Kung Fu Panda brought with it the usual challenge of adapting a brand new license to a game world. Luckily the Kung Fu universe lends itself well to many current gaming norms. The DS also offered the obvious though hard to do well, option for touch screen control. With a limited schedule and limited resources a great game was planned out and executed.

At the beginning of this project it was realized that their was an issue with the design staffing and the current tool set. Out of the designers on the project only one was knowledgeable in scripting. This was an issue as the tool set to be used was coming from Transformers and was solely scripting based. Conducted research using other industry tools. Wrote up a system proposal for engineering describing a visual based scripting system where objects could signal other objects according to a well defined and intuitive state change. Some examples: a timer would signal it’s target when it received a signal, a counter would signal at its limit or up until its limit, etc. Every object was to be simple in functionality and all links were to be represented visually in 3D Studio Max. The actual connecting of objects was also done using smart tabs instead of the old text based tag editing of before. The system was a huge success and designers who had been limited previously by their lack of scripting knowledge were given great control in molding their room designs.

Because of the short development cycle controls were not locked down in time for the start of mission design and level creation. As is always the case, art needed content yesterday. Paper designs were completed for 18 missions using the planned game mechanics as a base. These paper plans were for the Chorh-Gom region of the game. These 18 levels were the most puzzle heavy rooms in the title. Their post design construction was able to move quickly because of the well thought out plans created up front. Because of this systematic approach art was not held up.

The paper designs were then modeled up and implemented using 3D Studio max. The Chorh-Gom Prison presented in the film contained large amounts of verticality. This was represented in the game levels with the players fighting downward through vertical arenas and launching upwards using crumbling platform after crumbling platform.

Missions were implemented using the in house C Based Scripting System combined with the newly designed Visual Scripting System. This game was the first project to use the new Visual Scripting system mentioned in the first section above.

Designed and scripted four major bosses that extended from existing AI functionality. Each boss intentionally highlighted game mechanics previously introduced to the player. Created a fifth unique boss, Tai Lung, who was designed and scripted from the ground up. A state machine was developed within the scripting system for Tai Lung’s many unique behaviors including various traversals, charges and barrel-throwing techniques.

Worked closely with the rest of the design team implementing any needed script heavy cutscenes. Answered design requests for special scripted entities and general support for mission functionality requiring text script implementation. Worked closely with art and animation building white rooms and hooking up new art assets as soon as they came in.