Translating a narrative-heavy superhero property into a competitive fighting game presents a unique challenge. Characters need to remain authentic to the source material while also fitting inside tightly balanced systems built around responsiveness, readability, and competitive depth. For Invincible VS, the goal was not simply recreating the violence and spectacle of the Invincible universe but transforming it into something that feels equally cinematic and mechanically expressive in real time.

Developed by a team with roots in competitive fighting game design, the project combines brutal superhero combat, destructible environments, rollback networking, and highly iterative animation workflows with a visual style designed specifically for fast-paced competitive gameplay rather than direct one-to-one recreation of the animated series.

In this interview, the developers discuss the project’s core combat philosophy, how characters from vastly different power levels were adapted into balanced gameplay archetypes, and why responsiveness and player expression became central pillars of the game’s design.

Invincible VS brings a highly cinematic, brutal superhero universe into a competitive fighting game format. What were the core design pillars guiding the project?

Mike Willette, Executive Producer: We wanted every player to look and feel like a badass hero from the Invincible universe. That meant being authentic to the IP. Combat had to be brutal, and characters needed to be excellent representations of their comic and show counterparts. We wanted everyone’s kit to feel distinct and important within the combat systems. And from our KI days, we wanted more player-to-player interactions on offense and defense, so you want to pay attention to the action at all times.

Adapting a narrative-driven IP like Invincible into a systems-heavy genre like fighting games presents unique challenges. How did you approach translating characters and abilities into balanced gameplay mechanics?

Mike Willette: We look at the characters and see what archetypes they represent, where we can push designs, and where there are natural extensions. It really comes down to what feels and looks cool, and is authentic to the behaviour of that character. With all characters, we start at the source material and look at our own inspirations as creatives. The team works diligently in creating a sandbox of sorts where combo exploration and movement expression are key.

Combat in Invincible is known for its speed and intensity. How did you design and tune your combat systems to capture that feeling while maintaining clarity and competitive depth?

Dave Hall, Game Director: Capturing the speed and intensity of the combat in Invincible has been a focus since we started the project. We wanted to sell the massive destruction that could occur in the fights, which is why we have arenas that will go through stages of destruction as the fight progresses, leaving the arena destroyed after a long battle.

As characters take damage, they will start to be covered in blood, and their costumes will start to tear apart as the fight progresses. It’s easy to take a look at the characters and arena to see how brutal the fight has been. We also specifically designed our overkill system to be in the moment and fast-paced when you would get your head knocked off or completely gibbed. We wanted to feel the intensity of the overkill but also make sure to keep the action going.

From a gameplay perspective, how do you balance characters that are blatantly more powerful than others in the show for a game like this?

Dave Hall: We like to focus on what makes the character unique and focus around those abilities, for instance,  when we designed Cecil, we thought it would be cool if he was teleporting all around the battlefield and using all the high-tech equipment he could to help him contend with fighting such powerful superheroes. 

From a technical standpoint, what engine and core technologies are powering the game, and why were they chosen?

Bill Merrell, Technical Director: While there are undeniable advantages to building and owning all of our technology from the ground up, Unreal Engine allowed our team to get started immediately, while enabling us to keep a smaller, more focused team. We are able to apply the strengths of Unreal while concentrating our engineering resources on technology efforts that maximize our strengths and set us apart from the masses.

Can you walk us through your pipeline for building a character—from concept and animation to implementing movesets and balancing abilities?

Dave Hall: Characters go through a couple of main steps: concept, CDD (Character Design Document), blockout, gameplay pass, and finalization. The CDD gives an overview of the moves and style of the character; this is used to make sure all the teams are on the same page and get the character moving forward into blockout. Blockout step will quickly set up the character and get first pass animations so we can start to see and feel the character in action, once approved we move onto the gameplay pass.

This is where we really start to tune in the combat and the animations, this is a highly iterative time where there are daily anim reviews and playtesting as we get the timing and feel for the character to what we consider gameplay complete. Finalization pass will further refine the animation and effects while also continuing on making sure the character is tournament viable.

During this phase, we are having a large amount of playtests and are inviting in FGC members to try out characters and give feedback, we keep our process very iterative so that we can quickly adjust to feedback if necessary.

Animation plays a huge role in selling impact, especially for superpowered characters. How did you approach animation workflows to achieve both responsiveness and cinematic weight?

Don Waters, Animation Director: The first step is a deep dive into reference. With a property like Invincible there is a wealth of incredible material to delve into from one hundred and forty four issues of the comic to four seasons of the animated show. After selecting key reference poses and animation sequences that give a strong representation of the character, a style guide is created for fast and easy reference.

The next step is called “Blocking” and is vital for rapid prototyping of combat without investing time into finished animation. It is similar to working with clay where an artist will block out the larger forms before adding secondary forms and tertiary details. An animator will create an initial pass of an attack consisting of three parts: Anticipation, Strike and Recovery. These three poses are the backbone of every combat animation that goes into the game. Working with design, the poses and timing are reviewed and tweaked until all the foundational elements are dialed in and feel responsive, as well as massaging the poses for readability, impact and style with strong emphasis on the strike frame. We want all the hits to feel meaty and exude as much character and style as possible.

This process is repeated until an overall representation of combat is playable in game from normal moves to special and super moves. After several rounds of review and gameplay updates based on playtests, the character is ready for the final step: Final animation pass and polish.

From an art direction perspective, how did you adapt the comic/animated style of Invincible into a real-time game environment?

Dan Eder, Art Director: Yeah, so the big thing for us was that we didn’t want to just copy the show or the comics one-to-one. That sounds like the obvious thing to do at first, but once you put these characters into a real-time 3D fighting game, a lot of stuff starts breaking down pretty quickly.

The show has a fairly clean, simplified 2D style, and that works really well for animation. But in our game, these characters need to rotate in 3D, bend, get hit, perform supers, read clearly during fast gameplay, and still look good under real-time lighting. So the challenge became: how do we keep the spirit of Invincible, but translate it into something that actually works for our medium?

A lot of it came down to building a visual language that still felt bold and graphic, but had enough material definition and breakup to hold up in a modern game. For example, fabrics, armor, skin, blood, VFX, all those things are pretty flat in the source material, so we had to decide how far to push them without making the characters feel over-rendered or disconnected from the IP.

Readability was also a huge part of it. It’s a fighting game, so you can’t just make things look cool in a still frame. You have to understand the silhouette, the color separation, the effects, the hit reactions, all of it, instantly. Especially with a game this fast and violent, clarity becomes part of the art direction, not just a gameplay concern.

So I’d say our approach was really about adaptation, not recreation. We wanted it to feel like the version of Invincible that belongs in a high-impact, cinematic fighting game. Still authentic to the show and comics, but a little more elevated, physical, and built to survive actual gameplay. That was the line we were always trying to walk.

Multiplayer and competitive play require extremely tight synchronization. What were the biggest challenges in networking and performance optimization? 

Bill Merrell: Robust network infrastructure is table stakes for competitive fighters, so we built the game with rollback in mind from the start. This goes far beyond networking, however, requiring absolute determinism across all simulation-critical systems - physics, collision, animation, combat - everything. Achieving this efficiently demands strong tooling, validation, and discipline throughout development. 

Maintaining rock-solid 60hz performance on all target platforms is challenging on its own, but made more so by the rollback requirement, since under the hood, the game actually runs many times per render frame as it rolls back and resimulates constantly. We’ve therefore taken performance very seriously since the beginning. A degrading framerate not only slows the team down and makes everyone’s jobs more difficult, but saving optimization for the final stages of the project all but guarantees hasty and heartbreaking changes are necessary to achieve it. We take a fundamentally different approach by prioritizing it at all times.

Looking ahead, how do you plan to evolve Invincible VS post-launch, particularly in terms of new characters, systems, or competitive features?

Mike Willette: We want to keep adding content to the game and evolving with the community. We announced our year 1 character pass with the Immortal and Universa as our first 2 characters. Nothing we can reveal yet, but they will add some great gameplay to the current meta.

We are also looking to address quality of life concerns, as you could see with our first hotfix patch, addressing some things that impacted the player experience.

We want to make sure our fans continue to have fun! Stay tuned!

Quarter Up, Game Development Studio, and Skybound Games, Publisher

Interview conducted by David Jagneaux