Train2Game interview: UFC Undisputed 3 interview with THQ Senior GameDesigner Wes Bunn

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Part 1

Train2Game recently sat down for a chat with THQ

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s UFC Undisputed 3 Senior Game Designer WesBunn at a preview event in London. In an in depth interview with The Train2Game Blog, Bunndiscussed developing UFC Undisputed 3, Game Design, QA Testing,getting into the industry and much more.In the first part of this two part interview with The Train2Game Blog, the THQ Senior Game Designerdiscusses the game design process for UFC Undisputed 3. Read it right here on The Train2Game Blog,or on the Train2Game Scribd page. As usual, leave your comments here on The Train2Game Blog,or on the Train2Game forum.Part two of The Train2Game Blog interview with Wes Bunn will be published soon.

First of all, tell us what your role as Senior Game Designer for UFC Undisputed 3 involves?

Pretty much every area of the game from combat to modes to everything! And I’ve been on the

franchise since 2006;

I was the original designer on the project so I’ve been working on this game for

the past six years.

How did you get started with the first project, and how have you keep UFC Undisputed titlesfresh?

It’s actually pretty crazy to see the evolution of the past three games. Back in 2006 when I first

started there was no game, it was all on paper, all theories about how the game would work. To see

where it is now, it’s come a

long way and UFC Undisputed 3 is really what I say is five years of development, not just the last two years t

hat we’ve been working on it. Because we’ve

always beentrying to improve each year and I think that

this year when people play it they’ll feel a difference andsee it’s by far the best one.

So when you’re designing the game, how difficult is it to create a balance between all the fightingstyles, making sure one isn’t overly powered or another isn’t overly weak?

It’s definitely a tightrope that you have to walk, balancing the strikers versus the grapplers. Typically,

the guys who are very dominant in their striking skills are lacking in other areas, or are not aseffective in other areas. Chuck Liddell

is a good example, he’s a great striker, but off his back he’s not

very good, so my counter to that would be a good wrestler who can try to take him down and put

him on his back and see what he can do. It’s been challenging to get the balance in there, but we’ve

been able accomplish that I think, in this game

specifically with the additions that we’ve made to the

stats and working with the UFC matchmaker Joe Silva, I think players will see the fighters arebalanced pretty well.

Pride fighters feature in UFC Undisputed 3, was them and their different rules like developing awhole new game in addition to UFC Undisputed 3?

Yeah, we always joked that it’s a game within a game because when you jump into pride it’s acompletely different experience because you’re playing with different commentaries, different rules,

different fighters, a different environment... The different moves were probably the most

challenging, because getting the soccer kick in there, and the foot stomp, because it isn’t somethingwe’ve had to do in the past.

Tell us about the new community created content sharing options for UFC Undisputed 3.

Yeah, actually that’s a new feature this year, we have this content sharing thing. Not only is it

created fighters you can upload a

nd download, but it’s also your created logos, so if you have any

kind of tattoos you can create those and post those online, people can download and rate those, as

well as our highlight reels, that’s a new feature. So you can upload and download those as

well.

UFC Undisputed 3 has moved the series away from a yearly release cycle. How has that changeddevelopment and why was that decision made?

The switch in the development time just gave us more time to polish and tune the game as well asintroduce new

features and systems. It’s something that I think you’ll see in the product when youplay, the polish that we were able to get done and the tuning, as it’s really substantial compared tothe previous titles. I think moving forward that’s going to be the plan, we’ll do the two year cycle

because it gives us more time to what we want to do.

Last year saw the release of UFC Fitness for Kinect, have you thought about somehowimplementing Kinect controls into UFC Undisputed 3?

Maybe in the future we could do it for the training. I don’t know how you’d actually do it from

character to character with Kinect because then it would just be grappling an invisible person on thefloor!

Or multiplayer with a friend!

In that case I’d rather go out there and grapples for real rather do something with an invisible person

or somebody for the game! But that might be something for the future, maybe for hitting mitts orsomething with Kinect, potentially.

How much input into UFC Undisputed 3 did you have from UFC fighters themselves?

We get a lot of “suggestions” I’ll say from fighters about their stats and move sets. I know“Rampage” Jac

kson has been asking for a head kick three games! I told him if he does a head kick in

a fight then I’ll give him one in the game, but most the time people are pretty happy when they see

their character in the game. Most of them are just blown away that th