MORTAL KOMBAT 11
My Position
After assisting on some design work on Injustice 2’s Legendary Edition, I took on designing more for Mortal Kombat 11—including some new features that I pitched and helping with the revised tutorial mode.
Additionally, I continued to take on more responsibility in my role as a gameplay programmer as I was promoted from Associate Software Engineer to Software Engineer.
Tutorial Mode
After expanding on our tutorial mode for Injustice 2’s Legendary Edition, we had already found what we wanted to teach and how we wanted to relay the information. So for Mortal Kombat 11’s tutorial mode, our focus was on streamlining existing tools for players while also finding new ways to empower players with various forms of feedback. Additionally from the engineering/production side, we already knew the format of the mode, so I built a new mode architecture from scratch. This would give us a flexible and clean foundation to build upon for several games to come.
When the game launched, our new tutorial mode had an incredible reception from players and press.
“Mortal Kombat 11‘s tutorials have taught me so much. A lot of it is stuff I should have learned sooner, as a fighting game fan, but the information has never been presented so compellingly.”
— Kotaku
Game Developers Conference 2020
For GDC 2020 I pitched, and was approved for, a talk about how we designed our tutorials to empower players through various forms of feedback and tools. Unfortunately due to COVID-19, the conference was cancelled. Despite the cancellation, I delivered the talk virtually and it can now be viewed on the GDC Vault and YouTube.
Mastering Kombat: Designing Mortal Kombat 11’s Empowering Tutorial Mode
Fighting games are some of the most difficult game to play, but they often don’t empower players with the tools or structure to digest their complexity. Over the course of Injustice 2 and Mortal Kombat 11, NetherRealm Studios has revamped its tutorials from the ground up. This talk will cover how NetherRealm created a foundation to better onboard players, increase player engagement, and build sustainably for future projects, all through a flexible roadmap for diverse player types, and teaching content via various visual and auditory methods.
Takeaway
Attendees will learn about how NetherRealm Studios leveraged its insight into player segments to build tutorial lessons that pace out the content through various forms of feedback, and created a flexible structure to equip players with the knowledge they desire for their style of play. Though the content of this talk will be delivered through a fighting game, our approach will be accessible to anyone interested in teaching mechanics to a wide playerbase of varying skill levels.
Intended Audience
This talk is intended for people interested in teaching complex mechanics and designing engaging tutorials for diverse player segments. No prior knowledge of fighting games or experience designing tutorials is necessary.
Watch the talk now on YouTube!
Kombat Breakdown +
Kombat Kard 2.0
The Kombat Breakdown and Kombat Kard 2.0 were part of a pitch I created to tell better player stories. The idea was that by creating in-game symbols for events that happen throughout the match, we could craft a match story (Kombat Breakdown). That match story could then accumulate in the Kombat Kard to tell a better story about the player’s career as a whole—capturing their style and personality in one spot. This would also get the Kombat Kard out of the spreadsheet format that it was in for Mortal Kombat X.
The Kombat Breakdown is intended to tell the story of the match in just one screen, in three sections.
Match Performance is a general indicator to show how close the match was by comparing how much damage each player dealt vs how much damage was taken.
The Attack Breakdown is shown as a graph and percentages in order to represent every possible damage category in the game and their weights. Here is where you can see how a player was able to deal their damage and also see how they took their damage.
Finally the Top Medallions section are events that happened throughout the match such as punishes, tiers of combos, throws, reversals, and more. These icons also show up in the HUD when the events occur in order to correlate the moment-to-moment story with the overall match story. Descriptions, along with the icons, are also available in the Kombat Kard if a player needs to brush up on them.
For an in-depth look at this feature, please read my blog post about it.
The design intention of the Kombat Kard was always to be a snapshot of a player’s career with some light customization. But as you can see in the Mortal Kombat X screenshot below, it was kept in a spreadsheet-like format where the only customization was the player module in the upper left. For Mortal Kombat 11, we wanted more images, including large portraits of the characters a player uses the most. It’s more pleasing to look at and it feels more custom and personal to the individual player.
We also pared back the stats to the most essential while adding more sections to the Kombat Kard such as the following:
Online Character History is where a player can see their online matchups per character. This is also where the Kombat Breakdowns accumulate so a player can see how they perform as and against each character.
Match Replays, which not only serves as a match history, but also a place to download and rewatch matches.
Medallions is where you can view your career match events that are also highlighted in the Kombat Breakdown screen.
And more!
A player’s Kombat Kard can be viewed by anyone that they have matched with and also in the leaderboards so it’s important that it encapsulates that player.
Kombat Kard 2.0 in Mortal Kombat 11
Kombat Kard in Mortal Kombat X
Photo Mode
Later in the development of Mortal Kombat 11, our character team decided that our character viewer tool wasn’t ideal for reviewing meshes because the in-engine lighting had diverged so much. So they requested that a character viewer be built in-game for debug purposes.
I was assigned this task, but when I scoped out the work, I realized that taking this feature to be retail-ready would mostly just require some small UI art. After talking with our producers, we decided it would be a great idea to add a photo mode—especially because of the customization-based focus of MK11.
Kustomize UI Screens
The most UI-heavy area of the game is the Kustomize area where you can setup character loadouts and customize their gear, skins, abilities, and AI behavior. Except for the loadout selection screen, I was in charge of programming all the UI in the Kustomize area and helping script some camera constraints for the inspect cinemas. See the video below for a full walkthrough.
Fatality System
For Mortal Kombat 11 I refactored and built the gameplay side of the fatality system. This meant that I was in charge of implementing the new design and choreography which includes the UI treatment, world slow down effect that happens on final hits, and blending the victim from any possible state into their dizzy state. I also needed to build a pathway to load the proper dismemberment packages from the disk and help artists debug cinema issues that would come up from time to time.
Leaderboards
The leaderboards in Mortal Kombat 11 are fairly straight forward, but there’s a lot of different variations for each mode throughout the game. I created a polymorphic code structure to handle every case and grey boxed the UI Flash screen to handle each iteration as well. On the code side I was required to query our servers with the correct leaderboard slug, asynchronously download the data, and fill out the screen with proper sorting when the download completed.
