As a young lad who has bright ideas for the future, I REALLY want to make a ton of fighting games. Upon talking with a friend about potentially making a 2d hand-drawn fighting game, It occurred to me that the sprites would have to be 60 fps to keep up with the game itself. But then I turned on my 3ds and played Blazblue, in which the sprites seem to be 30 fps.
How fast are they exactly? Are the sprites 30 fps or 60 fps? If 30, then do they just use hotboxes at 60 frames per second? Are there any disadvantages to playing with 30fps sprites?
How would you tell that the sprites are running in 30 FPS? Just curious.
Anyway, I don’t think the FPS (at least, 30 vs 60) makes that big a difference in a 2D fighter, and here’s why:
Each move only has a few distinct frames of animation. Those frames are ‘held’ for the duration of however long the designers want, and then the game proceeds to show the next frame. If you drift over to the old Extend frame data on Dustloop they actually have screenshots, with hitboxes, of (I think) each frame of animation involved in a move - so if you look at, say, Tsubaki’s 5B, which actually lasts for over 30 frames, you’ll see it doesn’t have that many actual distinct animation frames. The frames are just drawn in such a way as to give the illusion of motion. So the game’s ‘clock’ runs at 60FPS, but the animation is… well, all over the place.
At least, I believe that’s how it works. Certainly, drawing 32 different frames of animation for every character’s 5B would become cost prohibitive in a hurry.
Thanks for all of your input, guys. I looked at the frame data link you sent, but just from eyeballing it I don’t think they have all of the frames. As for knowing wether or not the sprites were 30 frames, I was just estimating it, as I play SF4 frequently on the 3ds and have gotten used to the differences in 60 and 30 frames. If they are 60 fps sprites after all, that’s great. If not, then I gotta think of something.
I want to find a solution to this because I feel like the game would look better and feel better if the characters ran at 60 frames per second like in SF4, Tekken, and MK. Of course those 3d games are easier to animate because it’s just key framing model animation and the computer fills in the blanks.
So Skullgirls uses some kind of vector keyframing for their sprites?
Could I incorporate something like that? I know programs like After Effects have a sort of blurry “Frame Blending” feature. Here you can create a frame in between two existing frames using the images and creating a midway image for them. This way I could have my animator draw at 30 frames per second, slow it down to half speed, add the frames in between, and essentially have 60fps sprites. I would have to see how it would look though.