Inspiration: Rocksteady

Rocksteady are a fantastic UK based game studio, best known for their recent work with the Batman franchise. I love the strength of their art direction, and the weightiness of their animation. Helped by the Havok physics built into the Unreal Engine, their environments and characters work excellently to make their games have a real physicality to them. Impacts and movements feel heavy, and the characters feel very solid. I would love to be able to make the characters in Echoes have this same feeling of physicality to them.

The studio began in 2004, to a relatively quiet start. Their first game, Urban Chaos: Riot Response met with reasonable critical success, but did not propel the studio into the limelight. With the release of Batman: Arkham Asylum in 2009, Rocksteady rocketed into centre stage and became a well respected developer on a global scale.

Always, their design on the Arkham games has been focussed on making the environments and characters come alive. One of the ways they achieve this so effectively is by having their characters interact fluidly with the environment. Implementing this into our own game project would help sell our characters, but it requires a lot of technically challenging work in the engine, and organisation between the engine team and the animators to correctly set up these motions.