Irreverent Labs
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During my time working on the Mecha Fight Club, our mission was to make a Cockfighting game with Artificialy Intelligent NFT Robot-Chickens. We intially developed a physics-based combat system for them, but this wasn't every entertaining.
Two chickens circling around and trying to smack eachother with colliders using attack animations didn't have any real substance to it. Eventually I proposed a pivot towards using choreography and cinematography to build a
Cinematic Generator that would produce fights that were properly funny and entertaining. I prototyped the concept, and this was the result:
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As an intermediate project, we were also instructed to make a Dojo game, where users could train their Robot-Chickens:
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I prototyped an alternative UI for the Dojo game, in an attempt to enhance the gameplay by steering it more towards a strategic auto-battler with an innovative timeline-based tactical combat system:
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Animation Sequencing
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Irreverent Labs promised their customers a game by November of 2022, even though development just began when I started in August. Sometime in October, I was tasked with creating 60+ 2-second combat animations for our robot chickens in just but two weeks
time. To accomplish this, I animated 10 seconds of base animation and turned it into 120 seconds worth of combat animation by concatenating transitions and stances through an animation sequencing system, layered with Unity Rig constraints
for the wings to control strikes. For example, this is technique 00019:
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I based the entire fighting style upon a martial arts form called Bok Fu (literally a real thing) because it uses a side-fighting style, which I liked because it enabled the robot-chickens to use their wings as shields. I developed the animation
sequencing tech as a stance management system using Scriptable Objects. If you study the image to the right, you'll see the robot chicken goes from Bow Stance Left, to Horse Stance Left, to Cat Stance Left, to Horse Stance Left, to Horse Stance
Right, to Cross Step Right. Throughout these movements, the left wing strikes with a Double Jab, then a Pinky Chop, while the right wing delivers two Index Chops at different heights (controlled by the Roll value). Below is the same technique,
but with no wing controller strikes, and it briefly holds each stance to illustrate the concept:
 I was eventually able to produce over 90 combat techniques using this system. After running thousands of simulations, our data indicated that the Bok Fu style greatly outperformed all other creative attack animations we had. Bok Fu techniques delivered lots of strikes, and simultaneously avoided damage, as intended.
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