Rolling the Credits on Asgard's Wrath

Ok, I've finished Asgard's Wrath. whew. That was a workout, a crazy grind fest, and also pretty amazing. What a fun game!

It's so much fun to see all the main cast dancing at the very end of the game.

So when last we left our hero, I was taking on the second half of Stikkan's story. It took a bunch of work, but eventually I leveled up Stikkan's gear enough that he could survive till the end fight, which was pretty epic.  Hel sucks you up into a vortex and then starts flying around you and trying to chuck giant iceballs at you. It's all about shooting her with your God bow at the right times.

A couple of Superstars about to go WWE in Aegir's Hall!

When you do defeat her, you get the Greed Stone and give it to Loki, and Hel busts into the tavern. After a heated exchange, she's banished. End of problem. All that was left after that was to travel to Jotunheim and take on the final arc of Risi's story. 

Risi, as it turns out, while technically is a half-giant, he's an absolute dwarf compared to the actual giants. Once you free the giant chieftains from Thor, they grant you a big club and tell you that you have to be the one to take down Thor. It's chill though, because you have a God helping you out.

The chiefens are HUGE when they are finally freed and get to stand up.

After a bunch of complex battles, you topple Thor's tower with SCIENCE!  Risi's artificial arm turns out to be a fantastic lightning conduit that ends up dropping Thor's tower on his own head. The end.

Thor is about to get a headache!

Back at the tavern, Thor threatens you a bunch, and after Loki gets his final stone, he goes insane with power and turns on you. The final fight with Loki isn't even the hardest part of this experience though. No, that tower defense game you play with Thor's army is wayyyy harder. I failed on that a number of times.

How you like that beat down, Loki?! Come at me, bro!

While you do get to beat Loki up pretty good, his ultimate trick is to trap you in Asgard as he makes his escape, leaving you with a pretty cool hint at what's coming next -- an ankh, which basically fortold Asgard's Wrath 2.

I can't remember, there wasn't a hint like this in Asgard's Wrath 2 was there?

So even though I've finished the main quest and rolled the credits, I still haven't seen everything in the game. Basically there's about seven areas or so that I still haven't seen, and if you really wanted to, you could level all your heroes and companions up to legendary status.  There's a lot more to do.

I love my little frog companion so much! He deserves to be leveled up to Legendary.

Even as I'm typing this, I'm feeling pulled back into the game, like I may actually want to 100 percent this one. I actually felt the same way back when I finished Asgard's Wrath 2.  Both of these were such great games. If you're looking for the best the Oculus has to offer, you can't go wrong with these two games, especially if you love action RPGs.

I can't recommend them enough.

Happy Dueling!

Asgard's Wrath -- Rivers of Blood and Ripped out Eyeballs

I got a bit caught up in releasing UNSVR lately, but that doesn't mean I haven't been playing a lot of the OG Asgard's Wrath! It's been a lot of fun to be honest. I could only play it in short bursts lately because I haven't had the time and stamina to do otherwise, but I've made a lot of progress doing just that.

So, first off, I finished Part 1 of Stikkan's journey, and it ended with solving a God Puzzle where you filled up the channels of a canal his boat was stuck in. It was a river full of blood mind you . . . I guess it was kind of like the Nephilim version of working the locks of the Panama Canal. Kind of weird, but I'm rolling with it.

Filling the river with blood!

The main challenge in this puzzle came from a couple of fights with a bloated, poison spitting garbage-heap of a woman. I was kind of reminded of an uglier version of Grummus from Everquest. That may be too esoteric of a reference for the kids. Anyway, at the end of the fight, you rip out her stomach. Don't ask me why, but that seemed to be the only way to kill a bloated, poison-spitting garbage-heap of a woman.

The Draugar Queen, otherwise known as a bloated, poison-spitting garbage heap of a woman.

After this, you royally piss off the Norse royalty, and Odin throws you in Asgard's jail.  It's ok though, because you can possess a half-giant whose missing an arm and restore him to his former glory and free yourself from Odin's bondage. (You can't make this stuff up . . . unless you're Sanzaru, then, ok, nice imagination Sanzaru! I like it!)

Half giant / Half machine!

The half-giant's name is Risi, and he's your fourth hero you can play as.  While escaping Asgard's Jail (it's name is escaping my brain right now), you find Risi's mechanical arm and unlock a super cool raven character named Runa that helps you sneak past these evil statues that one-shot you with a death ray.

By the end, you free yourself from the prison and have an epic fight with the Warden. So, reader, if you rip out the heart of the first boss and you rip out the stomach of the second boss, just guess what you rip out of the Warden? I SAID GUESS!! Well, I gave it away in this post's title, but if you guessed eyes, you guessed right! You just grab on to those suckers and rip 'em right out of his skull. Fatality!

They're glowy eyes too!

After all this, the game did something really unexpected, and I say this as a game designer. Check it out . . . the game splits into three paths and unhooks you from the main quest line!  It feels really risky to me to do this, but I can respect the decision. 

Your paths are as follows:

1- You can play as a champion running around in Asgard's Bar, the Aegir Hall. This is incredibly fun, btw. You get to see the bar from a totally different perspective and arm yourself with sewing needles and acorn shell shields.

2- You can play part 2 of Stikkan's journey.

or 3- You can play part 2 of Risi's journey.

For me, I finished up option 1 as much as I could (some fun battles there) and then started on option 2, Stikkan's journey. I'm not sure what my decision did or did not do for me since surely I'll be playing Risi's journey as well, but they gave me an interesting choice.

The "safe" designer in me wonders why you would ever detach someone from the main quest line, even for a moment.  The "creative" designer in me loves the "surprise and delight" moment of even being offered a choice.  You definitely don't see this same type of choice being offered in AW2 (as far as I remember correctly).  Part of me wonders if the metrics showed them that people stopped playing at this area when they did that?  It's something I'd love to know just to answer my own curiosity.

So far in Stikkan's follow-on quest, I've unlocked a new wolf companion.  He's a brutal dual wielder that can howl at magical ice crystals and break them so you can proceed. In this quest, I'm finding myself swapping back and forth between companions a lot to solve puzzles and break through blocking mechanics. This feels really good in late game. I like re-using companions in this way.

All in all, I'm having a great time playing Asgard's Wrath. I feel like I'm getting close to beating it and I'm even wondering if I'll have it done over the weekend here.

I'll be sure to let you know.

Happy Dueling!

Unnatural Selection VR Pitch Slides

​​Back in 2022, WIMO Games was starting to investigate VR games. At the time, my job was to work closely with an outsourcing team in Spain to build a vertical slice of a mobile game called Unnatural Selection (UNS). The object was to get a viable product out there as fast as possible, to put it out for public consumption, and to see how close to expected metrics it was. Most mobile games are failures, but if you can "fail fast," your company is at less risk. When you do find something that works, you can go all in (as they did with our game Dice RPG).

When I got wind that we were transitioning to VR, I instantly wanted to try making our UNS mobile game as a VR game (UNSVR!). To that end, I drew up a PowerPoint pitch deck and presented it to our executives. They were interested and happy I had taken that initiative, but they wanted something a bit less risky and strange for our first VR project.  I can't say I blame them!

Below are a few of the slides from that PowerPoint deck:

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Later, in 2023, WIMO hosted a game jam internally and encouraged all teams to make VR games. Ryan Chapman and I were co-captains and decided to make UNSVR a reality. To be perfectly clear, the Unnatural Selection base game (whether on PC or Mobile) was originally Ryan's brainchild. Ryan had been dreaming of making a fish breeding game FOR YEARS. This game just wouldn't have happened without Ryan. That said, as the sole VR designer for the team (in this instance), I borrowed from the original pitch deck and created something more manageable for us to create in the span of seven days.

I wrote up both a design document and a less pitch-oriented, design PowerPoint deck that would help us define the boundaries of our scope while keeping the original flavor of the game we wanted to build. Below are a few slides from that Powerpoint.

​Unfortunately, we were still very ambitious and a few items had to be cut halfway through our game jam because we realized we wouldn't have time to implement them. For example, we didn't have time to build a way to remove decoration items (only place). We didn't have time to make the final whale that swims through the environment something you can grab onto or "ride," instead, proximity would move the whale along as you swam next to it.   The quest cave map couldn't be something that was slowly revealed as you played, instead, it was just a "mall map" on the wall of the quest cave. 

If there was to be an update someday to this game, we always envisioned a second saltwater environment and adding in a few of these wanted features.  We're pretty happy with how the game turned out and how good the game looks for seven days of work.

As cheesy and obvious as it is, PowerPoint (good ol' PowerPoint) remains a great tool for communicating ideas with your team.

If you're interested in downloading and playing UNSVR on PC, Click here.

Happy Dueling!

Unnatural Selection VR -- Now Available on itch.io!

Hello friends, come download my game!

I've uploaded a VR game to itch.io that a few ex-WIMO employees and I made for an internal game jam back in 2023: Unnatural Selection VR. Please click that link to check it out! 

UNSVR can best be described as a lighthearted, quest-based, underwater fish breeding and decoration game. You'll be taking on the role of an underwater field technician whose job is to breed new, hybrid fish for headquarters, decorate the freshwater lakebed with decorations, spruce up the underwater environment, and explore the world below the surface. 

Just put any two fish in a spawning cloud and BOOM, instant quirky hybrid fun!

In UNSVR you’ll unlock decorations, make hybrid fish mashups, and slowly uncover hidden decorations in the lake. The game features:

🐠 -- 10 hidden decorations scattered throughout the environment

🌈 -- Special clouds that give fish new skins

📻 -- A grab-and-go underwater radio in the entrance cave that plays music as you explore

🧠 -- A light quest system with a few secrets to uncover

🪸 -- The ability to decorate and personalize your lakebed with unlocked items

Ultimately, it’s a chill, underwater VR experience with a sense of humor and a lot of heart.

That's how the magic happens!

A little backstory on this release: After WIMO closed its doors, I received permission from the old CEO to use the game and the assets from the game for personal projects. At first, I was going to recreate the game, polish it a bit, and release a modified and simplified version of UNSVR, but that proved incredibly difficult. 

1- I didn't have the original Unreal files, only the game itself. 

2- While I could use programs like Fmodel and Blender to crack it open to try and recreate it, I'm being real: I'm more of a designer, audio engineer, and a team lead than a solo all-in-one design/art/code wizard. (I'm working on it!😅)

3- We used Unreal instead of Unity, and my Unreal experience is still growing.

Our team worked incredibly hard on it over a period of a week and used a lot of existing assets (even improving existing assets) from a mobile game project that never saw mass release. (You can read about the original incarnation of Unnatural Selection in my game portfolio.)

Collect decorations and make your environment your own!

Notes about playing UNSVR:

• The game is free and was built for Oculus Quest using a Link Cable to a PC.
• It might work with other headsets like Vive or Index, but no guarantees—if you try it, I’d love to hear how it goes!
• The game saves automatically any time you complete a quest or breed fish. So hopefully you won't have to worry about crashes or lost progress.
• Playtime is roughly 30–60 minutes, depending on how much exploring and decorating you do. Once you complete your environment, you could probably spend an hour or so just swimming around with the radio and looking at all your crazy fish collection.
• SHOW ME YOUR CRAZY FISH!  I'd love to see what kind of strange mutant fish you can create.  Feel free to tag me on social media if you make something special.

Just a few fun secrets to unlock within!

Why release it now? Well, because it’s fun, quirky, and a fantastic snapshot of what our team could do in just a week with some wild fish ideas and a shared love for underwater experimentation.

And mostly, because I think this little project deserves to be played. Let me know if you give it a shot—and if you feel you qualify to be the Employee of the Quarter at UNS. 

👉 Download Unnatural Selection VR here

Special thanks to the team: Ryan Chapman, Tom Purdue, Paul Constantine, Cory Haltinner, Kyle Marcum, and Sean Macintosh.

Happy Dueling!

Whhaaaaaat? Mythic Rank in Brawl Stars?

I had to make a quick Brawl Stars post today because it actually happened, and it's something that I said would never happen for me back in December of last year.

OMG . . . whaaaatttt?! Mythic!?!?!

Crazy, I'm trying to think of the difference, and I believe it has to be the new Ranked Pro Pass system. I certainly haven't gotten any better, and I definitely don't have a set team I play ranked matches with.  No, I'm just doing random battles in ranked and playing like I always do.

The win that sealed the deal . . . and hey . . . I was the star player even!

I suppose I have ranked up quite a few new heroes, and if there is a difference in my play, it's that. I've found myself playing a lot of Carl for gem battles, Jacky for hockey (a new mode they've allowed to be played in ranked matches) and Brawl Ball, Pearl and Cordelius in knockout, and Jessie and Barley in Heist. 

As for what's going on in Brawl Stars itself these days, we're about 10 days away from finishing up Month 1 of the new Ranked Pro Pass. I'm not quite sure what's going to happen when that rolls over? Also, we wrapped up the Dark Sands Season and have moved into the era of the Super Brawl Season. Super Brawl seems to be all about heroes and villains. I'm sure we shall see a whole slew of hero and villain skins happen here in the next few weeks.

I was tempted to buy Dark Sands. I kind of loved that mummy skin for Frank.

Of particular note to me, I've got quite a few heroes to level now that there are a ton of hyper charges that seem to be dropping like candy. I picked up Tick, Mico, and Sandy's hypercharges from random legendary Starr drops. It's just a never-ending gold drain trying to level these heroes. I suppose once I finish Tick, I'll probably move on to Mico. He's a pretty hip monkey man with a fun pouncing hit, which also seems to make him challenging to play.

Check, 1, 2, Check 1, 2.

So, I guess there you go. I feel lucky to have made it into Mythic, and I guess the new goal would be to see if I could push into Legendary, but . . . LOL . . . yeah, I don't think it's going to happen.

It seems so impossible to reach

Happy Dueling!