Golden Axe: Beast Rider
(October 2008, Xbox 360 and PS3, SEGA/Secret Level)
A modern-day update of the classic arcade game Golden Axe. As Tyris Flare, players use sword, beast, and magic to defeat hordes of enemies on their way to a showdown with the Death Adder.
A fan-made trailer for Golden Axe: Beast Rider.
Coming onto a project late in the process is always a challenge. My role on Golden Axe: Beast Rider was to design and tune the AI for a wide range of enemy NPCs — and to do it quickly. With a combination of high-level state machines and mid-level scripting in Lua — and a lot of coordination with other designers, animators, and engineers — I was able to assemble a library of reusable attack abilties and controllers, which allowed the team to build a full range of melee, magic-using, and mounted enemies with both orthogonal and scaled differences, to keep the player challenged and engaged.
The bosses in the game used the standard abilities as a leaping-off point, but presented the additional challenge of environmental interactions. Working closely with the level scripter and environment artists, I worked on creating scenarios in which the player has to use the entire level in order to defeat the boss: knocking them into flaming towers, destroying healing beacons, and flushing them out of burrows. The result is bosses that offer a break in pace from the hack-and-slash of regular levels, and allow the the player to feel like they've overcome a special sort of challenge.
Other responsibilities I had on Golden Axe: Beast Rider: planning and implementing the game's survival mode; integrating animations using Havok Behavior; maintaining a library of visualization tools to help designers diagnose and tune AI in real time.