Bringing brawling to life in Midnight Fight Express

blog.playstation.com:

Midnight Fight Express is a high-intensity 3D brawler that brings the player back to the heyday of ‘80s action cinema and gaming. The title is developed mostly by one man, Jacob Dzwinel, and is published by Humble Games for release on PS4 August 23. To help bring the game’s dynamic battles to a new level, Dzwinel enlisted the help of Kratos’s stuntman himself, Eric Jacobus, who brought together an action team at his Las Vegas-based SuperAlloy Interactive studio to design and perform motion capture for the game’s unique combat engine.

Dzwinel’s love of ‘80s entertainment inspired him to design combat with exciting counter-attacks, a variety of weapons, brutal (and sometimes funny) finishers, and a unique multi-direction combat system. What makes this game truly unique, though, was how Dzwinel and Jacobus collaborated to bring the action style to life.

Long before he came on board MFE, Jacobus had been watching the game’s progress through a series of posts made by Dzwinel showing the core loop of the gameplay engine. Jacobus told his business partner and executive producer Zac Swartout, “We gotta work on this game. Let’s contact this guy.” The problem was, Dzwinel, a lone developer in Poland, seemed to be almost unreachable, so Jacobus gave up the hunt. But then one day, Humble Games contacted Jacobus asking if he’d be interested in doing motion capture on a game they were publishing. When he found out it was Midnight Fight Express, Jacobus jumped at the opportunity.

After an introductory call, Jacobus and Dzwinel decided on a four-day mocap shoot during which the team would pull off a planned 300 shots including combos, parries, finishers, environmental attacks, and enemy moves. When shoot day began, Jacobus and Dzwinel