I was a combat designer on a four person team made up of myself, Chris Kindred, Chapin Boyer, and Sishir Bommakanti. Together we made an online asymmetrical co-op FPS game about fighting monsters as a mech pilot while your friend, the commander, controls the mech systems and UI.

Using this strangely split perspective and limited information creates a very unique experience that makes for an exhilarating battle which mirrors the intense combat of the anime shows we were inspired by.

I was involved with every part of the process, but my specialization on the team was in the systems design, UI/UX design, combat design through the commander portion of the game. I had to make a lot of choices about the positive and negative ramifications of players not co-operating and how that would manifest in the combat moments. This led me to design systems such as the commander needing to actually eject the gun from the mech’s hand to pick up another gun. The design prompted players to communicate more proactively about combat situations, and didn’t penalize them too much for not thinking several steps ahead (while also making for some very funny moments).

I also built/ designed systems around what we could feasibly scale up using a coding style of systems which multiple players could access but only few could change. I designed systems using this coding framework such as the commander activating structures around the map, like creating new cover spots, or such as having the pilot charge up an energy point for the commander to utilize. These created clean ways for players to co-operate within combat, and easy pathways for us to quickly create and test these moments.

We were chosen to develop the project for Google Stadia as part of their week long game jam to hopefully turn it into a larger game. The end result was an experience which we hoped to scale into something much larger but, Google Stadia didn’t exist for much longer and they didn’t pick up any of the games from the game jam.

Thankfully you can see what we were able in such a short amount of time in the video!