ICEBREAKER HOCKEY
Digital Legends Entertainment / Natural Motion
Project Description

Icebreaker Hockey is a single player sports game where the player faces increassingly difficult ice rink and enemy layouts before trying to score at the oppossing goal. Natural Motion provided the base concept (Backbreaker on ice) and the animation technology, Morpheme Connect. Digital Legends provided the engine, rendering technology and content design

The main difficulty of the project was to adapt an AAA animation engine used on PS3 (Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption) to a mobile platform. Due to the performance limitations of Iphone/Ipad models at that time, the game only supported 5 enemies plus the goalkeeper and the player itself. The game renders far away enemies with low resolution animations, which didn't look great compared to the fluidity of the player movement. Another big hindrance was the level editing tool, buggy and user-unfriendly. Given that the game contained 75 levels, it was a real pain in the ass implementing them

The game was released with decent success, specially at US and Canada, where ice hockey is quite popular. The project was full of difficult moments, but the chance to work along with a great developer and use a powerful tool like Morpheme Connect was a high point in my career

Project Details
  • GenreSports, Ice Hockey, Arcade
  • ClientNatural Motion
  • DateJune 2011
  • StatusLive
  • PlatformIOS
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My work

  • Gameplay Design: Under Natural Motion product guidelines I designed an Ice Hockey variant of their Backbreaker IOS series. The main differences were the entities faster movement speed on the ice rink, high speed collisions to walls and shooting mechanics when facing the goalkeeper

  • Level Design: I co-designed 75 ice rink levels / layouts with Natural Motion production team

  • Animation design: I defined the movementsand behaviours of all game entities (player, enemies, goalkeeper), and implemented them using Morpheme Connect. Really powerful tool

  • Motion capture: I assisted Natural Motion's lead animator and capture team with design feedback. Motion capture was performed at Oxford ice rink, from midnight to 6 AM. A very cold and exciting experience!

  • Sound design: I was looking for an arcade feeling to the game, so I asked for short rocking guitar tunes, very much like the ones played on Sega arcades like Afterburner or Virtua Tennis. I also designed the sound requirements and rink ambience

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