Agents of Mayhem
Agents of Mayhem is a third person shooter/action game with a bombastic kinetic combat system. On Agents of Mayhem I worked on the combat team specializing in hero design for our playable characters from the tail-end of pre-production to ship. I also served as Lead Designer on the Agents of Mayhem DLC.
Contributions:
Worked with the combat team to explore different combat directions including arcadey and cover based.
Worked with narrative, concept, and animation to define a character’s identity, backstory, and personality.
Designed in depth character kits for Daisy, Oni, Hardtack, Kingpin, and Red Card. Kits includes weapon, passives, melee attack, activated ability, and Ultimate Ability.
Prototyped or fully implemented most character kits in our proprietary engine including bug fixing, sfx/animation/vfx hookup, and general polish.
Coordinated with other disciplines including animation, narrative, character art, SFX, and VFX to develop a character from initial design to ship.
Worked with our UX team to define our color language, player facing information, ability keywords, and tutorial text. I took over tutorials at the tail end of production.
Served as Lead Combat designer during pre-production on a canceled sequel.
Post-Release gameplay footage of three agents I worked on: Oni, Hardtack, and Kingpin
Agent Example - Daisy
Overview
Daisy is a bruiser agent with high durability and battle control. Their kit includes-
Weapon - Minigun
Minigun with wind up, high damage output, and heat build up. When the gun overheats it must be vented before it can fire again.
Special
Daisy vents her gun. She gains a speed boost, several stacks of fortify, and touching enemies deals damage and knocks them back.
Ultimate - Jammer Mode
Daisy unleashes the full potential of her Heavy Mini. While in Jammer Mode, her gun does not build up heat and has an increased rate of fire and damage output.
Daisy was one of my most challenging and also most successful agent designs on Agents of Mayhem.
Daisy is a minigun carrying bruiser agent with high mobility thanks to her roller derby skills and hover skates. Personality wise Daisy is “built like a sh*t brickhouse” who jumps into the middle of the fray with no hesitation.
All these things together meant that if we weren’t careful Daisy would be the perfect agent - fast, durable, and high damage. But we don’t want perfect agents. We want them to have strengths and weaknesses so players are motivated to swap between agents and craft diverse squads.
My solution was to make a modal setup so that Daisy could be all these powerful things just not at the same time. Daisy has high damage from her minigun but it builds up heat and will not fire when it overheats. I didn’t want heat to be an absolute negative. Instead I utilized it as a resource that fuels her roller derby inspired special ability that embraces her mobility. She can zip around the battlefield knocking around enemies in her path.
Originally the ability auto triggered when you filled up the heat meter but I wanted it to have tactical applications. Players can use the ability whenever. This allowed players to use it as a quick tactical reposition tool in quick bursts to break flanks, close distances to enemies, or for increased defense against powerful attacks. Or players could save up heat to use the move as a form of “super melee” to beat up enemies.
(Daisy’s concept art outlining her minigun)
The Minigun Problem
Daisy’s initial design was a challenge but late in development we hit a separate problem. I got heavy internal feedback that Daisy didn’t “feel” right and wasn’t dealing enough damage. This was mainly focused on the minigun and how people expected it to deal way more damage than it was.
However our agent weapons needed to be a default attack for the agents. They couldn’t switch weapons and had infinite ammo so that they always had their weapon to fall back onto. Additionally her minigun needed to be balanced against other agents’ weapons and they had more basic AR rifles or shotguns. This goes against player expectations since players expect miniguns to be a super weapon that can mow down enemies.
My design already tried to mitigate this as much as possible. We gave her weapon heat to lower her long term DPS and boost her short term DPS with the weapon. We also added a faked weapon spread so players feel like more bullets are fired that don’t dramatically increase her single target DPS. Her ultimate was also meant to be the true minigun experience where she has no heat and increased damage to fulfill the player expectation.
Despite all that we were still short on her minigun game feel. Being close to ship we couldn’t do any weapon or character re-designs to thoroughly address the issue. I took the feedback and we pushed the minigun damage as much as we could even breaking some of our balance metrics to do so. We also pushed her ultimate ability as the ultimates are meant to break the game in some way to give the player a power rush. These pushes were enough to overcome the power dissonance the team was feeling.
To address the feedback I wrote an internal blog post that walked through the problem. People really appreciated me taking the time and helped them feel like their feedback was heard. After some additional tweaks people were satisfied with the result. The process is my example of the importance of feedback.
Post-Release combat footage of Daisy