Modern Combat: Rebel Guns

Rebel Guns is an arcade twin stick shooter spin off derived from Gameloft’s Modern Combat IP.

The game went through multiple iterations starting with a hybrid action strategy game and eventually transformed into a fairly straightforward bullet hell/twin stick shooter with an emphasis on different character builds that have access to diverse abilities and weapons.

I was the owner of the majority of combat features, including, design of enemy archetypes and AI behaviours, the various player abilities, item and weapon systems and more. You can view some examples of the features I worked on bellow.

Missile Strike Ability

This is one example of the many abilities I designed for the different playable characters. This particular ability deploys a barrage of damaging projectiles in a radius around the player and was originally designed for one of the playable characters but was ultimately repurposed as a mech ability instead.

The goal was to provide a crowd control ability that can be used in situations where the player is surrounded by hostiles with the main trade off being that that the player would become stationary for a short time at the point the ability was triggered.

As with all abilities in the game it was managed by a short cooldown before it could be triggered again.

Combat Mechs

Apart from the core playable character roster the team also decided to include the ability to deploy Mech vehicles that could be summoned on demand.

They came in different classes, which determined their base stats strengths, weaknesses, specialised abilities and weapon loadout.

The main goals with Mechs were to:

  • Have different Mechs with clear trade offs that lean into players being able to customise their play style.

  • Provide an “ultimate ability” that will allow players to overcome the odds when used strategically.

They were unlocked in dedicated missions containing Mechs and once collected, the Mechs would go into the Player's Inventory, from where they could equipped and upgraded with Currencies and Upgrade materials with each new upgrade level increasing their core stats and any ability related cool-downs.

Once equipped in the Loadout, they were hence available to be deployed on-demand, via a HUD button, during a mission after an initial time delay and only once per mission.