Batman: Arkham Shadows

Project Overview

AAA VR entry to the Batman: Arkham series

Won "Best VR/AR Game" at the Game Awards 2024

Work Examples

Things I worked on for this Boss fight:

• Worked with designers to iterate on the overall Boss Fight flow

  • Enemy wave functionality and numbers tuning

  • Cart behavior and timings (how do the carts come out? how do they go back in? Is it automatic? Does the player trigger it? Etc)

  • Minigun behavior

• Helped design and implemented how the player interrupts Falcone when using the minigun

• Implemented system to tailor enemy gun behavior to the encounter and difficulty setting. This system ensured that there could only be a certain amount of enemies with guns at a time by limiting how many of them could grab guns from the carts and removing guns on the ground when the player wasn't looking. It also ensured that the goons would prioritize grabbing guns so that the player was (nearly) guaranteed to encounter them in the fight. This was the first boss after the introduction of firearms, so we wanted to ensure that they were an important part of the fight while not overwhelming the player with too many of them.

• Implemented and tuned Minigun targeting, tracking speed, and its interactions with the player dodge

• Helped implement Falcone's animation setup

• System to allow Falcone to dodge batarangs when not firing his minigun. No other character in the game dodges batarangs

• Logic to allow Falcone to throw a valid gameplay grenade at the end of the cinematic

• Logic to allow the grenades to be detonated with the batarang, including mid-air

• Implemented logic allowing the carts to work as valid weapon pickup locations (previously all weapon pickups were static)

• Implemented system for cart destruction, including removing carts destroyed in invalid locations (e.i. before sending them back into the pillar) and replacing them with a fresh cart so that the player can't get in a blocking situation where they have no carts to use to progress the fight

• System for allowing goons in the "cinematic" to become valid enemies that jump down into the arena. Previously all cinematic goons were a completely separate prefab

• Grenade warning UI

• UI indicating when to use the batarang to interrupt Falcone's minigun attacks

• Navmesh work to allow enemies to jump down from the balcony and also ensure they can't clip through the carts or electric barriers

See it on Meta

I was assigned to be the main engineer working on the Falcone boss encounter. This meant working closely with the designer assigned to this fight to iterate on many different versions of this encounter and implementing all of the mechanics unique to this fight. Some things added for this fight were also used in other parts of the game after they were implemented here.

I unfortunately don't have a lot of capture from my time working with Camouflaj but the video below by a Youtube content creator is a good showcase of the fight and most of its mechanics

Falcone Boss Fight