I agree, and I have a lot of this already in mind and plenty of ideas to flesh all this out. The life bar thing is something that just popped into my head as I was reading over the thread.
Here’s a pic of the blood/bloodstain effects btw:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v311/Yin22/bloodeffects01.png
Still havn’t fixed the eyepatch switch… :bluu:
Hmm. Thats cool that the effects leave lasting effects on the background. Do they fade over time or you could litter up the whole background with blood and craters leaving a hard fought match look like a freaken warzone?
Right now I have them fade, but after a pretty long time. But that’s just because I’m not sure of the performance impact (especially with the “rip-his-own-arm-off” guy who will be bleeding a lot, and inflicting a lot of bleeding). I might make it an option, so you can set them to disappear or stay permanent depending on your computers power.
Ours is the stamina and onguard systems so far. Stamina has been done a few times in other games but never on the level we’re planning. We hope it can add a really fun level of strategy to the game, where you will have to balance smart offense with defense depending on whether you’re at full stamina or below 30%. Some moves change completely during low stamina (some characters can even benefit from this on certain defense-oriented moves) meaning that when you’re at low stamina, short combos that end in knockdowns become much more valuable. This way, we can encourage a player to use a more varied set of moves instead of just sticking to single B&B combos that do the most damage.
Some characters need to revolve their strategies around this. For example, a grappler in our game may not have great combos, but his attacks would hit for high stamina damage, meaning that his goal is to wear the opponent down so that his grabs become un-techable and his pummel grabs will be harder to break out of.
Also, we want to encourage players to get creative with their block strings too. I think we can all agree that getting a guard crush is one of the most satisfying things in a fighting game, and in our game, guard cracking, blockstun and chip damage is a huge part of the system, with the game actually having a separate combo counter for hits that are done on a guarding opponent. A staggered guard broke opponent takes less damage than they usually would if you hit them and you can get a combo. But be careful because each character has a desparation super that they can pull off only while in this stagger state. The character who’s on the offense will need to decide if they want to go in for the kill or try to bait the opponent’s next move.
I’m sure that there will be lots of balance problems at first, but we’re going to try to listen to the players and get it as balanced as possible.
Oh, and aesthetically we’re hoping it’s going to be very fun to watch. Lots of guard breaking, exciting combos, detailed animations and interactive background elements.
In terms of offense vs defense, the game rewards offense without having negative penalties for turtling like Guilty Gear does (I mean, it’s easy to break the opponent’s guard if you have the stamina and meter to burn on a long guard combo, so you certainly can’t just block all day) but it’s going to be possible to play defensively, especially with certain characters who are more defensively adept than others. Also, almost every character will have some way to get around the opponent’s guard, whether it be a command grab, an unblockable or other more evil means.
Speaking of unblockables, there will be no ‘really slow/useless’ attacks. If a character has a slow attack that would never hit a smart opponent, that character will also have some kind of way to set up for it, and the attack will probably do mad guard damage or something like that to compensate. We’re going to try to make it so that all moves have a use at high level play.
Sounds good squirrel, getting excited.
As for balance, I must admit I’m just throwing stuff in there at a whim… I’m kinda thinking I’ll balance it later when the characters are done and can be compared. And maybe with some helpful SRK alpha/beta testing…
Well hey, that’s what they did with TvC! They made it as crazy as possible to begin with, then added balance stuff as needed.
How big/small are your character movesets? If they only have a smallish command list, the balancing isn’t going to be too difficult. From the screenshots I gather the combat is pretty close-quarters, or is it more like Arcana Heart where the screen can pan out and characters can move about the stage as they please?
The screen can actually zoom out, took my weak programming skills a long time to solve that one without everything getting blurred(I prefer the pixel sharp look), and without incorrect scaling/screen snapping weirdly 
As for moves… 6-8 specials and 1-2 supers should be the average. And only one normal (one standing, one crouching, one jumping… so three really). I don’t think it’ll be that hard. It’s not a combo heavy game either, most things don’t link and the pushback increases with combo length. No damage scaling yet though, undecided on that one.
A question to sprite artists: how do you ‘save’ your animated sprites? As a series of same-sized (width & height) files ?? (ex: one character’s full Jab animation would be : Punch1.file, Punch2.file, Punch3.file <-- this would be a Jab Punch with 3 animation frames and saved as some .FILE format, which can be any kind of image file format, actually)
I’m just wondering what most of you guys prefer.
Also, what common hurdles or constant annoyances do you notice when making a sprite? We are thinking of making some simple sprite-assembling tool for sprite artists, & we would like to know how to make sprite-assembling much more easier. We’re assuming you guys/gals are using Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop, MS Paint, or whatever to create/edit the sprite images and just need something to see if those same sprites will work o.k. in a particular game.
I use MSPaint(there are better programs out there, but there’s something about the feeling of Paint… Maybe it’s just nostalgia but I’m stickin’ to it) and save all frames for a character in one giant file, usually 256 color bmp (converted to 256 colors in Photoshop, because Paint can’t do that well).
I recall GraphicsGale being a nice sprite program, but I’m sure there’s many new ones by now that has what MSPaint lacks (namely layers, palette management and onion transparency for frames)
http://pixelation.wayofthepixel.net/
Not sure if it’s as good as when I used to visit, many years ago, but you might find some nice hints there.
Well that’s certainly interesting that the specials outnumber the normals in your game. Never seen that before. Is there something special about the normal attacks (lol)?
Anyway, our artist uses Graphics Gale. He says it’s excellent for animation because it offers live feedback and onion skinning which really helps. It also has this handy tool that lets you set a brush to replace a certain colour with another one. No fiddling around with paint bucket. It also allows you to save your animations as a PNG sequence or an animated gif if you have the full version.
As of now, we’re saving all our sprites as PNG sequences. When it comes time to compress for smaller file size we’ll probably re-export them as some other more manageable format. But for now we’re only using placeholder sketches (though still fully animated mind you).
I got a question for any composers out there. What do you use to make your music. Is Fruityloops ok, or is REASON a better option? Also, how do you go about making typical fighting game sound effects such as punching sounds and stuff?
I just didn’t want to animate the darn things
Also, I guess this puts more focus on specials. And it limits combos. Not neccesarily bad imo.
Actually, you can do this in Paint as well. It has a lot of little hidden things, like:
Using the eraser with right button replaces your first color with your second color instead of erasing.
Holding ctrl and pressing + can increase the size of the brushes(including eraser) beyond what is selectable to the left.
Pressing juuuust below “8x” in zoom you can get one more “secret” level of zoom.
I wonder this as well.
Holy shit that site is back. I used to visit it when it was still at pixelation.cjb.net but lost all of my work from back then… haven’t messed with pixel art in a long time now but there’s always a lot of good stuff on there.
maybe you can find some nice sound effects here:
http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/soundfx/Disasters.shtml
So after you draw the different frames of the sprite, what are you using to animate them?
I just put them in the game and have a look.
But occasionally I will put the frames into Microsoft GIF Animator(real minimalistic, simple program) just to check it out with less hassle while I’m working on it.
But many modern pixel programs allow to check it out in the program itself.
Do any particular pixel programs come to mind? I’ve never done pixel animation and I’d like to give it a shot.
Well, I havn’t been keeping up to date with the latest programs, but as mentioned Graphics Gale is pretty good and does have that function:
Aww weak. You have to buy it to open GIFs. That sucks. How big are your sprites, Yin?
Oh god effeminate furry fighter