My Role: Producer

Secondary Roles: Video Editor, Web Designer, Scrum Master, Pitch Writer

The Team

Paul Klimaszewski, Lead Designer

Gabriel Pereyra, Lead Programmer

Duncan Carroll. Graphics Programmer

Cole Kirkpatrick, Lead Artist

Victoria Vergara, Environment Artist

Sean Walsh, Animator

Joseph Lefebvre, Animator

Natalie Orlando, UI/UX Designer and Associate Producer

Brain Flaherty, Sound Designer and Composer

Elijah Dixson, Producer

The Story of Our Development

About The Game

Lucha Megadrive is a fighting game where players battle each other in a world where wrestling is law. Players can jump off of ropes to do aerial attacks and build up hype from the crowd to power up the fighters There are traditional fighting game mechanics like special moves and health bars, but the match can end at anytime if one player pins the other and is declared the winner. Take control of Johnny Fuego or Nuclear Winter and battle each other one on one in versus mode. Learn how to play in the tutorial mode or test and hone your skills in the trials and training modes. Lucha Megadrive is playable now at Champlain College’s Arcade.

Learn more at this website I have been working on: https://luchamegadrive.com

The Arcade Cabinet

Development Context

All of us on Team Nitro Fist attend Champlain College and are a part of their super awesome game development program. During our College Capstone class where were tasked to “find the fun” in one of our game ideas and iterate on it. We’ve always wanted to create a fighting game so we went for it. There has been a lot of roadblocks along the way as not very many people make fighting games these days. We created our own fighting game system from scratch which has allowed us to create a truly unique fighting game experience. After the first 3 months of development we presented our progress to our studio heads and made the cut to continue working on the project for another 3 months and to add more developers to the project. Check out that presentation in the video below:

Development History

Lucha Megadrive Development Blog

May 1, 2018

Lucha Megadrive Post Mortem

May 1, 2018

Last semester we were the underdogs challenging the taboo of making a fighting game and we came out victorious and arguably a fan favorite among our cohort. If last semester was Rocky 1 or Karate Kid 1 were no one expected us to win, but we worked hard and we succeeded anyways– this semester was the sequel. The expectations for our success rose tremendously, we got maybe a little over confident over winter break. When we hit our first major road block of figuring out our new art direction the team’s morale dropped off the earth, communication went out the window, and there were days to me at least were it felt like we were living the sequel that didn’t need to happen. But eventually we came around, we rose up from the ashes of the first half of the semester, and we started to live the sequel that everyone always wants– the sequel that is better than the original.

May 1, 2018

Apr 25, 2018

Sprint 28: Gold Master

Apr 25, 2018

We did it! We finished Lucha Megadrive and everything is all set up for the show!

Apr 25, 2018

Apr 18, 2018

Sprint 27: Release 1

Apr 18, 2018

The game is almost done! The cabinet is almost done! The senior show is just around the corner!

Apr 18, 2018

Apr 11, 2018

Sprint 26: PAX

Apr 11, 2018

Lucha Megadrive was featured via Champlain College at PAX this week! Tori our environment artist and Natalie our UI/UX Designer / Associate Producer show off the game and here is what players are said about the game:

Apr 11, 2018

Apr 4, 2018

Sprint 25: Beta

Apr 4, 2018

It is nice to be back in the swing of things!Team mentality is shifting from less discipline focused goals / task to more feature focused goals and tasks.

Apr 4, 2018

Mar 28, 2018

Sprint 24: GDC and Alpha

Mar 28, 2018

I was away at GDC this last sprint, but the team did a great job putting together our Alpha!

Mar 28, 2018

Mar 16, 2018

Sprint 23: Spring Break

Mar 16, 2018

This week is spring break for Champlain College which means the Lucha Megadrive team is taking some much needed time off!

Mar 16, 2018

Mar 7, 2018

Sprint 22: Merging Scenes

Mar 7, 2018

For the past two months we have had a lot of progress in each of the areas of our development: art, design, programming, and sound; however, up until today we haven’t put our test scenes together to see how it all works in unison. This week we finally merged our test scenes! The game has gone through a huge amount of changes! We’ve increased our overall visual polish and put in our in progress models of our TWO characters! It was an exciting week for us.

Mar 7, 2018

Feb 28, 2018

Sprint 21: Surprise! We have a cabinet!

Feb 28, 2018

Our team’s dynamic is on the up and up. We are planning out the senior show. And we are ahead of schedule with our arcade cabinet construction!

Feb 28, 2018

Feb 21, 2018

Sprint 20: Team Dynamic and Communication Changes

Feb 21, 2018

This week I’d like to take some time to talk about our team’s dynamic and communication these past few sprints. Some mistakes were definitely made on my end as a producer that ended up affecting the teams productivity pretty negatively. It has always been my belief that if you don’t feel comfortable talking to someone about your life then you probably don’t want to work with them either. I realize now that I wasn’t doing a part of my job which is to make people feel safe, comfortable to speak up, and trusted in our work environment. I was too concerned with preparing deliverables and meeting deadlines that I forgot to take care of my team.

Feb 21, 2018

Feb 14, 2018

Sprint 19: Art Revamp and Trails Mode

Feb 14, 2018

This week we revamped our art direction. Credit goes to our amazing artists!

Feb 14, 2018

Feb 9, 2018

Sprint 18: Into Production!

Feb 9, 2018

This week was big for Lucha Megadrive's development! We made progress our re-imagining of our main character Jonny Fuego! Our other main character Nuclear Winter now has a test model in game so that we can start testing out their moves! We have our first artist pass for our new UI! And we now have a fully 3D environment blocked out and in game which has allow us to do cool tricks with our camera!

Feb 9, 2018

Jan 31, 2018

Sprint 17: Working Towards Greenlight

Jan 31, 2018

Week 2 of the new semester has been a busy one! Our team tackled a combination of documentation and implementation of some our of new assets.

Jan 31, 2018

Jan 23, 2018

Sprint 16: Back in Action

Jan 23, 2018

We are back into the fray! We took about a month off for winter break, spent sometime with our families, and now we are all ready to jump back into development of Lucha Megadrive for the next 3-4 months!

Jan 23, 2018

Dec 9, 2017

Sprint 15: Spring Semester Plan & Post Mortem

Dec 9, 2017

With the semester coming to a close here at Champlain College there is very little time left to make progress on Lucha Megadrive. It has been a long and intense semester for the team. Taking a few weeks off for the winter holidays will help us recharge, spend time with our families– and probably still work on Lucha Megadrive here and there because we all love working on it so much! Most of us already have some research work planned out for during the holidays– nothing super intense, but could save a lot of time at the start of the semester.

Dec 9, 2017

Dec 5, 2017

Sprint 14: The “Draft”

Dec 5, 2017

This past week has been a long one. Many late nights have been had despite the project being done for the semester. Much debate has been going through the game studio regarding the process and result of “drafting” the now free agent developers onto new teams. For those not in the know, 11 out of 24 teams this semester were chosen to continue development on their prototyped game ideas and our game Lucha Megadrive was one of those surviving projects. This process of prototyping and cutting game ideas is modeled after Nintendo’s “find the fun” methodology and is a standard process every year here at Champlain College’s The Game Studio.

Dec 5, 2017

Nov 30, 2017

Sprint 13: We Made The Cut!

Nov 30, 2017

Our presentation last week was a big hit! (Check it out at this link, I’ll be editing together a subtitled version with different camera angles over the next couple of weeks). In addition to the studio wides pitches, each team also needed to demo their game for the faculty members. When we demoed our game to Champlain College faculty most of them were able to pick it up pretty easily and start having a good time right away. We were given 1 hour to guide faculty members as they played our game and after all the games made this semester were played, the faculty locked themselves in a classroom for 2.5 hours and determined which teams should move on to next semester.

Nov 30, 2017

Nov 21, 2017

Sprint 12: Studio Wide Pitches

Nov 21, 2017

Pitch night has come and gone at Champlain College. 12 weeks of development has gone by here at The Game Studio and 18 teams presented what they’ve accomplished and why their games should move forward into production. Every team did an amazing job, and besides technical difficulties with the auditorium, it was all around an impressive event. When our team was called to the stage the excitement quickly escalated in the audience. Our fan base on campus made sure they were heard. And then, we started our presentation. Fair warning, there were technical difficulties across all the teams, the audio from this recording is far from ideal, and the crowd blocks the footage at times. With that said, here is our pitch:

Nov 21, 2017

Nov 13, 2017

Sprint 11: Finish Line In Sight

Nov 13, 2017

Were almost there! One week remains before the studio wide pitch next Monday. We’ve made a ton of progress this past week: crowd reactions to hype events, UI updates, more animations, physics changes, advertisements in the background, and on top of all that we added a new mechanic: parrying. Gameplay footage can be seen below:

Nov 13, 2017

Nov 6, 2017

Sprint 10: Last of the Mechanics

Nov 6, 2017

First week of vertical slice down. We finished up the last of our fighting game mechanics such as: parries, armored moves, and unblockables. We added a second megadrive attack. Updated our font and environment. And added some placeholder music in the background. Check out the footage below:

Nov 6, 2017

Nov 3, 2017

Sprint 9: Into Vertical Slice

Nov 3, 2017

We made it into the vertical slice! Our team is excited to finally be able to take a break from having to meet class requirements and just make our game. Gameplay footage can be seen below. We've made progress on our how our stage and UI looks. We are still experimenting with the fonts we want to use and currently we are playing around with a font that is for personal use only. Sadly this means the video is unlisted, but don’t worry we are in the process of finding a font that is 100% free to use and fits the style we are going for.

Nov 3, 2017

Oct 23, 2017

Sprint 8: The New Stage

Oct 23, 2017

This week we made the transition from a 2D fighting stage to a 3D one. It wasn’t quite the smooth drag and drop experience we were hoping for. A big issue involving our camera came up were we needed it to function like Streetfighter when 2 players are close up and when they are far away from each other the camera needed to function like Super Smash Brothers. We consulted with our peers and faculty eventually finding a solution that allows the mechanics to function the way they are supposed to and also properly represents the art. Below is some updated gameplay footage:

Oct 23, 2017

Oct 17, 2017

Sprint 7: Super Charged

Oct 17, 2017

This week in class we challenged to get out of the deep dive stage of our college capstone. We successfully made it through and now we are in the Proof of Concept Stage! The slides for our presentation are below:

Oct 17, 2017

Oct 11, 2017

Sprint 6: First Gameplay Footage

Oct 11, 2017

Here is gameplay footage of our latest build! I figured it is probably time to show this prototype in action since our plan for this next week is to start replacing the prototype art with assets more representative of Lucha!

Oct 11, 2017

Oct 5, 2017

Sprint 5: Deep Dive Week 1

Oct 5, 2017

This past sprint Team Nitro Fist had our first week of deep dive. We plan to be working on this mini vertical slice for the next 2 weeks. During our in class demo we showed off our rig for our first 3D character, the final core fighting game mechanics, basic meter implementation, and made progress on our documentation.

Oct 5, 2017

Sep 26, 2017

Sprint 4: In To Deep Dive!

Sep 26, 2017

We successfully passed our second challenge attempt and have been approved to enter deep dive. The team is happy, excited, and relieved. We didn’t get here without some challenges— we started to encounter the unfortunate stigma around creating fighting games here at Champlain College. Sadly fighting games have not seen very much success here and have formed a reputation around them. There is a lot a team has to get right in order to have a good fighting game: satisfying input feedback, smooth controls, clear visuals, balanced mechanics, a huge amount of moves to facilitate lots of strategies— overall a ton of work and polished for everyone involved and not the typical level of game seen at Champlain College.

Sep 26, 2017

Sep 19, 2017

Sprint 3: Challenge Attempt 1

Sep 19, 2017

This week we attempted our first challenge stage. In order to progress in our Champlain College Capstone we need to present our rationale to our professors on why we should move forward into the next stage of prototyping and development. Our attempt to challenge the first stage of concept generation didn’t completely pass, but it didn’t fail either. We no longer have to prototype 3 games at once. Instead, we are being asked to challenge again next week and present an even deeper case for the one game idea we really want to develop. Below are some of the slides we presented to the faculty. Also, we finally have a team name: Team Nitro Fist.

Sep 19, 2017

Sep 10, 2017

Sprint 2: Concept Exploration 1

Sep 10, 2017

This week our goal was to develop 3 basic prototypes one for each of our sticky game ideas: Luchador Fighting, Cut Corners Farming, and Dungeon Survival Versus. Since each idea is very different, we took very different approaches for each prototype.

Sep 10, 2017

Sep 7, 2017

Morale Activities

Sep 7, 2017

Week 2 has begun and our team dynamic seems to be normalizing once again. Last week there were misunderstandings and miscommunications, but this week we seem to all be jiving and we were even complimented on our team dynamic in class by a faculty member. I don’t think last week will be our only interpersonal road bumps this semester, so I am working hard to constantly huddle everyone together and make sure we are on the same page. In our meeting for today I plan to start up weekly morale activities to help make sure everyone is comfortable talking to each other and to checkin on everyones lives.

Sep 7, 2017

Sep 3, 2017

Sprint 1: Ideation

Sep 3, 2017

Sprint 1 is coming to an end. The goals our team set out for ourselves were to come up with game ideas we are all excited about, figure out some initial meeting and communication logistics, set up our blogs, and put together a general road map from now until December. We accomplished all of those and a little bit more.

Sep 3, 2017