Project HERO

Project: HERO was a game development project for about a year. The project was made with a team, and I was the lead designer. This page showcases some of the major hero design iterations I have made on the game's heroes since its inception. Choose one to learn more!

Caveman Balling

Learn about the first hero added to the game and where he is a year later.

Glocktopus

Learn about how system changes have affected one of our trickiest heroes.

Heavy Metal

Learn about how I tackled a full-on hero rework and created a rhythm mechanic!

Caveman Balling

After finally deciding that I was to make a singleplayer hero shooter, the idea for Caveman Balling came to me almost like a dream. I’m sure that I received some sort of subconscious influence...

Caveman Balling was my first take at tailoring a hero design to singleplayer. There are many small touches here, but the highlight is the Basketball Rock. By catching the ball, its cooldown is reset instantly. In multiplayer, that would be tough to balance. In singleplayer, it's just an exciting tool that makes Caveman Balling unique.

Paired with the basketball, Caveman Balling uses a classic thwacking club. This weapon uses no ammunition, constantly fires, and can one-shot small enemies with a critical hit. During testing, we found that players only needed the club: it made combat trivial compared to the basketball, which was much harder to get value out of. Here's gameplay from 2023:

To encourage players to start balling, I added some incentive to lead with the basketball and track it consistently. Hitting the basketball now increases the club’s damage dealt to the target, but its base damage club was significantly reduced. Basketball Rock is now THE enabler in Caveman's kit, rather than the club being the easy out for damage.

Glocktopus

Before I started prototyping, there was lots of thought on paper about how to make an octopus holding eight guns function. I landed on basic logic - if you’ve got a gun in each tentacle, then how can you move? Basically, movement reduces your firerate unless you're not making any inputs.

This created a big challenge: To highlight this mechanic, Glocktopus only deals damage with its guns. Systemic changes, like those related to aim or movement impact this hero the most. For example, when enemy AI changes made aiming more difficult, the high risk of standing still to deal damage was made even higher!

The simple solution was to increase Glocktopus’ damage dealt, so that the reward was higher. This seemed… concerning, as Glocktopus already had some of the highest sustained damage in the entire game. It also made encounters with the turret enemies, who do not move, far easier.

The optimal solution turned out to be another new system: Damage falloff.

Glocktopus already had a range cutoff motivated by early feedback, but it wasn’t granular. By rewarding Glocktopus with extra damage for getting closer to foes, that moved the major risk factor onto the player’s movement as opposed to the enemy’s movement. This meant more player autonomy overall, especially considering that Glocktopus’ variety of positioning abilities now had more potential risk and reward associated with them.

Heavy Metal

Heavy Metal, thematically, has always been about playing music. Her original development period was very exploratory - we said she’d play a banjo, designed a kit around jazz, and then made a guitar anyways. This recent summer gave us the opportunity to refocus Heavy Metal’s identity and solve some of the problems behind her original design.

She started with a mechanic where attacks cycled through statuses that you activated with an ability. It was sort of like music, but it was too confusing to figure out in a 5-minute first-impression play session. We needed something simpler that embodied that musical fantasy…

So it was time to do some research. Inevitably, the answer lied in how traditional rhythm games implemented their own mechanics. I immediately crossed out a passive ‘play to the beat’ mechanic: because Heavy Metal is a single hero in a larger game, it wouldn’t be worthwhile to restructure the entire game around a mechanic that won’t be used all the time.

I landed on a rhythm sequence. Here’s how it works: The player uses the ability, then has to time presses of right (blue) and left (clicks) to the passing box on the screen. Each successful hit boosts an explosion.

This was still rough - you were still playing a rhythm game and a hero shooter at the same time, even if only for a second. My solution was to take advantage of the singleplayer nature of the game and slow down time during the rhythm sequence. This added separation - visually and mechanically - so players focused on the sequence as it was happening.

Trailer

Like what you saw? Want to play it for yourself? Check out the trailer for Project: HERO, featuring these characters and more, and download the game on my itch.io page!

Mason Crochetiere

Technical Designer

Project HERO

Caveman Balling

Glocktopus

Heavy Metal

Caveman Balling

Glocktopus

Heavy Metal

Trailer