BRUCE LEE: DRAGON WARRIOR
Digital Legends Entertainment / Universal
Project Description

Bruce Lee: Dragon Warrior is the third 3D fighting game made by Digital Legends, and my first game as Lead Designer. In the single player campaign we told a fictional take on Bruce Lee's early days in Hong Kong, before he went to the US. The game was planned to have multiplayer on a later update, but disagreements with some of the parts involved cancelled any chance to release even a single bugfixing update. It became also a launch title for the new Ipad device, and was released too on the Sony Xperia Play

The game was going to be one of the first 3D fighting games with motion captured animations on a touch device. The game allowed full 3D movement, and used a simple yet deep fighting system. A player could mash the buttons and win, but the system allowed to maintain combos open up to 20 hits per combo. The game used ending moves much like Mortal Kombat fatalities. The game also had an event system that could have been used to add content, tourneys and even multiplayer events post release

The game was paid (F2P wasn't even a thing at that time), and reaped a decent success, both critical and financial. It is also the game I'm most proud of, both for the huge amount of work I poured into it and for the end results. Sadly, the above mentioned disagreements left no chance to polish and improve the game with further updates

Project Details
  • GenreMartial arts, Fighting game, 1vs1
  • ClientUniversal
  • DateFebruary 2010
  • StatusRemoved from IOS Appstore
  • PlatformIOS, Sony Xperia Play
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My work

  • Gameplay design: The idea was to translate a very complex game genre to a platform that favours simple game inputs. It was quite difficult, and while I don't love the on-screen gamepad solution, the fighting system worked quite well with it. The game supported only single player, but had many game modes (VS, Tournament, Time Attack). The one I'm most proud of is the Story Mode. The player is presented with a map of Hong Kong, and several events are always available to play (story mode, time attacks, etc). If the player completes one of the story events, the next story event is presented in the map. If other type of event is completed, the game systems feeds the player with new events constantly. In that way, a campaign that could be completed in an hour could last several more

  • Animation design: Bruce Lee is famous for his Jeet Kune Do philosophy, which basically consists on using the right movement on a fight, no matter which fighting style the fighter favours. We implemented this with a fighting style that could learn and use moves from defeated opponents. Bruce Lee's style was, in this way, customizable. This also gave player an agency to fight the rest of the fighters again and again on the map event system to get all the moves. The fighting styles (Jeet Kune Do, Kung Fu, Karate and Thai Boxing) were implemented using an in-house scripting tool with realtime preview.

  • Story Mode design: The Story mode was presented with animated 2D cutscenes much like Disgaea. Implementation was done through scripting, and I still have nightmares about the crunch I endured to finish it. The story writing, while well documented, was a bit cheesy and topic. But for a first attempt at writing it wasn't that bad.

  • Sound design: In a game where the main story character is Bruce Lee himself, it was crucial to avoid repetition of his trademark screams that could pull off players from the game. A volume/pitch system was designed to avoid just that

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