assistance and number of enemies, since these were the two axis we found most combat games shared and directly influenced their difficulty.
Alongside this discussion, we sampled some of our favorite mechanics from different games to consider for inclusion in our core combat system, such as Lock On, Executions, Juggling, and Parrying.
From these two discussions, I outlined our player's basic actions, including:
- 4-hit light and heavy attack chains, ending in powerful finishers.
- A universal dodge attack that initiates a new attack chain.
- A chargeable secondary attack opener that knocks enemies down.
- Dodge-canceling from any non-dodge, non-finisher attack.
- A single-target, long-duration disabling special ability.
- An AoE knockback special ability.

Lessons:

Avoiding Painful Traversal: As this project was solely focused on combat, I neglected to consider how slow our game would feel without standard movement options, such as sprinting or jumping. As even a game such as this needed to get players from one encounter to another quickly, these features were sorely missed by players.
Reflecting Player Intention: As we were playtesting, I kept hearing two pieces of feedback: players were frustrated by not being able to heavy attack out of dodge, and players loved the chargeable heavy. To lean into this, I made the dodge attack a light attack specific input, and added the ability to charge any secondary attack. This increase in flexibility and realignment with player expectations drastically improved the cohesion of our move set and the flow of the combat loop, and reminded me of why playtesting early and often is key.

Character Kit Brainstorming

PlayerActions_EarlyBrainstorming.pdf

Character Kit Early Outline

ForwardFacing_03-31-26.mp4

Character Kit In-Game

Enemy Behavior

Problem:

Without a compelling set of enemies for the player fight, the tools we gave them would be useless and uninspiring.

Goals

Strong Identity - Each character we built had to feel unique to fight and be visually distinct, so that when the player was facing down a horde of enemies, they'd be able to quickly parse what the objective of the fight was and who were the important actors in the combat.
Flexible Encounters - We needed to build our cast in such a way that we could specifically challenge any subset of the player's skills or abilities, while also being mindful of the limited time and resources we had on hand.

Process:

To start, I researched how our reference games built up compelling enemy encounters.
I found that in many of our reference games, such as God of War 2018, they used the same 3 enemy types for the majority of encounters:

The Fodder: Weak but plentiful enemies that were used to fill out the bulk of the encounter and challenge the player's crowd management.
The Defender: Strong but scarce enemies that were used to add texture to and focus the player's attention in group fights, due to their limited capacity to ignore the hit stun of the player's attacks.
The Archer: Ranged enemies that were used to pester the player and split their attention away from pressing melee enemies to test the player's situational awareness and positioning.

After the player got used to these basic types, the game also usually threw in a character with special abilities, like a summoner or behemoth type, to spice up encounters past what they could do with just the basic types.

With this research in mind, I outlined how we could adapt these enemies types to our game, built out a general behavior tree and token-taking system for group combat, then implemented the enemy specific behaviors, such as blocking or shooting, that would make the enemies feel unique.

Lessons:

Behavior Sub-Trees: When I first approached this problem, I built a standardized behavior tree that all the enemies would use, with the intention of leaving specific behaviors up to overriden methods and blackboard parameter changes. This worked well enough for a project of this scale, but reduced our enemies movment to orbiting the player or not moving at all. In the future, I would break up the behaviors I'm looking for into their own sub-trees, rather than conglomerating everything into a master tree, so that I can mix and match the behaviors I want individual enemies to exhibit.
Player-Defense-Centric Enemy Balance: The defender enemy was the most difficult enemy to balance from the bunch, due to how they asked the player to adapt by pacing their attacks and making space. Through this enemy, I learned how important defensive mechanics and good telegraphing are, as without thing like dodge-cancelling or tech-rolling, the player is likely to get stun-locked or frustrated by the seemingly low responsiveness of the game.

SoldierBehavior.mp4

Enemy Behavior: Fodder

DefenderBehavior.mp4

Enemy Behavior: Defender

ArcherBehavior.mp4

Enemy Behavior: Archer

FullGroupCombat.mp4

Enemy Behavior: Group

Boss - The Commander

Problem:

As a team, we really wanted an encounter that would showcase all the our game had to offer and allow the player to exercise all the skills they had developed during their playtime. What we landed on was the Commander.

Goals

Narrative Payoff - Throughout development, we had this picture of a freshly woken vampire, ready to slake his thirst on whatever unfortunate thing passed into his realm, so the boss was to provide a foil for that character. The Commander represents the forces of the light, encroaching on your territory of endless night, and was someone the player can feel badass about defeating.
Mastery & Expression - The experience up until the boss was mostly spent teaching the player the basics and giving them some room to try out their new "wings". It was all the more important, then, that the boss have moments that deliver strongly on both the player's desire for Mastery and Self Expression.

Process:

With Parker, another designer on my team, I mapped out the emotional journey we wanted to take the player on through this encounter, and outlined what we would need to accomplish that journey.
I then listed all the skills and abilities in our character's kit, and working back from there, designed six attacks that together fully covered over the whole set. This gave the Commander a base kit of three martial attacks and three magical attacks that were unlocked one at a time through each of his four phases.
Using these as a base, I created a state machine to manage the Commander's state changes, a base character and controller to consolidate the operating logic, and a behavior tree to dictate how the boss was to engage and respond to the player's actions.

Lessons:

Charting Enemy Behavior: When I started building the Commander's behavior tree, I split it up into multiple subtrees, one for each phase, thinking that this would give me more control over the boss's interaction. And, while it did to an extent, I didn't take the time to fully consider the behaviors shared between all the phases, leading to a lot of duplicated work and an eventual consolidation of the trees into the master tree for efficiency's sake.
Surprise & Delight: While building out the phase changes, my team and I felt that the transitions lacked excitement and clarity, so after brainstorming for a while, we added a fake death, a short delay, then a refilling health bar between phase 2 and 3, similar to the Ape Guardian from Sekiro, to give more gravitas to the switch. This small change completely changed the feel of the fight and ratched up the tension of the second half, after the fakeout, since the player was now facing a being much more powerful than they first thought.

BossFlowChart.pdf

Boss Fight Outline & Flowchart

Boss Fight Playthrough

TotalBossFight_04-21-26.mp4

Boss Fight Playthrough

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