MAINFRAME - Prototype Giant Mech Fighting Game - Student Prototype

And now for the big project that's kept me busy all semester. I've been taking an Intro to Game Dev class which focuses on Unity, given that it's a free and lightweight engine that's fairly easy to pick up for new users. I'm already fairly familiar with the tool, having taught myself bits of it in my free time over the last 6 years, so I got permission to use the asset kit Universal Fighting Engine 2.0 (https://ufe3d.com/doku.php) so I could focus primarily on the art and moveset design side of things.

Mainframe is intended to be a giant mecha fighting game, inspired by shows like Gundam and Transformers, and games like Street Fighter and BlazBlue. With the sheer size of the robots, it's a fun challenge to figure out how to pace the animations so that they feel heavy and powerful without losing the responsiveness required for a fighting game to be considered even halfway decent. I like to think I did a solid job!

Thanks to the asset kit's heavy lifting, I was able to build out a character with a solid moveset and varied actions. For the purposes of time and leaving room to adjust the timing of attacks, the attack animations are mostly just blocked-out animations, so I focused on making sure their silhouettes read well from both the front and the back. I'd also custom built the character and rig myself from scratch, which was handy because I knew exactly what sort of things I would need to make them work, like a driven-key arm cannon mechanism and joints near vents to attach particle systems too for certain actions.

In the end, I reacted roughly 90% of the visuals seen here, the remaining 10% consisting of certain unedited UI elements from the toolkit and the blue blaster shot particle effect used in two attacks. There's no way I'd have gotten this far without the assistance of UFE2.0, so I'm happy to admit to that.

Eventually I'd like to turn this into a full, proper fighting game, when I'm not focused on college and have a non-student license for Maya (or a will to use Blender's animation tools). It's one I've had in my head for a good 6 years now, and I'd love to see it finally brought out into the world as a proper full title, maybe even played on big stages if I play my cards right.

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Music in this video was provided by Chandler Fakkel, except the victory music which came with UFE