Crazy Arena Chaos: FromPrototype to Industry Talks

In Dev Pods any member who can do a game jam fidelity prototype can choose to lead. Many first-time project leads decide to aim for something modest at first, as way to get practice with the team leadership side and planning around the uniquely freeform collaboration processes use in our community. Crazy Arena Chaos was a big exception to this. It’s an unusually ambitious and impressive game for a new lead. It was developed in 5 months using Unreal with the help of over 20 collaborators.

An important part of how such a polished game turned out so well was the substantial experience the lead, Christian Gabbianelli, accumulated across other Dev Pods teams before he decided to lead a game of his own. He’d contributed to 9 released games, a few made with Unity, but most used Unreal 5. He took on a mix of tasks, which is invaluable practice since leading involves filling in gaps, though he had a clear focus across his credits on choosing tasks related to enemy behavior or procedural generation.

Christian found out about Dev Pods from his day job in educational software. He asked his manager at MIT, Erik Verlage, for advice on how to improve at game development. Erik recommended Dev Pods based on his own experiences as a member and 4-time project lead 2016-2019, where his experiences were helpful for his pivot from physics research into using game engines to create real-time science simulations.

Christian designed Crazy Arena Chaos to hone and show off his understanding of the technical aspects of real-time combat gameplay. He closely studied games - including Kingdom Hearts and Ratchet & Clank - to take notes about how player combos, animations, and enemy behaviors fit together to feel great.

Because Christian’s goal with Crazy Arena Chaos was to improve his professional positioning, he knew simply making a game wasn’t enough. Though his teammates in Dev Pods are scattered around the world (Dev Pods is completely online!), Christian lives near Boston where he’s able to give talks at in-person industry events - Boston Indies Lightning Talks and Boston GameDev Week MiniCon - to demonstrate he can think and speak effectively about his game development work.

His first presentation focused mainly on technical aspects. During Q&A, a gameplay engineer with 10 years of industry experience had an audible “wow” response (25 seconds in below!) to hearing the game he just saw the presentation about was made in only 5 months:

For Christian’s next version of the talk he doubled down on discussing the game’s combat design. Within a days of the video going public it became one of the most watched talks in years on the Boston Game Dev channel. Here’s the full presentation:

Christian also went out of his way to demo Crazy Arena Chaos at meetups, where people from the Boston game industry tried the game and offered thoughts (playing in the nearby photo is Joe Fielder - Narrative Design on Outer Worlds 2, writer for BioShock Infinite and Deathloop). Input he gathered at those events fed directly into his plans for the next game he’s prototyped to lead in Dev Pods, which he’ll be officially opening up to teammates just 1 month after the release of the Crazy Arena Chaos.

At the time of this writing he’s in final preparations to start leading Shin and the Guardians of Spirits. He’ll be co-leading this game with Ben Owens, a Dev Pods member who contributed significantly to the UI in Crazy Arena Chaos. Ben found that having Crazy Arena Chaos in his portfolio has already helped him reach the interview stage for Unreal UI jobs.

Although this game will be building on combat systems Christian developed for Crazy Arena Chaos, to fill out his and Ben’s portfolio in new ways they’ll be focusing on boss fights, ranged combat support and a new fantasy setting.