Agents of Mayhem DLC
Agents of Mayhem is a third person shooter/action game with a bombastic kinetic combat system. On Agents of Mayhem DLC I served as lead designer to make additional characters that fit in the core game. We released a DLC agents every few weeks after the game’s launch for a total of three agents. I’m very proud of the DLC agents because the agent team, VFX and animation included, took everything we learned from the base game and produced some of our best agents.
Contributions:
Oversaw a cross-discipline team of designers, VFX, programmers, writers, and animators to create three new characters each with character missions, progression, and skins.
Collaborated closely with concept, animation, and narrative to conceptualize our three additional characters.
Designed in depth character kits for Gat, Lazarus, and Safeword. Kits includes weapon, passives, melee attack, activated ability, progression, and Ultimate Ability.
Designed intro missions for each agent and managed a team of designers, VFX, animators, and engineers to implement them.
Worked closely with production to plan out milestones, write tickets, and meet milestones.
Prototyped or fully implemented most character kits in our proprietary engine including bug fixing, sfx/animation/vfx hookup, and general polish.
Led review meetings and group playthroughs to maintain our quality bar and iterate on our work.
DLC Agent Gat trailer
Agent Example - Lazarus
Overview
Lazarus is a high skill elusive controller type that leverages her nano-bots, “nanites”, to deal damage over time and direct her powerful activated ability. Their kit includes-
Weapon - Drone Strike
Lazrus launches clusters of nanites at enemies that deal damage overtime and stack. Unlike other agents Lazarus has a max number of nanites clusters. Managing the swarm targets and ammo is key to playing Lazarus.
Special
When activated Lazarus deals damage based off of where her swarms are deployed. If an enemy has one swarm they are effected by a small effect. If they have two or more they are effected by a major effect. For every swarm not deployed Lazarus gains a scaling effect.
Ultimate - Metalstorm
Lazarus automatically fires clusters at nearby enemies and her special ability cooldown is reduced.
Gat and Safeword were picked as DLC agents for marketing reasons to appeal to existing Saints Row fans. Lazarus however was picked as a flex for our agent team. The VFX team went through thorough R&D to develop the nanites and their fantastic work pushed the design and animation teams to make her a standout agent.
I’m particularly proud of Lazarus because I designed her to subvert our combat system without breaking it. Our combat system is very explosive and kinetic and it rewards you for jumping in head first and being aggressive. I designed Lazarus to be more of an elusive schemer for high skilled players. Managing your nanite clusters creates an extra wrinkle to the game flow. Once deployed you are rewarded for playing defensively, not offensively. If you can capitalize on these elements she becomes immensely strong.
Lazarus’s kit also had high synergy across all her abilities while tapping into her visual and character design. It’s a very consistent design across all her elements.
All these things together made Lazarus a stand-out agent and my personal favorite.
One or More
One critical decision I made on Lazarus early on was that her special ability cared whether there were one or more than nanite clusters currently on an enemy. The nanites can infinitely stack beyond just two nanites and in theory we could easily scale effects to more finite detail but we would have run into a complexity problem.
Players only have so much that they can process particularly in a quick paced combat such as ours and we were already running into visual overload with our abundance of explosions, VFX, status effects, and damage numbers. Even if players could track their clusters number wise the visualization of the stacks would have been hard to read on enemies.
Tracking and stacking your nanite clusters was central to the design so I rendered it down to the most basic version of the decision process: Do they have one or do they have more than one? Though clunky to say in abilities it simplified the abilities and played extremely well from the start.
This paradigm made for interesting tactical decisions. I only gave players 4-5 swarms and often you were facing down 5+ enemies. Do you spread out your swarm to hit 5 smaller enemies? Or do you stack them up on 2 enemies for the more powerful effect? Or maybe put two on a big enemy and spread the rest out to other smaller enemies? Or do you keep some undeployed so you can get a buff?
The other critical decision I made was making sure Lazarus got a buff for undeployed nanites. Though this added more complexity to an already complex ability it made sure players had a safety net. No matter where their clusters were they were getting an effect. This helped lower the barrier to entry for playing Lazarus because you were never punished for under utilizing her nanites and her special.
All together this made for a very interesting and deep decision space players could engage with even in the thick of the most intense combats.
(Lazarus’ concept art outlining how her nanites are deployed)
Post-Release gameplay footage of the DLC agent Lazarus