SPENCER SIMONS
Combat Designer
Guardian Heroes
A 2D Beat'em Up Prototype
Using the Unity Engine, I spent about 8 months creating a game that closely resembled one of my favorites for the Sega Saturn, Guardian Heroes. I focused on emulating the combat of a Guardian Heroes game at a basic level as well as some of its important mechanics that made it stand out. The project won Academy of Art's 2023 Runner-Up for Best Full Game.
A Smooth, Impactful Combo
One of my processes was continually tweaking a responsive 4-hit combo the player could initiate and easily break away from and not feel "locked in the animation" when trying to react to enemies. This proved to be a trying process since I was working with pre-assembled sprites and was making my own animation with them, ensuring the contact felt right at various distances as well as ensuring the speed of each attack matched evenly and did not cause the player to slide from their origin point.
Changing Lanes
An important mechanic to the original Guardian Heroes game is a system that allows the player to change "lanes" in the battlefield. A "Far", "Middle", and "Near". I decided to make this game in 2D at the time so had to do a great deal of C# scripting to create the perception of perspective, transforming the character's size gradually when they change lanes to make them appear farther or closer and changing which tags they can interact with when it comes to Game Objects.
Fun Combat Experience
Combining these along with tuning enemy reactions and attacks to be readable to the player and place them strategically to generate an engaging combat experience was a lot of fun to play around with. Using certain enemy attacks to force the player to change lanes quickly to dodge fire tornadoes or laser beams as well as making certain enemies be able to change lanes too to hunt you down.
