00:00Sì, questo è anche horrifying.
00:03Non, non so I do damage to him, right?
00:06Watch it like this, this whole thing goes awry.
00:08So he's right here.
00:09Do you hit the lip of the...
00:10So I starfall him, I actually send him up out the...
00:14Out the spot.
00:15Send him up.
00:16And now he's got high limit of time.
00:18And now when I die, I get rocketed in the face.
00:23Designing characters for Lawbreakers is an interesting process.
00:26You may think that it begins with the design team
00:28and then immediately moves to the art team.
00:31But that's not the case.
00:32As our studio grew, we structured the development
00:34to create deep multiplayer characters
00:36by focusing on rapid gameplay iteration,
00:39or prototyping,
00:40to make sure that we find the fun
00:42in everything that we do
00:43and play the game every single day.
00:46And Maverick was the first character
00:48to solidify that process.
00:50This is her story.
01:17When BossKey first started,
01:19we had character design ideas,
01:20but we needed to establish a process.
01:23Maverick was the first character
01:24to set the stage for how we develop characters now,
01:26as she established a system for characters
01:28to include a call sign or name,
01:30their role in the battlefield,
01:32and what faction they belong to in the fiction.
01:34Our design team establishes those gameplay needs first,
01:38and then the character creation process begins.
01:41We start out usually with just trying to figure out
01:43what is fun.
01:45It sounds simple enough,
01:46but what's fun?
01:48What gaps are we missing?
01:50What holes do we need filling in the game?
01:51And we realized we needed somebody a little more
01:54in the air consistently.
01:56So Maverick was a special character
01:57as a vertical character.
02:00It's one of our characters
02:01that we really dug into into the vertical space.
02:03I mean, but we also wanted to temper her
02:05with the idea that she needed to be close.
02:07She needed to be up front and in your face.
02:09So we gave her this big Gatling gun
02:11that drove her to be closer to the fight,
02:13which is why she's a skirmisher.
02:14The idea of coming into the middle of a fight,
02:17running in hard, recklessly, without much armor,
02:20getting into the fight,
02:21but also jetting away really quickly.
02:22So that's who she is.
02:24When I say Maverick,
02:25people have an instant vision in their mind.
02:28When we talk about skirmisher,
02:29skirmisher is a play style.
02:31And because we're a symmetric game,
02:32we want to make sure that players,
02:33regardless of which side they're playing on,
02:35whether it's law or breakers,
02:36understand what the gameplay is
02:38to come from the role that they've selected.
02:40And skirmisher comes with a play style,
02:42but they'll choose Maverick,
02:43and Maverick represents the law.
02:45But the faction she's in,
02:47the Valkyries kind of temper that personality.
02:49they put her into a space that dictates
02:52how maybe good or how evil she is,
02:55or whether or not she upholds the law or breaks the law.
03:00Target is wired.
03:03How did you quad kill?
03:06Design and programming must work as a team
03:09to bring characters to the play test environment.
03:11Like I said earlier,
03:13you may think that the art team receives
03:14the character description from design
03:16and gets to work on the visuals first, right?
03:19No, that's not how it works.
03:21For us, at this point,
03:22the character goes into prototyping
03:23with our gameplay programmers,
03:25who translate design into actual gameplay.
03:28Simply put,
03:29we want to find the fun first.
03:31Once Dan and Cliff have sort of decided
03:34on the high-level concept for the character,
03:37I take over the process at that point,
03:39and I'm responsible for the design
03:41and the implementation of the specific weapons
03:44and abilities that make up that character,
03:46as well as coding the underlying systems
03:49that all characters share.
03:50Maverick is actually a really interesting character story
03:53because while she did change several times
03:56during development,
03:57I feel like Maverick is actually sort of foundational
03:59to what the game has become.
04:01When you first add characters into a game like this,
04:03the game doesn't really exist yet.
04:05And so the characters can kind of become
04:07whatever they want.
04:09But at some point,
04:11when Maverick comes into the game,
04:13in terms of how much mobility she's bringing
04:15and her gravity manipulation,
04:17it really forced us to sort of re-evaluate
04:20what the other characters could do.
04:22And it really changed and defined
04:24what the game was about.
04:25Prototyping is actually really crazy.
04:27Prototyping is
04:28because essentially you take a high-level idea
04:33and you really don't know where it's going to end up.
04:38Usually what I do is paper design,
04:41which is a one-page overview
04:44of essentially ideas for what a character could be.
04:49And from that paper design,
04:51I start doing implementations
04:53and trying them out in the game.
04:54One of the earlier versions of Maverick,
04:56actually her alt-fire,
04:58her right-click was a shield
05:00that you could bring up like this
05:01and then shoot your Gatling gun
05:03at the same time while it is up.
05:04Now I look back and I'm like,
05:05I don't know what I was thinking.
05:07I mean, you can see back in the day,
05:08you know, we're such a small team.
05:10GPPs have to wear a lot of hats.
05:12So I actually did all the animations
05:13on this prototype.
05:14And that's why you can see this like Wu-Tang hand here
05:17where she's holding the Gatling gun
05:19and this like white cylinder
05:20that I was like,
05:21oh, this vaguely looks like a Gatling gun.
05:24I'm going to model it in Maya and do my best, you know.
05:26And I think it was actually
05:27one of the shortest-lived features
05:29we've had in the game.
05:30I think it survived maybe one or two playtests
05:33of people just essentially turtling behind this shield
05:37and shooting people up.
05:39And it was terrible.
05:40It was atrocious.
05:41While some prototypes never see the light of day,
05:44our tried and true characters
05:45are put into our daily playtest sessions,
05:47which we take very seriously at BossKey.
05:50We playtest from beginning until end.
05:53We playtest every day.
05:55I think about three times a day on average
05:57is what we're doing.
05:58In the beginning,
05:59it's really just trying to feel out the character
06:00to make sure it's fun.
06:01But then after we get it to Tramiel
06:02and after the art team arts it up
06:04and makes it pretty,
06:05the character comes back to us
06:06and we need to make sure
06:08that things like effects are reading correctly.
06:10You know, do you understand what's happening
06:12when you press the Q button?
06:13Do you understand what's happening when E is pressed?
06:15So we need to make sure
06:16that everything after art has come in
06:19services communication,
06:20not just the person who's actually doing the actions,
06:22but also from the enemies
06:23that are receiving the actions.
06:24Because if you get killed
06:25and you have no understanding
06:26as to why you got killed
06:27or what destroyed you,
06:28it's just as frustrating
06:29as not understanding
06:29why your abilities don't work
06:31or your weapons don't work
06:32the way you think they should be working.
06:33You throw a character into the playtest
06:35and you start finding out
06:36all the things that are wrong with it.
06:38And so it becomes this back and forth
06:41of gathering feedback from people
06:43within the studio
06:43and then making changes
06:45to adjust to that feedback
06:47pretty much every day.
06:49And this just goes on and on
06:50until the character is really polished
06:52and really sings.
06:54Making Maverick actually taught us
06:56a lot of lessons about the process
06:57that we use here.
06:59And one of the things that we do
07:00and one of the things we put a lot of value on
07:02is delighting players with things
07:04that they've never seen before
07:05and doing gameplay that you don't see
07:07in other games.
07:08Something a lot of other games
07:10tend to do with their class design
07:12is sort of just straight up copy
07:15classes or mechanics
07:16that exist in other games.
07:17But we place a huge value
07:19on things that people haven't seen.
07:21And so we just don't do that.
07:22We spend the extra time
07:24and the extra effort
07:24to make sure that
07:26even if we start with something
07:27that is familiar,
07:28that we guide it to a place
07:29that's unique.
07:33How did you say it like domination?
07:37Maverick's story is special
07:39because her abilities,
07:40her weapons,
07:40and her characterization
07:41all developed
07:43as BossKey matured as a studio.
07:45We're going to be doing
07:46more of these dev diaries
07:47in the future
07:48and we want to hear
07:48what you want to see
07:50from the behind-the-scenes process
07:51at BossKey.
07:52So please let us know.
07:54Follow us on Twitter
07:55at LawBreakers
07:56and at BossKey
07:57and weigh in.
07:58From everybody at the studio,
08:00thanks for watching.
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