Concept
The Biggest Bad That Ever Was is a turn-based, tactics, RPG with mini-games used to determine the success of attacks. You play as a villain who accidentally becomes a hero while trying to prove they are the greatest villain by defeating other villains. Some of these defeated villains will become your minions as you gain their respect by beating them in combat.
Unique but Similar
One of the difficulties was to theme the minigames so that they all fit the character they were attached to but to make them different for each attack. To do this I chose a core aspect to keep in each of the minigames for a character. For the martial artist this was a timer and rapid inputs. The basic attack required three rapid inputs as shown above. Then for a there rapid strike attack it was hitting the correct buttons in succession with an increasingly smaller time frame with each input. This process was used on all of the characters with the main character having gauges that required timing of some form for each of their attacks.
My Role
My role on this project was to come up with minigames, then make them the appropriate difficulty, design the combat aspects of characters, and balance them. I started by coming up with ideas for the minigames that would fit with the characters that we wanted in the game. For example, there is the Puncher Supreme which was based on anime martial artists and pro wrestlers. For this character, the minigames were made to emulate elements of fighting games like combos or special attack inputs. The shown attack is his basic attack which plays off of throwing quick attacks in fighting games.
Interactivity
One of the big things that we wanted for the game was that the player could interact with every turn that would be taken. This includes both player and enemy turns. While this may sound simple it was a factor that led to many design decisions including the max party size of four. This is because it is the number of buttons easily pressed by a player at one time. That was important to know as we wanted area attacks in our game and the player to be able to lower damage from incoming attacks. As such it was both a limiting factor but also one that gave us a clear outline of what would feel good number to control for the player.
What I Learned
This team communicated differently than any other team that I had been on. Most people I had worked with to this point liked text documents to explain things while this team preferred visuals. This led to communication not being good at first but after we talked about it everything worked well. Overall, I learned to talk to others about what works best for them and improved my visual communication skills.