Avengers In The Field
Disney Infinity Custom Level
This was a minigame I made in Disney Infinity 3.0 as part of a Captain America: Civil War themed community contest. In it, you have to protect your base from oncoming enemies while also completing bonus tasks that pop up from time to time in order to get bonus points.
You can watch a gameplay montage of this minigame below. Make sure to watch it all the way through the end to hear the Avengers theme which I programmed in as the end-of-game fanfare using the in-game music tools. I was very proud of putting time into that little detail.
Past the video is a write-up of my production process.
Background
Disney Interactive used to hold regular community contests for Disney Infinity 3.0 where players could use the game's content creation tools to make a level that matched a given theme and compete to have their levels featured prominently within the game. Due to some glitches specific to non-American versions of the game I couldn't actually enter these contests for a while, but still toyed around with the tools to get familiar with them.
Eventually I found myself with a fixed game and some spare time so I decided to make a serious entry into one of these contests. The theme was 'Captain America: Civil War' so I set out to make a level based on the movie. Mid-way though my work, production on the Infinity franchise was outright cancelled, along with all community contests. Oof. This was a big blow because I absolutely loved this series, but I decided to just stick to the deadline anyway because I'd already done so much work.
Concept
My initial concept was to make a sort of 'Story So Far' that introduced you to all of the 'Team Cap' heroes in Civil War through themed minigames. I started making a shooting gallery for Hawkeye, but it was quickly evident that a whole compilation of games would be too much work for the small timeframe of these contests (about a month). I decided I would need to focus on one game to ensure it was of the highest quality, and so I picked the idea that would be most impressive as a stand-alone product.
My minigame would be based on a scene from the movie that was released online (the film wasn't in cinemas yet) where Captain America's Avengers team attempts to stop Crossbones and his mercenaries from releasing a bioweapon in Lagos. There's a small fight outside of a building where the team combine their powers to take out some mercenaries, and then Scarlet Witch uses her telekinesis to propel Cap up to a high floor of the building. You can watch this clip below.
This minigame was going to be a Scarlet Witch themed one, as her telekinesis was a key part of the scene and I thought I could have some fun mechanics based on throwing things around. Scarlet Witch isn't actually playable in the game but you can pick up and throw characters and enemies, so you could still re-enact the scene that way.