US Gamer recently had the opportunity to get with Iron Galaxy’s CEO Dave Lang and discuss the creation process of Killer Instinct: Season 2’s characters, the collaborative effort between Iron Galaxy and Microsoft, and the future of the franchise. I’ve provided a portion of the interview for you all here, so be sure and visit USGamer.net to read it in it’s entirety!

Hisako

“When you get down to Hisako, what void in the pantheon of fighting games has Killer Instinct not touched yet? Okay, well we don’t have a counter-hit player; would Hisako be interesting in that mold? Then we try to kick around design ideas in the collective group. Once we’re convinced that this is an interesting character who fills a hole in the KI creative space, that when we start working on it. That’s where a lot of the implementation details come to life. We try to do everything different all the time and it pushes us to do things like Hisako’s movement.”

Omen

“If you look back at Season One, Shadow Jago was a bonus character,” Lang recounts. “That’s why he started off as a close relative to Jago in terms of moveset and look. We had the idea of leaving Shadow Jago the way he is and doing another version of the character; just keep pushing him in the direction that Adam and Double Helix started going down. Omen became our bonus character for Season Two.”

Kan-Ra

“Adam and Microsoft knew we wanted this trap grappler character. In the first concept, it was a net you could shoot out and set traps with. That wasn’t super interesting. We kept spitballing ideas about how this trap grappler would function mechanically. ‘What if there was a mummy with bandages?’ ‘What if it’s not a mummy, maybe a necromancer?’ We zeroed in on that from the mechanical side. We start with mechanics and come up with cool fiction ways to justify those mechanics, building the world and character around that core.”

ARIA

“Aria’s a boss character. If you look at Galactus in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, he’s not a character in one sense, but he is. He’s this big, broken thing at the end of the game and we want our bosses to be like that. We want a boss to be really special and unique, but still be tournament-viable. We want to walk right up to being broken and take a step back. TJ Combo and Saberwulf are cool, but they’re not bosses. We want Aria to feel like this uber-powerful character. We’ve had varying degrees of success so far.”

Cinder

“Cinder is definitely going to be a very aerial character. If you’re someone who likes characters that get up in the air, like Sadira for example, I think you’ll like Cinder a lot. He has a lot he can do when he gets airborne. Very offensive, very aggressive playstyle. The character is angry and we want that to come through in the mechanics and the gameplay.”

The Future

“We don’t even know if there’s going to be more Killer Instinct in the future,” he says, with a single tear falling down his face. “We hope there is, we love working on it, but we don’t know for sure. Microsoft will figure that out and let us know. I can answer the question as a hypothetical. I’d want to round out the cast. Some people really want Eyedol, some people really want Tusk. We want to make all those fans happy. Personally, what more exciting to me is now we’re getting to add things to this amazing franchise. If 50 years from now someone does Killer Instinct 4, our stamp will still be on it. I want to do more original characters. There’s still untapped potential in the base that’s been laid.”

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