Posted by Tony Huynh.
Punch-Out “Buttonless Mini-Games” Prototyping
Here is the original prototype for the Buttonless mini-games that shipped in God of War Ascension. I worked on this concept along with Animator Michael Biancalana.
Note: This is an early prototype that happened as we were wrapping up God of War 3 so the animations and camera are obviously not polished. Also ignore the cone on top of Kratos’ head. 
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Punchout “Buttonless Mini-Games” Goals
The goals for this new feature were twofold:
1: Maintain a cinematic experience by reducing the need of intrusive button prompts.
In this video of the original prototype the player and enemy have a lot more options than what we eventually shipped with.
The player has the following offensive attacks, light attack (fast/low damage); heavy attack (slow/high damage) and Block Breaker. Defensively the player has evades, block and counter.
The enemy could use light attacks which could be blocked or heavy attacks that were unblockable (but can be parried). The enemy would also occasionally counter the player to promote a feeling of a back and forth struggle.
The challenge here was to make the attacks read well and for the player to be able to discern the correct paper/rock/scissor response to the enemy’s actions. I believe we were successful in our prototype, but ultimately we shipped a streamlined version of what we prototyped for readability as well as to save on animation costs.
2: Get the camera close to show off how good our character models look
I always felt that It has been a shame that the gameplay camera in God of War is typically so wide that the crazy detail our artists put into characters is missed. Whenever I moved the camera close to our characters there was just so much detail that was not being shown that it mandated that we keep the camera tight for this mode.
I hope you found this interesting and enjoyed the prototype video and I’ll be posting some more prototyping I did for the bosses, AI cast as well as player and cooperative mode mechanics at some future date.
