Fusion Characters
An experiemnt in rapid content production
2021
Content Development
Design & Implementation
The lifeblood of any fighting game is its cast of characters, and in early 2021, Rushdown's roster was relatively narrow, with only 8 characters across the entire cast.
To tackle this problem, I oversaw execution of an experimental project that would allow us to rapidly expand the roster with minimal production costs. The basic premise involved produceing new character from as many reused assets as possible. These characters were billed as “Fusions”, framing the design as an intentional combination of characters to justify the reused rig and animations.
Unlike a typical character reskin, we wanted these characters to be unique and original in terms of their gameplay. In a genre where gameplay is so dependent on animations, it took some creativity and exploration to figure out how to best capitalize on existing assets to produce unique moves and fresh gameplay patterns.
Fusion characters would be built out of the following components:
Ultimately we built two of these fusion characters before securing sufficient funding to shift the pipeline over to fully original characters. Both characters are widely well-liked, and their abilities and playstyles are so meaningfully distinct that comparisons to the base character are essentially nonexistent in player feedback channels. Newer players often fail to recognize any overlap at all unless it’s explicitly pointed out to them.
- An existing character’s rig and animations would be used for the bulk of the character.
- The art team would provide concept art, as well as a new 3D model hooked up to the old character’s rig.
- If necessary, we could create a handful of new animations to fill especially difficult gaps in the new character's moveset, but the main directive was to produce a character with as few original assets as possible.
- Beyond this, almost the entirety of the character’s development was left up to a design team, which consisted mainly of myself and one co-designer.
Ultimately we built two of these fusion characters before securing sufficient funding to shift the pipeline over to fully original characters. Both characters are widely well-liked, and their abilities and playstyles are so meaningfully distinct that comparisons to the base character are essentially nonexistent in player feedback channels. Newer players often fail to recognize any overlap at all unless it’s explicitly pointed out to them.
Velora's Up-Special reuses an animation from Zhurong's Down-Aerial, spliced with several other animations (fall and double jump) to create an entirely new move.
Seth and Weishan's shared animation suite becomes apparent during their run, which proved infeasible to kitbash into something meaningfully distinct.