Marvel Super Hero Squad Online

I joined Gazillion to help move the development of Marvel Super Hero Squad Online from a 100+ person studio to our secret base in San Mateo, California. Our small team had a two week off site transition period to absorb as much as we could of an operational LiveOps game built in the Unity game engine.

Our first mission was a success. Spider-Man 2099 was already in progress and went out as planned just after we took responsibility for the title.

For months I formed half of a two person art director and technical artist team. We worked with a previously contracted outsourcing group that kept the raw assets rolling in.

Dr. Doom

Pirate Deadpool

Avengers Iron Man

We went on to ship over 60 main characters, a bunch of bosses and a horde of minions while I was on the project.

This Iron Spider video shows one of many characters that I helped develop for the game. I created and applied various visual effects, added synchronized audio clips, integrated the character morph transitions and added full range of emotes complete with particles. I worked closely with our in house animator to provide technical support and managed the underlying organization of the character.

Other special guests in the video that I worked on include, Avengers Iron Man, Doc Ock, Bombastic Bag Man, Dr. Doom playable, Venom and some of the minions that are defeated by Iron Spider.

Agent Venom safety tip, bring lots of guns

This is a picture of Agent Venom being fitted with orange gun tips to satisfy Marvel’s legal team. Everything had to pass approval down to the smallest detail.

Fostering a positive relationship with outsourced art teams helped keep the characters flowing. As assets were delivered and reviewed I constructed the characters in a proprietary tool that defined the core functionality of the heroes, villains and minions. Character size, strength, defensive abilities, attack chains, damage amounts, speed, mode of locomotion and more had to be defined with precision and speed.

I created this Honduran white bat, a rare reward item that frantically flaps around the player’s on screen character. Efficient wins were a constant goal to maximize our margins. I found many ways to leverage new items based off of existing assets.

There are many videos on YouTube featuring characters in  Super Hero Squad Online. Creating a huge range of particle effects and colorful bonus items was challenging and fun.