Unreal Engine Batman Arkham #26: Asylum, Armor and Lunatics

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Hi folks,

It’s been quite an unusually long time since the last update on this project, and as some of you might already know from some small announcements of mine here and there, this was largely due to me having quite a lot of other things to deal with for the majority of this year and as you can imagine one has to set some priorities in those situations. Regardless of that, there are numerous new things to showcase this time, and not all of them even made it into the video (mostly because I didn’t want to drag out the length of the video, and some of the smaller additions are easier to showcase in this post anyways). Anyways, let’s get into all the new stuff.

Arkham Asylum Menu Cinematic

I’ve decided to do yet another menu cinematic overhaul a few months ago, this time of the Arkham Asylum style background cinematic that I’ve originally made… about four years ago (I think). I’d say that the results speak for themselves in this instance.

Armored Arkham Batman

This is another original batsuit design that I’ve had in mind for a while and which I finally finished earlier this year. I’ve already done my usual breakdown of the design in my 3D portfolio. You can find its entry here: Link

This skin is also available for Arkham Knight here: Link

Justice Lords Batman

This is once again a skin made by JoeMama, who has done exceptional work on this design as usual. If you aren’t familiar with this, it’s an adaptation of the Batman design seen in the Justice Lords Episode of the Justice League Animated Series from the early 2000s. This skin is also available as a mod for Arkham Knight: Link

Alex Ross’ Batman

Here we have yet another addition made by JoeMama, this time in the shape of a quite meticulous adaptation of Batman as drawn by Alex Ross. We also had to give this skin its signature pose for the showcase, given that it is from a fairly iconic piece of artwork. As with Lord Batman, this skin is also available for Arkham Knight: Link

Hair Shenanigans on Keaton

This is another small revision of my version(s) of Michael Keaton’s Batman, although this time it’s merely a new and much more fitting hair mesh that recreates his signature curly hair in a much more authentic manner. I’ve recently figured out a bit of a workflow for hair meshes and this felt like a good start, as the previous hair mesh really didn’t do it justice.

Dynamic Wrinkles

This is more of a minor addition, but I came up with my own solution for dynamic face wrinkles depending on the facial animation that’s playing. It doesn’t make a huge visual difference most of the time, but it’s just neat and I like having it.

Arkham Sewers Combat Map (also known as Sewer-Bat)

I felt like it’d be nice to have a new Arkham Asylum themed challenge map to accompany the new armored Batsuit design I’ve made and after a while I eventually settled on the sewers as a nice and atmospheric environment to create. It turned out to be a bit more finicky than usual, not only because I wanted to get some key elements right such as the water outlet that can be seen at one end of the map (right across the railing) but also because this is an environment that has quite a lot of clutter going on, so giving it that right amount of worn-down, messy and neglected atmosphere was rather important. I also went with some less intense and more localised style of lighting, rather than the fairly well-lit look it had in the original game, as this just felt much more fitting and dramatic with the overall visual style I’ve established in my project so far. I am pretty happy with how it turned out in the end though, even if I went through a bit more tinkering than usual until it felt right to me.

Super-Stuns

I’ve also been working on a few more gameplay additions for the combat system, with super stuns being one of them. As you might expect I’ve done a bit of a twist of my own on them here and there, most notably when it comes to everything beyond performing the super stun in the classic way by doing three stuns in a row on one enemy. Picking up an enemy from the floor saves you one stun for example, so you already perform a super stun after two stuns in that case, and in addition to that you can also perform a super-stun-takedown now, which uses some unused animations from Arkham Knight. Batclaw super-stuns also act a bit different now, with Batman doing a bit of a leap towards the enemy if they’re further away, rather than just snap-teleporting into place like he does in Arkham Knight. I’ve left out the charged super stun though (which you’d have done by holding the stun button), as that just felt like it would be redundant with the Batclaw super stun already existing.

Lunatics

One thing that I had on my to-do list for a while was more variation when it comes to the types of enemies in the combat challenge and as I already made the Arkham Asylum filing room challenge map, the lunatics were an obvious choice for an alternative type of enemies. For once the animations turned out to be the easiest part to get working, as implementing and smoothly integrating their necessary new behaviours into my existing enemy system became a bit of a complex problem. That also highlighted some of the existing issues with the (rather messy) way I’ve setup my enemy pawn classes, so I might have to force myself through the tedious process of revamping that at some point, especially for more new enemy types, but at least it works as-is for now and the lunatics mesh quite well with the rest of the combat gameplay.

Fuse-Boxes and Electrical Barrier Takedowns

You might remember the fuse box takedowns from Arkham Knight, which recently felt like they’d be a neat addition to my project to me. I’ve decided to make them replace the regular special combo takedowns though, as it kind of felt like these two are more or less the same action, which means that instead of a special combo takedown one gets a fuse box takedown if there’s a usable fuse box nearby.

In addition to that I’ve also figured that the electrical barriers you might know from Arkham Asylum make for a perfect prop to use for these takedowns as well given that they essentially also just shock thugs, so they now allow for infinite fuse box takedowns using the barrier as long as it is active.

Long-Distance Floor Takedowns

This is a rather small addition, but I’ve decided to dip my toes into some light animation work to put together a new floor takedown animation, which only plays when performing a floor takedown on an enemy that’s quite far away from Batman. My idea behind it was that Batman should perform a bit of a leap using his cape to cover the distance, so that it won’t just look like he’s doing some super-human jump across the room. The final animation is a mix of parts from a few existing animations, where I then manually keyframed the transition between the jump into a bit of a gliding motion and the last half where it’s pretty much just one of the regular floor takedowns.

Multi-Counters

This is also another small (and long overdue) change, as multi-counters used to be triggered automatically with a single button press when multiple enemies attacked. Instead they now require multiple button presses depending on if there’s two or three enemies attacking at once. I decided against making the first button press already start the counter animation though, given that I’ve been leaning more heavily into allowing players to cancel attacks and other combat moves in favour of performing a different action instead.

And that’s everything for this time (I think), I hope you enjoyed this sort of overdue update and hopefully it won’t be almost a year until the next one.

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