Crackdown 3

Crackdown 3 official site: https://www.crackdown.com/

Company: Climax Studios

Main Game Developer Company: Sumo Digital

Engine: Unreal Engine 4

Role: Gameplay Programmer

Climax Studios helped co-develop boss battles on Crackdown 3 with Sumo Digital over the final 6 months of development. Our role was to redesign and refine boss encounters and make iterations based on client feedback while working hand-to-hand with Sumo’s design team.

About My Work in Crackdown

My job mainly consisted of providing support to the design team to modify existing boss behaviors, as well as implementing new behaviors for those bosses.

The boss levels I was responsible for where:

  • Ngata
    • For Ngata we decided to add some phasing to the battle, so I created an enemy wave spawner capable of distinguishing between enemy difficulty for designers to easily tweak based on the spawn logic of the boss health value.
    • We also improved the way the boss uses his special attacks. To do this, I added a targeting system for the special laser attack as well as implementing boss special attack zones – high floor barrage, medium floor laser to help the boss decide which attack to use depending on where the player is.
  • Vargas
    • The wave spawn system used for Ngata was reimplemented in the Vargas arena.
    • The design of Vargas allowed her to grab rocks in the arena and throw them to the player. For this, I added a boss projectile spawner that creates throwable rocks while hiding the spawn from the player.
    • As we wanted the fight to be dynamic I created gas hazards to prevent the player from hiding in the arena.
  • Niemand
    • My work on Neimand consisted of modifying the existing phase logic to make the boss fulfill the new requests from design, such as enemy spawning at certain point in a phase and phase sequencing.