Speed Brawl

Speed Brawl was a fast, side-scrolling combat game set in an alternate-history Victorian London, and the studio's first PC and console title. It was a major step up in production value, with a graphic-novel art style at a much higher fidelity than anything we'd shipped before. I ran production over three years: planning sprints, scaling the team up and down as the project demanded, and managing external QA and porting partners.

The Toon Boom pipeline

This is where we started building a hybrid animation pipeline with Toon Boom. Most 2D animation in games is either sprite sheets or puppetry, and both have real downsides. Toon Boom was developing a game plugin that combined sprite sheets, puppets, and deformations, but it lacked Unity expertise and the plugin was rough. I rewrote it to integrate properly with Unity and run at high performance, with custom shaders and full use of the renderer. We contributed the work back and became the dev team for the plugin over the following years. It went on to power the visuals in Convergence.

The systems underneath

• A custom console abstraction layer covering multiplayer, profiles, and saves, which our porting partners called some of the best-architected code they'd seen for a game like ours.
• A custom network protocol with eventually-consistent state sync and full-world prediction, including enemy AI and physics, to hide latency under highly kinetic gameplay. It was designed to bolt onto gameplay that already existed, which forced real discipline around flexibility.
• Extensive optimization so the game ran smoothly across three consoles (including Switch), PC, and Android.

Why it mattered

This was the system work that proved a small studio could ship best-in-class real-time multiplayer. It became a reusable backbone, which is exactly the kind of leverage I look for: solve a hard problem once, well, and enable the whole team build on it. That same protocol went on to power Convergence.