"The ships are such a joy to fly and the modes themselves are so successful – I wish it had been blown out into its own game." – Polygon

Starfighter Assault is one of the many modes in EA's Star Wars Battlefront II. In this mode 24 players pilot one of the iconic Star Wars fighter ships such as X-Wings or TIE fighters. Once they earn enough points they can upgrade to a hero ship such as Darth Maul's Scimitar. During a round, one side launches wave after wave of fighters against giant capital ships, while the other attempts to hold out and defend them. The mode was very well received, critiques praising it for the extremely tight controls and unique interactive maps.

Starfighter Abilities

During this project I worked with a small team who were focused on delivering the gameplay components of the many starfighters. My role was to help design and implement all of the starfighter abilities in the game. You can see a few of these abilities in the trailer above, such as the invisibility cloak that is deployed by Maul's Scimitar.

Below you can see some of the loadouts for the starfighters in the game. Each starfighter has 3 abilities. Generally, the left hand ability is defensive, the right hand ability is offensive and the middle ability is something unique to that fighter and more powerful.

Frostbite Development

Before entering production on the abilities, I worked to establish the different types that we would have in the game and how we would implement them. Each starfighter has 3 abilities, all of them have cooldowns, some trigger and then last for a long duration, others fire off a one-shot effect. Many abilities can interact with each other or overlap in unique ways to provide the player with powerful combos. During production I engineered each ability in Frostbite and collaborated with vfx artists, audio designers, engineers and gameplay designers to ensure that they feel incredible and meet the quality expected of Star Wars.