an action-adventure where you play as Xiara, a high school engineer, as she battles corruption across a Frutiger Aero-themed future Los Angeles.
Help Xiara protect her community from brutality as she fights the Ethnic Compliance Initiative (or E.C.I. for short)... with a magnetic basketball?!
Use crossovers to outmaneuver and daze your opponents. Break their ankles... and then break their faces!
I was tasked with being the creative director for this project. Over the course of ~6 months, our team poured hundreds of hours into bringing this project together from conception. As the creative director, it was my responsibility to keep everyone involved, lead weekly discussions regarding the state and direction of the project, and ensure everyone had a clear idea of not only what their tasks were, but what their perception of the project and their own responsibilities. With the assistance of my lead producer, it was also my task to determine just what we wanted the project to be.
Simply put, Frutiger Aero is an aesthetic style popular in the 2000s. The result of a new wave of CGI online, Frutiger Aero commonly features bubbly, bright-colored surrealism. Your average Frutiger Aero pictures feature idyllic scenery and rounded edges, but in an exaggerated and absurdly realistic fashion.
When people think of Frutiger Aero, many think of classic Windows wallpapers, macintosh tech, iCarly, or old iPhone app icons. Our team wanted to incorporate Frutiger Aero into our game to bring new life to a rare and "dated" art form.
Frutiger Metro in a lot of ways is the polar opposite of Frutiger Aero. It's much more passionate and bold, with sharp-edged shapes, black silhouettes, and highly saturated oranges and purples. In Full Court Uprising, our main character Xiara doesn't exactly fit into the world around her, and we wanted players to feel that by making her art style contrast with the environment's art style.
Our absolute biggest challenge working on Full Court Uprising was designing the main hook: fighting enemies in a style that feels like basketball, while also incorporating movement mechanics like rails.
Multiple design team meetings, on top of fast prototyping and feedback, led us through multiple systems of combat to reach the one we currently have today.
Combining high speed rail traversal and complex combat introduced unique challenges for level design. We wanted our level to feel open and free for the player to explore in the way they like, but still oriented around an end goal. We also wanted to ensure players were having the best experience and interacting with mechanics at their own pace. Rewards for clever skill expression came in the form of quicker fights, cooler paths, and flashy visual effects as the main character, Xiara, leaps from rail to rail.
One of our big aspirations was to program and position enemies in ways that encouraged you to take advantage of the mechanics in the game. In many encounters throughout the level, players need to use rails liberally to reposition themselves around hordes of melee enemies and close the gap between them and ranged enemies.