What went right

What went wrong

As Tough Kookie is a Beat'em up based on the fantasy of making your own action movie, it has the potential of attracting  players with a wide range of skill levels, from people only interested in living the fantasy to Beat'em up veterans.

To ensure this potential is harnessed, I designed every part of the gameplay with the intent of making the game easily accessible but with great depth.

I did so with mechanics rewarding different layers of mastery :

- Easy to use and rewarding combos alongside long and intricate but better ones

- Hidden ways of exploiting mechanics to modify the meta

- A special attention to making sure that every move has a utility at the maximum level of mastery, even those designed for beginners.

Given the game's scope, we decided to have a top-down approach to the design.
Our intention was to avoid iterations by anticipating problems ahead of time even at the cost of extra design time.
As a result programming time is reduced by avoiding any major modification of the system once it's programmed.
While this allowed us to stay loyal to our scope, it also created problems in the design part as we could only guess (and not test) the quality of what we did.
Because of this, designing some elements took a long time as keeping those elements in line with their design goals was exponentially hard.
Depending on the amount of those goals, they would interfere with each other.

What I learned

This project allowed me to hone in on :
- My documentation skills
- My knowledge in combat design in terms of game feel while making it "Easy to learn, very hard to master"
- Information ranking and positioning for the UI
- Camera design
- Improving other fields as I had to design just about everything that is needed for the combat to work properly.