15 September 2005
       


What began as an idea was now moving towards reality. Paradox had thought about making a celebrity based action game, they had frozen in on
Jean Claude Van Damme as the celebrity and he had been convinced that they would do a good job of the game....

The challenge now was to do the job well.

Once licenses and other initial issues are in place, the next step is creating the Game Design Document. The production workflow management plans are also initialized at this step.

Paradox Studios Executive Producer Ninad Chhaya

Ninad Chhaya the executive producer of Van Damme Kickboxing worked on the production workflow plan even while game design lead Chirag Desai began work on the Game Design Document. Both of them had specific challenges to cope with.

For Ninad, the challenge was to release the game on two different platforms. Not only was the game to be developed both on J2MEJava 2 Platform Micro Edition provides application-development platform for mobile devices including cell phones and PDAs. and BREW, Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless, developed by Qualcomm Wireless. it was to be ported across various handsets - from high-end devices to low-memory mobile phones, while maintaining the quality of the game. This, though being a usual procedure with mobile game development, was a concern with Van Damme Kickboxing due to two reasons:



1. The game had to be ready within a stipulated time since Van Damme's agent has specific plans about the game's release.

2. Since the game involved a celebrity, the team had to doubly make sure that the procedure didn't even remotely affect the game's performance.

Ninad also had to ensure that all the teams involved in the project worked in tandem, understood each others’ requirements and worked accordingly, meeting the deadlines. Finally, it was also his responsibility to co-ordinate with the marketing team, provide updates of the progress and status of the game to facilitate client approvals.

Meanwhile Chirag working on the game design document was addressing the set of issues that he had to tackle.

The game design document is the blue print of the game. It clearly states what the game is meant to be. It defines the kind of experience that a player playing the game would have and elaborates on the style, game levels, character sketches, level of ineractivity, etc.

It is like a compass which directs all those working on the game towards a common goal.

A lot of thought, research and redrafting go into the making of a game design document. It is a very critical stage and any gameplay element or potential production error overlooked here would mean 10x problems later on.

Research

Paradox Studios' Game Designer Chirag Desai

As Chirag prepared to prepare the Game Design Document, he flung himself full scale into research. He watched dozens of Jean-Claude movies to observe and assimilate the martial art super icon's style and moves. On one occasion he actually locked himself up in a room to watch five Van Damme movies back-to-back – Hard Target, Time Cop, Kick Boxer, Double Impact and Cyborg.

Interestingly, Chirag's father too is a hardcore Van Damme fan and at times the two of them sat together watching his movies. ”My dad envies my job," beamed Chirag smugly. However he warned, "Let me tell you that watching your favorite star's movie is one thing and watching five of them at a go is something else, and can seriously have your head spinning."

Chirag observed that in most movies Van Damme had a lot of underground fights in the warehouse and when he fought, he fought to death. The fights were extremely physical in nature and had a majority of kickboxing moves. Amongst the movies that they researched, his team found Hard Target to be very rewarding since it had a lot of well-defined poses. The relevant shots were identified and the frames were frozen for the concept artists to sketch them in detail. Van Damme was sketched in a variety of poses to check which ones fitted the bill for the game. This, needless to say, was done amidst never-ending brainstorming sessions with the entire production team present.

The Story Line
Chirag also created the story line for the game, which had Van Damme facing a hoard of opponents to win the top accolades in the fighting circuit. Depending on the Genre, storylines for games can range from one line plots as in Van Damme Kickboxing to long elaborate plots as in most of RPG games. Some games dont have a storyline, for e.g sports based games like cricket and football.

Game Style

The realistic moves
The surreal bakgrounds

At this point Chirag and Ninad had to come to a consensus about the level of reality to be sported in the game. Where Ninad thought the game should look as realistic as possible, Chirag held a view that the backgrounds were required to look surreal to reflect a gaming environment. Finally it was agreed that the moves (martial arts kicks , punches and blocks)  would be made realistic since, it was difficult to show a life-like representation of Van Damme himself on the mobile platform. The duo also decided that the backgrounds ought to be surreal.

Game Play
The toughest part in the game is creating the AI (Artificial Intelligence)The action of a character in a game as it reacts to other objects in the game. , wherein the enemies & obstacles have to be tough enough to create challenging and fun gameplay, while at the same time making sure that the AI is not so tough that the enemy becomes unbeatable.

The game has to offer re-playability, the ideal cycle being that of a challenge, a potential learning curve that makes it possible to overcome the challenge in a few attempts, followed by a greater challenge with yet another learning curve.

This is always a consideration while coming up with the Game Design Document and the same was the case with Van Damme Kickboxing.

Another feature the Game Design team thought of was that of adding a training level. This was inspired by one of the Van Damme movies, where he goes through a training session and betters his fighting skills. In the game, depending on how well the player performed on the training level, Van Damme’s energy level increased, and performing optimally in this level resulted in the moves getting better in the following levels.

After the initial research was done and over with, the team realized that the biggest challenge was yet to be overcome: To squeeze all the action and ideas into the ridiculously small sizes of the mobile screens!

*(Animation 'xpress case studies are now enabled with Text Tips. Hover your mouse over a technical term to read its definition. All Text Tips are highlighted)

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