KNOCKOUT LEAGUE (2018)
Knockout League is an arcade-style boxing game built from the ground up for virtual reality. The game is heavily inspired by old school boxing games but with modern twists and an exceptionally crazy cast of characters. The gameplay is centered around reading and reacting to your opponents’ varied attacks.
I was heavily involved from the very beginning: making both the initial pitch and the prototype with our Technical Director. For the remainder of the project, I served primarily as Lead Designer and Scrum Master for our ~15 person team, though you’d often find me doing 3D animations for the game and some occasional VO.
The game features 9 characters and their hard mode variants. I was responsible for the majority of their initial design directions as well as implementing many from concept through completion.
SPECIFIC CONTRIBUTIONS
Below are overviews of my some of favorite characters from Knockout League. Along with their design goals and unique mechanics, I’ve also included deep dives about design problems I encountered during development and what I did to solve them. And of course, all work shown reflects the work of an entire studio.
Iron Maiden
DESIGN GOAL
Defensive character that rewarded technical play. For her Grudge Match (Hard Mode), I wanted to increase difficulty through gameplay - not number scaling. We achieved these through 2 core mechanics, Spot Defense and Glove Shredding:
SPOT DEFENSE: By posing her arms and opening/closing her mask, I could create specific openings for observant players to exploit. I also could vary how she posed to require different punches or increased precision in her Grudge Match.
GLOVE SHRED: Her spikes shred your gloves on contact, leaving them useless for a set time. Due to the game’s system mechanics, this also meant that you lost the option to block. You weren’t left defenseless though, as you could still use the remaining glove to punch her weak spots! Especially with her less obvious openings, this was a move that left many players feeling pretty clever!
Click here to read a deep dive into Iron Maiden’s design where I talk about some of her design problems and how I addressed them.
Showtime
DESIGN GOAL
Tricky and speedy character with a big personality and bigger mouth. Every aspect of him, from attacks and hit reactions, should support those traits. As always, I wanted his Grudge Match to have increased difficulty through gameplay – not number scaling. These were all achieved through the ways his single main mechanic interacts with core game rules.
SHOWTIME’S FEINTS: Before every attack, Showtime flashes a facial expression. This gives away if he’s going to feint and in his Grudge Match, which punch he will feint in his combos.
I timed his feints so that if he tricked you into blocking early, the actual punch will land right as your block becomes weak. Then, his follow-up punches will connect because of…
KNOCKOUT’S BLOCKING MECHANIC: To block, you put your gloves up to your head. But holding them there for too long makes it “weak” so you must time it. If an attack connects while you’re in a Weak block, your gloves are temporarily disabled. This helps prevent overly defensive play.
SHOWTIME’S FEINTS PT. 2: The feints are made so pre-emptive dodges will also get caught. All I needed to make that happen was extend his normal rotate-to-player windows through his feints. That way, the best way to avoid the delayed punch was to actually recognize it and dodge late.
Mixing in feints with normal attacks made his fight incredibly challenging. Blocking and dodging early OR late meant getting hit so players had to be on point.
It’s a very simple mechanic made meaningful thanks to how to it interacts with Knockout’s defensive systems.
Unfortunately, the mechanic proved so tricky that all our early playtest feedback was about how his fight was so frustrating. As if that wasn’t enough, we were also getting feedback that his personality was grating.
He was annoyingly effective and effectively annoying!
Click here to read a deep dive into Showtime’s design where I talk about these issues and specific design wins we had developing him.
Video/GIF Credits: