Crash Team Rumble

CTR is a 4v4 multiplayer game where teams compete to score more Wumpa than the other. Each character comes with their own unique abilities & movement options.

The characters all fall into 3 roles/classes:

- Scorers: Nimble characters who excel at gathering and depositing Wumpa fruit.

       - Blockers: Tanks who specialize in protecting their allies and blocking the enemy from scoring.

       - Boosters: Support characters that got extra benefits from boosting their team’s scores and from activitating buystations which could turn the tide of a game,

Crash Team Rumble was my first professional game! I worked primarily as a Hero/Movement designer, but I would help out with designing level actors & powers when necessary.

Aside from developing/testing characters, my duties also included regularly meeting to discuss balance changes to the meta and prepping tuning/bug fixes for patches.

As a Hero Designer

Since I entered the project mid-development, some of the characters I worked on already had a foundation for me to work off of.

By the end of the project, I was the point-of-contact dev for 6 of the 13 playable characters.

3 of these I took over the responsibilities for and 3 I created from scratch.

Characters that already had a foundation:

Crash Bandicoot (Scorer Role)

Crash! He’s the mascot everybody loves, which actually informed my design decisions quite a bit.

The majority of players would always gravitate to him so that he needed to be at least OK at performing all 3 roles even if he was the best at scoring. To accomplish this, I made sure that he had the tools he needed to fight effectivel in all scenarios even if he was sometimes at a disadvantage against the other roles.

I also knew that he would be the character most players started with, so I designed him to be easy to play, but with hidden depth as a reward for playes who stuck with him in the long term.  I did this by giving him hidden moves (like the spin-sweep combo) and by letting him cancel many moves into others, which let him really fly across the arena once you got good at chaining them.

Coco Bandicoot (Booster Role)

True to series’ form, Coco shares a number of abilities with her bro, but she differs in a few key ways that made her a powerful Booster.

Boosters need to be able to deposit relics to purchase buystations and to capture gems, which Coco’s wall was great at! It allowed her to essentially parry many enemy attacks without giving up her position, making her better at defense.

Also, her air-spiral was a powerful tool for mobility and combat which let her control the airspace around gem platforms effectively.

Dingodile (Blocker Role)

Dingo was designed to fit into the classic Tank archetype. He had the least amount of movement options in the game, but had tons of health and could slam his opponents around with ease.

Because he was so slow, he was at a disadvantage at getting to key areas, but once he got there he could dominate the field by charging up his tailwhip or by yanking enemies into a meaty combo with his vac-pull.

I also made it so that his regular vacuum did consistent DOT and applied a slow effect to enemies so that he could finish off low-health enemies if they waited too long to try to get away from him.

Characters Built by Me:

N. Tropy (Blocker Role)

Tropy was a character who had previously only been a boss, never playable, so I wanted to capture that feeling by giving her projecitile attacks that were reminiscent of platforms and bullet-hells.

While she didn’t have as much health as some of the other tanks, her low-gravity movement gave her a fair bit of mobility and her projectiles allowed her to control the area, forcing enemies to fight to her tempo.

She was one of the harder characters to use well, but also one of the strongest when played well.  

Ripper Roo (Blocker Role)

Ripper was the hardest character for me to design for because I really wanted to capture his chaotic, self-destructive nature which usually is not something players want from their character. 

I accomplished this goal by making his character centered around a risk vs. reward play style. He was capable of blasting across the map quicker than any other blockers and had numerous area-denial tools, but his movement was very fast/erratic, so you’d have a decent chance of knocking yourself of a cliff if you weren’t cautious.

I also gave him lots of high-damaging attacks, but very low health which resulted in him being a rather dangerous glass-canyon. However, clever players managed to mitigate these flaws somewhat by pairing him with the bounce crate power I designed which provided a quick getaway from your enemies when things got hairy, 

Spyro (Scorer Role)

Spyro was the final character I worked on that made it into the game and he presented a unique design challenge because he was the only guest character in the game.

I first started designing him by recreating all his main abilities from the original games and then re-worked them to be a hybridization of Crash/Spyro.

I also added in a few new touches like a DOT fire status effect and an aerial dash since he needed more combat options in the context of a multiplayer game.