On one hand, we felt strongly about the classic, couch-play beat-em-up genre; very much like
Double Dragon – which is an awesome experience and one of our main influences – but, on the other hand, our single player campaign was something special and truly unique. Every camera is hand-crafted, ever scene and enemy is carefully placed, achieving our vision of the “cinematic brawler.†Moving or shifting one piece of the single-player puzzle, could easily spell disaster.
Having two players in our orchestrated brawler tossed a huge wrench into our development plan. It’s challenging to keep both players on screen, so we can’t be sure how wide the camera will go. We also need enough enemies to keep both players busy, but the added chaos – while fun – introduces a different experience altogether. To make matters worse, building bosses that required two players, served no guarantee that the other player would be around to help. What we definitely didn’t want was to have a lame-o, tacked-on feature that just wasn’t very fun for the second player.
So we bit the bullet.
We said, “we’re going to make a whole bonus co-op campaign, and in each separate campaign, we’re going to play to their strengths.†The solution was to design the single player experience to be far more cinematic, allowing you to really enjoy and savor each action packed moment. We then kept the co-op rooted to the good ol’ fashioned beat-em-up formula that encourages players to help each other, especially during our though boss battles – which we went back and designed specific boss battles that can only be won with a second player at hand. As a finishing touch, we used the co-op campaign to delve even deeper into each character and foe that will eventually mess Shank over, leading up to the events in his story.
At the end, it presented a long list of challenges and obstacles, but it proved to be well worth it when trying to achieve our unique vision that is
Shank and it’s co-op experience.
ing awesome. Anamanaguchi is my new favorite band.