Marvel Battlegrounds:
Disney Infinity 3.0
Multiplayer Arena Brawler
I was Acting Art Director and the sole Concept Artist on Marvel Battlegrounds; a play set for Disney Infinity 3.0. Tasked by Marvel and Disney while at United Front Games, I collaborated with game design, and lead a relatively small team of artists to create environment art and visual effects transforming the sandbox Toys to Life title to support an up to 4 player Arena Brawler. Inspired by Capcom’s Power Stone titles, and leveraging the vast universe of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we created destructible, “always in motion” combat levels in iconic locales along the path of a story campaign.
“Lunar Shield Base”
The First Level + Discovering The Game
Disney Infinity “Destruction”
Disney Infinity had it’s own Art Direction for all of it’s adventure play sets and campaigns. However, that camera and progression differed from Marvel Battlegrounds, it had to be rethought and further developed as we wanted more detail and destruction in our game. The relationship between what was a “Toy” and what was “Real” had to be reconsidered. Tapping into Gunpla and how Toys were constructed inspired how objects came apart. This allowed more action to happen without it being viscerally violent.
Story In “The Bar Brawl”
The idea being “The Bar Brawl” served as our Pillar to explain how fights started small, but things would escalate and snowball, and each event would create player stories in a small arena. Akin to fights in old school Jackie Chan or Indiana Jones fights where one thing would lead to another in a fun and jovial way. Every decision in gameplay and art would support this idea/approach.
Multi Stage Escalation
I tried to incorporate one overarching idea that would be larger than life, echoing the grand battles that happens in Avengers stories. It would be divided into smaller section; each one telling a smaller subset of the story, with the last one concluding last leg of the journey. Each section would incorporate a type of gameplay novelty such as an electrified floor, or tracking laser from the eyes of a Wakandan statue, or a strafing spaceship amongst a junk field.
“I worked closely with Stuart on a couple productions during our time at United Front Games. Most notably, his efforts on Disney Infinity helped improve the quality of the game and he pitched ideas that pushed the project forward. He went above and beyond his concept artist position and provided clear art direction when there was no direct art director on the project. Simply put, he provided the game with a cohesive art direction, and made the game play better.
He interfaced with many different disciplines and is quite knowledgeable in many game genres and styles. This experience allows him to bring good ideas to the table and more importantly, communicate them well to the rest of the team. Those contributions were felt by all the wide variety of the impressive library of AAA game titles and genres he has worked on.
Stuart would be a welcome addition to any production.”
Jason Cheng
Lead Environment Artist at Next Level Games
(Worked together at United Front Games)