Kung Fu Chaos

Kung Fu Chaos is a four-player brawler that takes place on a variety of fictional movie sets, where the famously loud and self-important director Shao Ting is attempting to make the most exciting and epic Kung Fu movie of them all. Players take on the role of an "actor" in Shao Ting's latest opus and proceed to fight their way through the various scenes, utilizing a variety of environmental props, special moves, combo attacks, and devastating taunts (like, "I laugh at you with bad breath!") to ultimately help Shao Ting achieve his vision.

One of the greatest challenges developers face when creating this style of game is not only to provide gamers with a fun challenge when playing against friends, but also to create a single-player experience with sufficient depth to keep gamers satisfied while playing solo. The Kung Fu Chaos team decided to invest a significant amount of time and effort developing the single-player mode of the game—the results of which not only make the game more fun for solo play, but also make the multiplayer elements even better.

In particular, we were very impressed with the techniques devised by the Kung Fu Chaos team to improve the balance of gameplay and responsiveness of the controls.

First, rather than falling back on the traditional Easy, Normal, and Hard skill-level choices, the development team sought to dynamically balance the game, so it would be both challenging and accessible to players of all skill levels. How cool is this: You don't have to choose your skill-level—the game figures it out, based on how you play!

To accomplish this, the game monitors the player's actions and adjusts the difficulty and skill-level of enemies, based on the player's performance. Many times throughout an individual scene, the difficulty level dynamically adjusts, changing attack and health attributes for A.I. characters, regulating attack and health attributes for the player, and adjusting the likelihood of the appearance of power-ups that can give the player an extra life.

As a result, both casual and expert gamers often beat levels "by the skin of their teeth," which makes the experience very fun and gratifying. The best part is, the dynamic adjustments are so integrated into the game experience, that it happens without you even knowing it (unless you read this article).

The other key to a great fighting game is crisp, responsive controls that provide the player with a direct link to their on-screen persona. The problem is, players tend to press buttons at completely different rates, depending on their experience with fighting games. For developers, animating and registering button presses is often based on rigid timing that requires players to learn this timing, which could be too slow for some and too fast for others. But, this is another area in which Kung Fu Chaos really shines; we always felt like we were in total control of our character, no matter who played the game.

The Kung Fu Chaos team made this possible by developing an animation system that blends moves together, so that the faster you press the buttons, the faster your character responds. This means, more casual gamers can execute the same combos with relatively slow button presses, but expert gamers still feel quick responsiveness that promotes a seamless connection with their character.

Kung Fu Chaos stands out as a true next-generation game by reacting intelligently to player abilities to create a consistently fun gameplay experience. With its unique approaches to major hurdles in fight game design, Kung Fu Chaos is all the more fun for Xbox gamers … like us.

-Xbox.com