Gabriel Wozniak

Frat Fighter (University of Illinois 2025)

Overview

Frat Figher is a game I helped developed in 16 weeks as part of the "Introduction to Game Management" class at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (GSD 405). As part of this class, we learned and applied a top-down management process for producing a game from a set of high-level design specifications. The lecturer for the course was Dan Cermak, who lead the team that made Saints Row 3.

If you want to try it out, check out the Frat Fighter itch.io page.

Credits

The team that made Frat Fighter was called Team Brian. Really grateful to have been part of this group:

  • Brian Ngeunjuntr - Programming
  • Gio Zavalza - Programming
  • Tommy Liu - Programming
  • Jamison Maloney - Production
  • Alex O'Connel - Design and production
  • Neel Donthamsetti - 2D art
  • Gabe Wozniak - Programming, production, 2D art, sound

This game couldn't have existed without the designers who first came up with the genius idea to make a beat-em-up centered around college frat culture in an Ancient Greece setting:

  • Kamil Czamik
  • Alex O'Connell
  • Sulabh Patel
  • Sebastian Shenny
  • Jacob Sobel

I'd like to thank the SUI/DIO (soo-dee-oh) which was another group in the GSD 405 class that supported the project and the team:

  • Sui-Lin Tam
  • Elijah Miller
  • Ariana Tarafdar
  • Gio Zavalza
  • Jimmy Zhang

Premade Unity assets:

Fonts:

Music:

  • Splash Screen Music: Himiko Kikuchi - LOOK YOUR BACK!
  • End Credits Music: Double Exposure - Everyman
  • Main Menu Theme: Gabriel Wozniak - Echoes of the Past
  • Battle Theme: Gabriel Wozniak - The Rites of Eternal Glory

Finally a special thanks to Dan Cermak!

Management Processes

Primarily we used schedules, feature and asset lists (tools for decomposing high-level designs into actionable tasks), and Trello for managing the project.

Schedules and decomposition tools are seriously the most critical pieces of process that will benefit even the most casual of student projects (including individual ones) because it forces somebody to sit down and think about how long it will take to do everything. This makes them realize that doing everything is not even remotely possible. The realization that you cannot implement everything forces you to consider opportunity costs and make difficult decisions about what your true priorities are. For example everyone would love to have both feature A and B, but if having feature A meant not having feature B, is it still worth making feature A? Everything is a tradeoff.

And combine this with the other effect that as a project nears the deadline, the schedule becomes more accurate since there is less tasks that can be done in the remaining time. This property is what makes regular re-evaluation of schedule a prime insurance against the most common problem of student projects which is to spread work too thin and finish nothing. Because you can catch the turning point when it becomes important to start focusing on less before it's too late and there's no way to finish the project on time.

Programming

We started with Osarion's beat-em-template which is a well engineered piece of OO software. I feel like I learned a lot just by working with his code. The template implemented the combat system, sprites and different animations for different player inputs, enemy AI, and even a wave system. This saved us an enormous amount of time and allowed us to focus on elements which sets our game apart from other beat-em-ups. This includes:

  • Lots of custom, dynamic UI (HUD, Death Screen, Win Screen, Splash Screen, Title Screen, Perk Buy Menu, Pause Menu)
  • Zyn power-up effects (modifying and integrating Gheedu's aura asset, time-freeze, additional player state logic)
  • Perk Buy menu (shop logic, coexisting peacefully with pause menu, SP system, default stats, adjusting stats mid-game)
  • Individual Perks (Lightweight - extra jump height, Chicken and Rice - big sprite and damage up, Spartan Resolve - health bonus, Hazing Master - health on kill)
  • Control Adjustment (changing bindings, changing inputs to avoid moves which were not implemented by us)
  • Enemy Variants (pledge, Geed Destroyer and his custom moves, boss logic)
  • Camera modification (restrict to horizontal motion, parallax)
  • Tweaking level (waves, vase position, attack damage balance, difficulty balancing)

Music

I made 2 out of the 4 songs in the game: "The Rites of Eternal Glory", which is the main battle theme, and "Echoes of the Past" which is a simple, Kingdom Hearts inspired title screen theme. Both were done in FL Studio.

Gabriel Wozniak

The Rites of Eternal Glory

Gabriel Wozniak

Echoes of the Past

Character Art

The protagonist of our game is Chaddeus. He is so named because he is the coolest person in Ancient Greece. You can see Chaddeus' evolution below: Neel came up with this original sprite in a soulful green and red palette. Then I gave him sunglasses.

Neel's original Chaddeus

+ sunglasses = swag

However, fully animating Chaddeus was the true challenge. We tried AI but it didn't work for us. Finally we found a process for rapidly converting sprites from the original beat-em-up template into Chaddeus sprites: scaling the original sprite sheet by 1/2, tracing over to get proportions right, and then editing certain elements to get a consistent style across all the sprites. You can see this process below:

Chaddeus and Osarion's template sprites

Side-by-side idle animations

Below is some of my favorite Chaddeus art from through out the project including some of the animations I worked on, some references, and full-fledged concept art:

Running animation

Tobacco-free nicotine consumption

Getting up the cool way

Childeus

The punk rock Peter Griffin death pose

The face of a man who randomly found zyns in a vase

Za warudo

Chaddeus taking a smoke from my notebook

Neel's awesome Nomura-inspired art

The enemy variants, as you might be able to tell, are the exact same sprite as Chaddeus but with the replaced 'pledge' head: a time-saving measure. I really liked the juxtaposition of the toga with modern clothing so we went for the backwards cap with a dull sort of expression. And the Geed Destroyer is just the pledge with a black palette and an eye-patch.

Pledge concept

Standard pledge sprite

The Geed Destroyer

The cutscene art development was also really fun. Our designer Alex had an idea for a story which is basically Chaddeus got hazed and now he wants revenge. And communicate this in an angry birds style comic cutscene. You can actually see the development from his most basic storyboard, to my collage version, and then the final traceover.