I’ve been working on building a community around Kaiju Combat - a giant monster-based fighting game heavily influenced by the trio of Godzilla brawling games I made with Pipeworks/Atari last decade. I came up with a few core concepts to build around:
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[]Multiple small/medium games, each with their own roster, modes, & environments. Allow players to combine all the content from all of their games, the way you buy individual LEGO sets at the store, but (usually) consider your LEGO pieces as a single collection at home.
[]Fan/privately funded, so that publishers don’t have any input into the development of the game.
[]Total transparency in development - put all documentation online, including financials. Discuss everything openly and honestly with the community, during development and after.
[]Allow the community to make real choices about the game. Let the community vote on the roster, name anything & everything, choose features, decide how to split the budget between characters / environments, etc.
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As far as community building, we’ve got a great start - 400 members a week ago, and more than 1000 today (we went public with our campaign a week ago, which has brought in a huge number of new interested people.)
All good news. But unfortunately 80% of our fans thus far are Kaiju fans - people who geek out on drawing and discussing monsters. I’d really love to attract more** fighting game fans** to participate in the discussions - I think it would really help to deepen some of the discussions we’re having. We’re still in the early stages - there’s no playable alpha yet - but since I’m literally using the same (updated) engine and team I used on the past Godzilla games we’re discussing those as a decent jumping-off point.
Have you ever wanted to get some design experience? Are you interested in getting into the nuts & bolts of designing a fighting game? Do you play well with others? We’d love to have you jump in and participate.
Just as an update - we had one of our first votes end this past Monday - the subject was how to name our three attack buttons. This was not just an aesthetic debate - the names selected also revealed a lot about how people wanted to strategize in the game.
There were three broad categories for the names - names that focused on intensity (light, medium heavy), names that focused on speed (quick, normal, slow), and names that focused on directionality (thrust, cut, cross). Directionality lost big time, speed beat out intensity by just a smidge.
The Soul Calibur games (which I really like) have built their whole system around directionality. Godzilla: Save the Earth leveraged directionality a great deal as well. But, apparently, that’s not the sort of strategic thinking the fans want. They want seed decisions - which means creating tactical situations about controlling time & flow in the match.
Our three attack buttons will be named “strike, quick, fierce”.
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[]Strike will be the basic attack chains for each character. Simply mashing strike will do something pleasing and effective. Variations on strikes will enable anti-air, sweeps, and evasive attacks within combo chains.
[]Quick are rapid attacks which can interrupt (counter) strikes. In exchange, they don’t deal much damage and don’t combo into other attacks. But simply throwing quick attacks will prevent your opponent from landing long strike chains.
[*]Fierce attacks are slow, powerful attacks that can’t be countered by quick attacks. Standard strikes combo into fierce attacks, but creating combos after fierce attacks won’t work in most cases.
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So when playing the game I’ll ususally want to start with strikes - and then end my combo with a fierce attack when I think the opponent will try to interrupt with a quick attack. This creates a sort of “press your luck” mechanic - where I want to extend my basic combo for as long as possible.
Now obviously these types of attacks don’t form the entire combat system - we still have beams, energy for special moves (teleport, burrow, etc), ammo, rage attacks, fatigue meters, and all of the environmental interactions that define the series. But these attack types will form the core of our melee combat system.
Comments? Mistakes? Huge problems you can forsee? Please let me know. Or even better - jump into the Kaiju Combat forums and tell everyone in person! (We’re very friendly over there, I promise.)
Oh, and backing the project through Kickstarter is a great way to let the world know that you approve of games being developed from the ground up with fan-input.
I thought folks might like the latest bit of tasty character art. All our characters are collaborations between our staff and one of our backers - this one was a 12-year-old boy who met Matt at a convention, and won him over with his description of a giant Moray Eel in a coral exo-skeleton! That concept eventually became…
The moray eel’s design is amazing, totally looking forward to him. The game sounds pretty solid so far, but I’m pretty infamous for being willing to give anything a try, so I guess I’m not the best judge.
Just out of curiosity, how does publishers get a bad rep on turning games to trash and not designing by community with the same bad rep? Last I checked, designing games was a profession and not something you do because you play video games everyday? (i.e.: I’m not a chef because I eat food every day)
ANNOUNCEMENT : I’m going to be running an IAmA question-and-answer session on Reddit this Saturday (12/8). Come hop in and ask me questions. You can even re-ask this one if you like!
I believe what you are asking is this: “How can you so cavalierly dismiss publishers as a negative influence on game production, and at the same time assert that a mass of fans could do a better job with design and financial decisions? Isn’t there a skill and experience bias which should have a positive impact?”
And the answer is: no. The problem isn’t that publishers are stupid, or bad people - the problem is that the job of a publisher is fundamentally opposed to the concept of making a good game. It’s finance.
Developers take out loans from publishers to fund games. Developers usually get paid very little (compared to their skill level) for their work - but they do it because they would rather make less money and make games. Developers make games because they love them, and want to contribute a great game to the world.
Publishers, on the other hand, are run to make a profit off developers. Publishers make it their business to understand which developers can produce what sort of products, and understand what sort of marketing / scheduling can return what sort of profit off the sales of that game. IF A PUBLISHER CAN MAKE MORE MONEY BY SHIPPING A GAME BEFORE IT’S DONE - THEY WILL DO IT. This usually happens when the marketing campaign is working well - people have been convinced to buy the game based on previews, developer interviews, etc. Then the publishers simply ship the game without enough polish to actually deliver on the developer’s intentions - but the sales don’t reflect that.
Again, I don’t hate publishers. They aren’t evil. But the actions which make them money are wildly different from the actions that make games better. It’s like the private health care system in the USA - where your health care makes more money if you don’t get treated for your illness. It creates a negative profit motive that hurts everyone.
We have 8 1/2 days left, and we’re on target to reach our goal. Lots of new people on the forums - but the discussion is still HEAVILY skewed towards monster fandom as opposed to fighting experts. The design vote on roll use and distance ends tomorrow - and our new design vote deals with how beam damage is spread out over time. A few hundred backers is all we need!
I browsed your forum a bit and see that you’re obviously looking for a lot of input from the community which I can appreciate. But I checked a couple of threads made by you (such as the Jumping Physics thread) and it made references to those Godzilla games and how the mechanics worked. I have no experience with the more recent 3D monster games so I really couldn’t weigh in on that. Nor am I a big fan of 3D fighters, so I don’t know how much of an influence my opinion can be. But I have a couple of very general suggestions:
1: Netcode has to be good. Rollback netcode preferred. I’m sure you guys understand this but until rollback netcode becomes standard it’s unfortunate it still has to be requested by the players. I assume that the game will play like other 3D fighters (like Soul Calibur) and normals and special moves have an average startup of somewhere around 10 frames which greatly benefits rollback netcode.
2: As far as jumps go. I prefer fast jumps, low height ceiling. Opposite of SF4. Of course you could exclude flying characters from the rule.
3: No comeback mechanics. No long cinematics that take forever to finish unless it’s at the end of a fight like say a fatality or epic victory.
4: I noticed a thread on weapons. I would add the option of disabling weapons and other gimmicks if possible. Or include stages that lack gimmicks like military firing at you.
5: Have a combo counter. I didn’t notice one in Godzilla: Destroy all Monsters Melee. Just thought I should bring it up.
6: Character speeds/health/strengths. I personally don’t want to see every character walk and run very slowly. This is something I observed in some of the 3D games. I could be totally wrong because -as I said- I never played those games but my suggestion would be to take a que from SF. You could have really slow and clunky characters, but they hit really hard and have relatively high health like your standard grappler. Equivalent would be I guess King Kong. Then you have characters with average health and speed. Which would be Godzilla. Then you have really fast and nimble characters but have the lowest health. Like Mothra.
7: I’d love to see an homage to the Kaiju flick War of the Gargantuas.
Fine thoughts! I hope to draw in a LOT more folks from the FGC once we start having playable builds. Our Netcode is pretty awesome in my opinion - we built the engine around online play, which really adjusted how everything fits together. A big problem with Capcom games is that their code base fundamentally assumes no latency - which obviously means network play is always in conflict with the essential character of the game. The Spigot engine is built around network play - so the base assumptions about how the engine is running mesh much better with latency issues. We turn on faux-latency when designing the game, to make sure we’re not creating bad situations.
For those not paying close attention - Kaiju Combat successfully funded this afternoon. We ended with $112,513 from a total of 1,247 backers.
It’s been clean for about a week that we were going to make it. We had our first pre-production meeting with the engineering staff yesterday, and we’re doing a bit of ramp-up between now and January.
But the upshot is - Kaiju Combat is starting production, and will be available at some future point. Expect merciless requests for Alpha & Beta testers once we get to that stage!