Blood & Glory

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Timeline: 2011

Platform: Mobile (iOS and Android)

The Game:  an action game similar to the Infinity Blade series where the player competes in gladiator tournaments in ancient Rome. The game is made up of a number of tournaments where the player fights other gladiators in one-on-one duels. The player has to block, dodge and parry the attacks before attacking when the enemy is off balance. This is done by swiping left and right across the screen. Combos can be used for extra damage. A special attack meter is filled by blocks, dodges and attacks. When full a powerful special attack can be unleashed.

My Contributions

A landmark mobile game in 2011, this "finger-slashing" fighting title was launched alongside the then-ground-breaking iPad 2.  As Apple hit the market with a device with significantly better GPU and graphical robustness when compared to the previous iPad 1 and iPhone 4, my team was launching this game with a level of graphical fidelity and production values with very few equivalents among other free-to-play offerings. To a point stores in the US were using Blood & Glory as a "tech demo" to sell iPad 2s.

The core mechanics and the graphical bar was heavily inspired by Infinity Blade, but the systems mechanics and balancing were designed to be a free-to-play economy.

Blood & Glory was downloaded by millions of people and made enough revenue to reach #2 in the Top Downloads chart and #3 in the then-available Top Grossing chart of the Apple App Store. It was also the biggest mobile game production among Brazilian studios up to that point. The team size, scope and revenue of the project was an outlier in an industry made of tiny studios and small-scale projects (with few exceptions, like Taikodon).

To this day, "old-guard" Brazilian game developers sometimes still remember when Blood & Glory happened.

Design & UXProduct & ProductionEngineering
  • Wireframing for UI/UX design;
  • Management of intense UI/UX iterations with stakeholders.
  • I led a team of up to 25 as producer and product lead to make this game a reality in about 8 months;
  • Team and project management;
  • Stakeholder management, working in Brazil and reporting to an HQ in San Francisco.

The game is developed in Unity 3D and C#, and the first title I every worked where the concept of dynamic Asset Bundles was implemented to rapidly  add content to an iOS app without lengthy app update cycles.

This would become standard in the industry later, but back in 2011 the tech in Unity was janky and limited.

Media

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