Matthew Ein: Skylanders: Trap Team

Skylanders is a "toys to life" video game series published by Activision. The core gameplay mechanic involves placing toy characters on the “Portal of Power” accessory (a device that reads the character’s tags through NFC) and playing as that toy character in game. The gameplay is similar to other action role playing games like diablo but it requires a much lower level of execution.

Skylanders: Trap Team was the fourth installment in the Skylanders franchise and my first AAA game post graduate school. My role as a character gameplay designer was to implement playable character powers with a proprietary scripting language. I worked on five trap master and six mini skylanders (each with three abilities and a branching upgrade tree). My work required me to work closely with animators, visual effect artists, sound effect artists, and gameplay programmers.

Despite being the most junior member of the team I strove to create the most fun, powerful, cohesive, and complex characters in the game. I created three of the top eight selling characters including the two most popular characters outside of the initial starter pack characters. Our studiohead also took notice of my work when he wrote, the following in an interview, "Thank you. We had a new designer this year, and he wanted to prove to us how great he was, and he built this one, and it has got so many powers it was almost like stop putting all these powers in him. But, I like this guy a lot [the rather bulky looking Lion, Wildfire]. He's definitely for if you like 'rawr' a lot; he's the high end of that." Additionally, I gave a talk about my character work with the character design team at the 2015 Activision Summit at GDC.

Wildfire is a fire type Skylanders that pulls in enemies with fire chains before destroying them with devastating shield and flame attacks.

Ka-Boom is a ranged fire Skylander that wields a cannon. He can blast enemies from afar or use his cannon jump to quickly get in the middle of the battle.

Gusto is an air type Skylander that excels at mid-range combat with boomerang attacks. Gusto can also swallow enemies and spit them out as projectiles.