The developer of DMC, Heavenly Sword, and the upcoming Hell Blade has recently released another dropped project called Kung Fu Story, which would be a spiritual successor for Kung Fu Chaos. Unfortunately, both Kung Fu Story and the AAA project called Razor were dumped for various reasons, but the Ninja Theory team are using their old design documentations to educate folks who are interested in studying game design. Before getting into the technical details, watch the teaser trailer for Kung Fu Story.
Announced five hours ago on twitter, Ninja Theory has provided an inside scoop about a second project that failed in the pitch stage.
Back in 2003 we conceived a spiritual successor to Kung Fu Chaos called Kung Fu Story. It didn't make it past the pitch stage.
— Ninja Theory (@NinjaTheory) September 8, 2014
The above footage was actually the video that the developer provided to publishers. As a quick reminder, the Ninja Theory staff has always started by creating a trailer before starting the whole project to get a clear mood and tone toward the game’s design; how would this game look and play? While publishers examine the heroine’s fighting style and action scenes, Ninja Theory also included the design documentation.
Attack Strings Concept
One of the surviving and interesting documents from this old project is the combat design document. While uploading these files for interested spectators to examine, Dominic “Dom” Matthews also explained how codding and programming works in details, especially creating enemy artificial intelligence. In his general breakdown, the object oriented (abbreviated as “oo”) programming enables folks to create systems to follow an object:
In OO, you can break down difficult problems such as “How do I create enemy AI” into a system of “Classes” (e.g. a soldier) from which you could inherit “Subclasses” (e.g. a sniper, a swordsman), each of which had “Behaviors” (e.g. patrol, search, kill) and “Attributes” (e.g. shot accuracy, attack speed). So when you spawn an enemy such as swordsman, you are creating an “Object” that follows all the behavior rules of a Swordsman Class which also inherits all the behaviors of a Soldier Class.
To keep track of these technical operations, they have to record these coding, which can result in numerous pages with heavy amount of text. See the right illustration for one concept. In the end, the Kung Fu Story preview video was created to visualize these concepts further. To provide a further analysis watch the second video to see these actual combat moves demonstrated.
After watching both videos, what do you think about creating action games? Is creating intelligent enemies better in terms of playing through these action games? What do you think could improve combats?
For more information about the developer, please visit the official website. To see more concepts about the combat designs, please click here.
Gamer Headlines encourage its avid readers to take advantage of the comment section to type any statements, recommendations, or questions. We value each individual’s opinions and suggest sharing his or her thoughts on the matter.
To see the latest blogs and news from this author, simply touch the profile image. To personally contact the writer, please email jjfarrington@gamerheadlines.com or follow @Jalane001.
[show_avatar email=2247 align=center user_link=authorpage show_name=true show_postcount=true]