Mayhem Brawler Developer Diary 6: Character Variants

Hello Brawlers! After a month of Mayhem Brawler developer diary breaks, we are once more together with you. Today, we will talk about the creation process of enemy variants in our game.

First of all, we already mentioned that we made different skins for the same character types in the Mayhem Brawler Developer Diary 4: Enemy Design and now we will detail it with you. While we were creating our character types, our brainstorm subject was how to reflect personalities on minions & lieutenants too. That’s where we got to decide our minions having their own “living” identities such as their past, lifestyle, and origin.

Minions

In beat ’em ups, minions are one of the straight-up crucial elements. They don’t challenge players much but they are so important for being cannon fodders and creating a scene. Back in the 80s, mostly due to technical difficulties there was only a single type of minion in each beat ’em up game. With the ever-growing gaming industry and improving technologies, game graphics and design got improved too. But in beat ’em ups that just kept limited with changing color palettes for creating different variants of the same minion kinds.

With the art department, we started to draw different head variants for each enemy class. We detailed anatomies, hairstyles, and dressing for each minion. For slightest differences, even personalized animations made for variants. Our creative director never ran away from any effort for this subject. As a result, we got a huge diverse minion and lieutenant catalog in Mayhem Brawler. When we asked our art lead about the variant design, he described his workflow on variants as: “Key influences are mostly from huge impacting ’90s trends and pop culture subjects as a salute to the back.”

Mayhem Brawler Minion Variants

Let us show you two examples of the minion varieties in Mayhem Brawler. We would love to show you all the minions but that would just ruin the surprise of the moment you face them for the first time!

Here you can see variants of the Thug enemy class. As you can see, their facial details, skin tones, coloring on their clothing, and head shapes are all different according to their unique self. Some of them have facial hair, some of them have scars, different eye shapes, and personalized facial detail positioning.

As you can see from Punk variants, they just don’t look like variants of the same class. They all look unique and reflect their personalities. Since they are criminals, they are bad people. But come on, they have lives too! Now with the much positive feedback we get, a lot of extra time spent on variations feels totally worth it!

That’s all for this developer diary, while we are developing the beat ’em up of our lives for you guys, we hope you are happy and hyped for Mayhem Brawler! And if you still haven’t added Mayhem Brawler to your wishlist, here is the link or you can use the widget on the bottom of the page, because an invitation won’t show up at your doorstep!

– Your friendly neighborhood superhero developers.