The Arena 2 (2020) | Reuben Newton

Game Project: The Arena 2 (2020)

Roles: Project Manager, Head Game Designer, Audio Designer, Secondary Artist, Video Editor

Tools: Unity, C#, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Aesprite, Figma

Timeline: 4 months

OVERVIEW

The Arena 2 is a game project made in Unity for IAT 410 (Advanced Game Design). It is a difficult platforming/fighting hybrid game made for speedrunning and high scores and is stylized like old arcade games. The player plays as Iron Mike, a fighter seeking to challenge The Arena, a fighting ring filled with strong fighters. In stage 1, 3, and 5 feature a single boss that the player must fight while levels 2 and 4 feature platforming and a variety of smaller enemies. In between stages, there are break rooms that allow the player to change their moveset as well as restore health depending on the difficulty. The game features better graphics, controls, and aesthetic quality compared to The Arena 1 from 2018. This project is also a snippet of a larger video game that I want to design in the future in being a large boss rush.

In Stage 1, players fight Greti, a large green yeti who fights mainly with physical attacks that ramp up in speed as the battles goes on
In Stage 2, players fight a hoard of Lesser Fighters, small enemies that come in a melee and ranged variant, across a platforming level
In Stage 3, players fight Purple Opponent, mysterious masked sorcerer who floats in the air fights with psychic energy projectiles
In Stage 4, players battle the Lesser Fighters again in a more intricate designed platforming level
In Stage 5, players battle G. Necross, a gangster necromancer who combined both melee and ranged attacks on top of summoning smaller minions to battle the player.
Extra Stage: Upon defeating G. Necross on the game's hard mode, players will have access to a special Stage 6 where the player immediately battles Shadow Mike (named in-game as "???"), an extra enemy that takes the form of a shadowy Iron Mike and attacks with powerful ramming and small shadowy arrow projectiles.

My contributions:

My main role in the project was that of project manager. This meant I kept up to date with the rest of my team and made goal plans for us to fulfill and was responsible for the main game design of the game. My intent going into the class was to expand on the ideas in the original The Arena using the stronger resources provided by having a team and a whole semester to work on the project. I am very thankful and lucky to have a team willing to help realize this new arena game.

From The Arena 1, the core concept of a short boss rush game was kept, but expanded upon. Whereas the previous game had limited controls, The Arena 2 features a dash, but more importantly a choose-limited-attack system. This system involves the player being brought to a menu before the game begins. This menu would show 5 moves that the player could pick 2 of before entering a stage that they would use for the stage. This gave an element of personalization and strategy as the player could choose moves that they preferred/felt would be a good fit for the upcoming stage (using previous experiences of failed attempts to know in advance).

The game’s character designs, with the exception of the player character Iron Mike, were drafted by me (see the bottom of this page) out of a small library of characters that I have to myself to use for these types of projects or comics. While I did do some sprite work on the smaller mob enemies present in levels 2 and 4, it should be noted that the main character and boss sprites were finalized by our team’s artist.

As I was in charge of the game’s user experience, I also decided to include some video elements into the game. Pretty much every fighting game out there has some sort of special victory and defeat screen that act as transitions between matches, so I decided to capitalize on this and make small videos that went before and after each stage.

These short videos usually had the boss say some kind of line as opposed to them being a blank slate and had limited animation using fade ins. These were made in Adobe Premiere by manipulating the sprites myself and my team’s lead artist made.

After making these videos, I decided to go even further and create and intro video commonly seen in old arcade fighting games, an ending cutscene, and even a small credit roll to celebrate my team. The lead programmer and I were also responsible for the game’s main two easter eggs, the first being the game’s training dummy turning hostile when attacked enough, and the second being the game’s hidden sixth stage only available on the hardest difficulty.

A video showcasing all the small splash video elements present in the game

In addition to all of this, I handled the game’s sound design through finding various royalty-free sounds and music, internally play tested the game a lot for balance, and always tried to contribute a bit more for related documents made for the project as to ease the burden for my programmers. I also contributed one piece of music to the game that I had made previously on my own time for the game’s hidden sixth stage.

Game Intro

Ending Cutscene

Credits

Skills and Tools

Various assets I developed in Aesprite. The first 3 (from the left) are animated within the game

Video elements integral to the game’s user experience made in Adobe Premiere
Strong leadership skills used to guide a small team of five students
Quickly learned to create basic spritework using Aseprite

The game was made using Unity version 2019.3.15f1. The elements I created for the game were created in Aseprite, a dedicated sprite creation tool. These elements were then manipulated in Adobe Premiere to create the video segments for the game mentioned previously. These graphical elements were also lightly supported by Adobe Photoshop and Figma.

The Challenge

Concept art versus final sprite of the characters Greti and Purple Opponent.

Concept art on the left by me while final sprite made by the team artist Qianzhen Goh

Personally, the main challenges for me were figuring out aspects of the design to accommodate for the amount of time we had. Originally, I wanted to have five boss stages, but swiftly concluded after consulting with my team that it would not be feasible. This left us with a problem as while we could produce 3 boss battles, this would make the game remarkably short.

Luckily for us, in my notes for a general “The Arena” game idea, I did think previously about a short level with mob enemies. These levels would be far in-between each other and be secondary to the main boss battles. By promoting this concept to a fully fledged level, I was able to solve the game length issue by having 2 levels in-between that could feature these mob enemies. The blue mob enemy was a melee attacker that moved while the yellow mob enemy was stationary and periodically shot energy blasts when the player was in range.

Picking the moves and bosses was also a challenge as I conceptualized a variety of designs for us to pick from. Out of the original 8 moves, we decided on making 4 of the 8, but picking the 4 was difficult since we needed to pick the ones that gave the right sense of balance. We also had 8 boss designs to pick 3 out of. Each boss had a small moveset that the team and I ended up picking from to which we chose the ones that best fit differing boss styles, akin to The Arena 1.

Finding the proper game balance was also difficult, each move and the enemies present in the game had to be properly balanced as to not be too underpowered or overpowered and I spent many late hours tweaking numbers in Unity as to ensure the game’s balance was appropriate. My team and I also discussed at length about the difficulty of the game. Whereas I believed the game should be "retro hard" and punishing, some of my teammates had issues with this as playing through the game became a challenge for internal and external playtesting.

After hearing said issues, I strategized with the project programmer to incorporate 3 difficulties to accommodate different player skill levels. This included an easy mode where players could try stages over and over with no penalty, a regular difficulty where players had to retry from the beginning if they failed but incorporated powerups and a lot of healing items, and lastly a hard mode where the player had to retry from the beginning if defeated, had limited healing, and no powerups.

The game’s final challenge came 2 days before the game was complete. The programmer and I had always wanted to introduce a quick extra boss as a reward for the player beating the game on hard mode, but we both figured that such a feature would not be possible before the game’s deadline.

To my surprise, he ended up making the extra stage with our extra boss: a shadow version of the player character, titled Shadow Mike. While incorporating the video material was easy as I had previously made it, the boss was not particularly balanced and I had to redesign it with what I had available. As I was not a programmer, I had access to only values in Unity, but was overall able to make the boss its own unique fight using a projectile prefab made by our level designer while also making a couple small additions in the code with what I did know.

The Extra Stage boss fight: Shadow Mike. Note how he is fought directly after G. Necross with no break between battles to catch players by surprise

Final Reflection

I am very proud of both myself and my team for the project. I am grateful to my team for bringing essentially my “dream student project” to life and was very happy with their work. We received a strong grade and I would later go on to present The Arena 2 at the Faculty of Communication and Technology (FCAT)'s Undergraduate Conference (UGC) alongside one of my teammates to earn recognition on my co-curricular record. For myself, this was a really great experience as it put me exactly where I would want to be in a game design role in designing theory and having an active role in altering the fundamentals of design.

I also learned some important leadership skills with this project as I never led a team before to the extent that I did in this project. The main thing I learned while being in a creative director role was to mainly to truly and actively listen to my team members for advice and ideas. While the game’s concept and direction were mainly mine, I always made sure to listen to my team to figure out and solve problems. This involved always being proactive in asking my team for their opinions instead of just waiting for them to speak up. By taking the initiative, my team felt more comfortable coming forward with their ideas and thoughts.

If I could redo this project, I think narrowing down levels 2 and 4’s design would have been a better idea as play testers sometimes felt like the two-level styles were too disjointed from each other. This is overall a slightly smaller complaint and people were still satisfied with the design choice given the status of the work as a student project. I also would have liked to add a third type of lesser fighter in stage 4.

Overall, this game was my favorite project ever made in my undergraduate degree and I learned a lot making it with my team. I hope to expand upon this idea in a future game design project and bring it to its full potential.

A gallery of concept art I drew for the game

Concept art of the player's moveset. These all made it to the final game.	Continuation of move concept art. The knee strike and stomp attacks were cut from the game plan,	Concept art of Greti's jump attack
Concept art of Greti's tackle attack	Concept art for Greti's roar attack	Concept art for Greti's blast attack
Concept art of Purple Opponent's first and fifth attack	Concept art of Purple Opponent's beam attack	Concept art of Purple Opponent's ground shock wave attack
Concept art of Purple Opponent's short range shock blast	Concept art of G. Necross's fist wave attack	Concept art of G. Necross's gangster crush attack. This was considered too similar to Greti's tackle and dropped in favor of an idea the team artist came up with spontaneously involving a motorcycle that was well received
Concept art of G Necross's summon attack where he summons Snazzy Skeletons	Concept art of G Necross's Necro Fist Shot. Originally intended to allow us to reuse assets, this was cut in favor of a large swipe move.	A concept art during the beginning stages of the project to pitch to the class