Man, this thread hurts my brain. (Background info: I am a professional software engineer who makes good money and generally knows his shit)
A 2D fighting game is one of the easiest games to program, because the amount of different things that can happen is VERY limited. If you look at something like an RPG, it has map screens, fighting screens, different item screens, lots of scripted events, etc. A fighting game really one has one aspect, the fighting, that’s it.
I wrote a fighting game engine over spring break one year. (You can still download it from http://www.geocities.com/margalisix/ ) Obviously it is not complete but it has chain combos, dizzies, cross-ups, mid-air juggling, knock downs, and a couple of supporting tools, including one for editing moves (setting up the graphics and hit boxes, setting different properties on them, etc), one for compiling all the character data and graphics, etc.
It’s not perfect, but it’s like 9 days of work. Then again, I’m good at that sort of stuff. The bottom line is that the programming is about the easiest you’ll find in the world of gaming.
I made those 1994 to 1996 for a dos-based fighting game I had wanted to make (then mugen came along and blew away everything I had done up to that point). The word “cel-shade” hadn’t even been coined yet with regards to 3D.
Are there a lot of jobs in programming? I heard from a teacher during my computer animation course that it’s not as difficult as the other parts of making a game and that although it’s not as difficult it’s tedious and boring. Resulting in not much people wanting to take it as a job. Is this true?
I do programming professionally too, glad to see someone else who thinks this kind of stuff isn’t that difficult.
A lot of the difficulty comes in the actual design of the game and systems… making something that works, is balanced, and is fun to play. Working with a high level language makes it not too difficult to actually code up for a modern machine (C++ is the way most developers go, although I’m experimenting in C# and DirectX right now).
Another chunk of difficulty arises when you start to cut corners or do little tricks… this I would imagon is a big problem for Console developers. Writing fast code and writing good code are different things… when you start trying to make things work fast, you may introduce odd bugs in your shortcuts.
And of course, there’s a lot of special case handling that needs tweaking out… what happens when two people throw at the same time, off cases of some scripted super effect missing a cue or wiffing for some reason… just all of the random things that can pop up. It helps to have people who know the genre really well, who can help you find out these dumb cases that need working out.
My personal project is a vertical shooter, which is actually kind of a similar game at a low level, when you think about it. Just all comes down to hit boxes and projectiles.
I guess the hardest part of my project is deciding on how I want the scripting to work. I really don’t need to code that much as far the engine goes. Most things can be handled by config files. Having the motivation and time to plan things out are different though.
Maybe Booda or Timekillr, one of you guys should start a new thread to see who would be interested in making a fighting game? I don’t know if everyone reads this or not, so you might get more people to join. I’ve almost got 10 frames (almost 6 hours) done! I’m going to recognize that creating a game is out of my league, so hopefully I can just make some really cool fighting animations. Thanks everyone who contributed and gave some other people insight on what they’re in for before they start something.
If either one of you two get a project going, I’d help out where I can. =)
Sprites up end of next week! I’ll revive this thread just once.
Well, the problem with that is people are notoriously skeptical about fan games. The thread would go mostly ignored, maybe with a few responses from people who volunteer for non-essential work (i.e. coding and art), then drift away into the back pages of SRK.
Anyways, if something like this were to ever actually (!) go through I’m sure some of the guys at Tagmonkey (me included) would love to help out with some of the art … although realistically it would probably end up being interface stuff. I don’t know what happened to Sprite-Central but contacting VX (again, via HerV) might give you some decent contacts in that regard.
The difficulty of the programming part depends on what language you’re going to use to code the game. Object-oriented languages like C++ are suited better for making games IMO than most other languages.
For my last assignment, I was actually given the layout for the game with the graphics and all, and the programming part that puts the whole game together, and all I had to do was code the actions, it wasn’t that difficult.
I’d say the toughest part would be all the graphics part.
I don’t know man. From what I’ve heard from people that have used it, they seemed to spend more time fixing engine bugs than actually work on the game. That’s only one group I guess…
