Assault Heroes 2
Year:
Platform:
Genre:
2008
XBox Arcade
Top Down Shooter
Role:
Game Designer
Game Overview
After the success of Assault Heroes, the publishers wanted a sequel. The lead designers who made the core of Assault Heroes and the prototype for AH2 left to form ACE Team so we reorganized our efforts to put it together. They'd made the original prototype, but we started from scratch. The game was bigger, had more features and expanded on existing ones across the board compared to AH1.
Design Objectives
A bunch of new features were introduced and the art team made some cool looking environments.
I hopped between VFX, enemy and most boss configurations and built the underground levels as before. Similar to what I'd done in AH1, but this time there was a lot more content to produce and I had a lot more autonomy in how it was done.
Once I'd finished my allotted tasks I got to work polishing gameplay across the main levels. Where I found something lacking I'd add more gameplay and/or a new enemy type or improve a boss and their attacks and phases to be more fun to battle.
The design goal was to meet, and surpass the excellent AH1. Not just with more stuff, but with a deeper level of polish and fun.
Successful Features
Lots! Having a template to work from meant we could focus on the new stuff and really make it shine. The bosses were great fun and possibly even more varied than the original game, each following a specific phase based battle system and the player taking them apart a piece at a time.
The environments looked great and were a joy to smash to bits. I tried some different experiments with the new ice weapon but none of them worked out, so eventually it became a cold flamethrower type weapon - although that worked perfectly well at the end. The other player weapons all felt fun to blast stuff with as well - I made sure to tweak each one even if it was a minor improvement.
The new vehicles added some nice variation to the play, and overall there was a lot to do in the game and it never got boring.
I feel I have to make a special mention of the iconic kamikaze troopers as well. We had them riding in cadillacs, skydiving, flying with jetpacks, being spat out by bosses, base jumping and, my favourite, riding on wild boars in the swamp secret level.
Conclusion
This could easily have been a failure. The core of the design team had gone on to new challenges so it was up to the rest of us to focus on putting together a solid game. Despite some fluctuations in productivity, we managed to put it together. Reviews were slightly lower than the original game, but I contribute that to this being a sequel rather than a completely new title. It was also competing in a much more active play space than its predecessor, which soon included copycat games trying to replicate what we'd accomplished.
The core design could have been more cohesive and had a few more 'wow' features, but overall it worked. There was an undercurrent of fun and humour within the game, along with swarms of bullets and hordes of enemies which players responded to well.