Assault Heroes
Year:
Platform:
Genre:
2006
XBox Arcade
Top Down Shooter
Role:
Level Designer
Game Overview
I'd just joined Wanako games and went directly onto this project. It was a retro throwback to games like Alien Breed with some Contra elements including inventive bosses, nonstop shooting action and a cool second chance mechanic when your jeep was destroyed.
Xbox Arcade was brand new and had very few games which weren't merely ports of classic arcade titles like Pacman or Gauntlet - this allowed Assault Heroes to strut its stuff at just the right moment. The only similar competition on the platform at the time was Geometry Wars.
Design Objectives
I was a rookie and didn't know the proprietary engine we were using (Tongas, named after a Chilean children's program robot... or so I was told) and I didn't even speak Spanish apart from a few broken phrases.
So I just dived in and started putting stuff together. My goals were to learn the engine and build some cool stuff, basically.
Successful Features
By the end of the project I'd designed the underground secret levels (4 total) gameplay and configured the weapons for those sections, configured various enemies and a boss (the spider, although Juan Pablo Lastra made the initial script) and learned enough of the vfx system to implement cool looking multipart explosions and energy blasts without tanking the framerate.
I was getting to grips with the renderer and got positive feedback on the weapons configuration and enemies I'd made.
There was some trepidation at letting me make four unique underground levels, so I wasn't able to go as wild with those as I wanted. Instead, once those were done I got to work polishing other features across the game.
Conclusion
The game was a great success and won the small studio more contracts. I was happy with my part in it since I'd figured out how the Tongas engine
worked, although my Spanish still left a lot to be desired!