How hard is it to make a fighting game?

[Bill307]

Though I’ve never tried to make a fighting game before, balancing aside, it seems like a *relatively *easy task, compared to making other types of games. However, compared to say, a school project, it would be infintiely harder.

The programming side doesn’t worry me too much. Like someone mentioned, I think the biggest trouble is going to be re-writing code when you need to change the way your game is designed. Ideally, you’d want to have your game design set in stone before you start to program it. But this is impractical because it’s very, very hard to figure out the little details and to know whether or not your game will actually be fun when you don’t have any kind of working prototype / work-in-progress to go on. Also, having a prototype to play with helps a lot with your motivation.

A nice perk of programming a fighting game is that there are so few objects in the game that slowdown should be a non-issue and you won’t have to worry about optimizing much of your code. Well, unless your background is too CPU/GPU-intensive (like that one firey stage in TvC), or your programmers just suck (like the guys who made AH2, which can slow down even on arcade hardware from as little as a small particle system). Seriously Examu, PS2 port aside, there’s no excuse for a fighting game with static 2D backgrounds to be lagging modern arcade hardware. :nono:

The artwork… if you’re doing a sprite-based game, good luck: you’re gonna need artists to draw literally hundreds of animation frames. (Unless you’re making another Million Knights Vermillion :razzy:.) Personally, I’d try to do what Capcom did with SF4. From what I’ve seen, animating a 3D model to throw a punch is a LOT less work than drawing the sprites for it.

Balancing the game seems like it’d be the most difficult part. You’d have a LOOOT of variables to tweak – hitboxes, damage, proration, hitstun, pushback, etc. – and you’d have to spend a LOOOT of time playing the game to test out as many possibilities as you can, and to get good enough at your own game that you can tell when something is going to be a problem. Not to mention, there isn’t even a well-defined way to know when a fighting game is going to be balanced. I guess the best you can do is expect to test it and patch it a lot.

Then you have all the other aspects to consider: input-reading, game mechanics, character designs, the story, the CPU opponent AIs, sound effects, music, backgrounds, localization, and so on. Individually, each task might not seem too great, but they’ll all add up to a LOOOT of work, no doubt.

[Canto]

Its tough.

Remember that Capcom has 100 and up emloyess all working on the same game at the same time, and within one or 2 years they have a game. if its just you and 4 or 5 other people imagine how long its going to take!

I really don’t think its that tough to code a fighting game. To be honest if you have a good artist and you do some really basic, well coordinated artwork, then its not that tought getting the art done… it just takes time. Then theres testing! It gets very time consuming and the drive or want to make a game dries out because its too long/hard.

Heres my suggestion. Focus on making things really really basic. Remember street fighter 1? It was balls, one playable character… but it was just the first of many. You have to keep things basic and set your goals without being overly ambitious. Make a game with 2 characters and, one level, and one music track and play the hell out of it and find what you like to make your engine.
Once you have your engine down, all you gotta do is put in all the art for other characters, levels, and the music of course.

Heres a cool idea. Recreate street fighter 2 from the ground up. Why? Cause you’ll learn so much by trying to recreate the game.
OR make a game in the same style as another game. Its so you can learn.

[Zinac]

Wow so many people giving opinion on something they’ve never attempted. Keep them coming.

I’ve never tried brain surgery before, but I don’t think it would be hard. Its just some slicing and stitching right?

[HellMUT]

Wow so many people giving opinion on something they’ve never attempted. Keep them coming.

I’ve never tried brain surgery before, but I don’t think it would be hard. Its just some slicing and stitching right?

I’ve done some brain surgery on my spare time before, its not that hard.

[frustratedsquirrel]

The thing with hitboxes and art syncing is not so bad if your lead designer is also the artist/animator, which is rarely the case but definately possible.

And yes, I am currently helping out with a fighting game at the moment, so I’m not just pulling it from my ass. And for us, that’s the case. The guy who designed the game idea, characters and story is also the animator and we have two very decent programmers working on the game engine. And they all get along just fine as a team. If all goes well it should end up as a respectable doujin.

But the worst part about making a fighting game is how darn time consuming it is, especially on the spriting side of things. 500+ frames for 12 characters is nothing to sneeze at.

[Canto]

Wow so many people giving opinion on something they’ve never attempted. Keep them coming.

I’ve never tried brain surgery before, but I don’t think it would be hard. Its just some slicing and stitching right?

I honestly don’t think you could compare writing C/C+ to brain surgery. One of them requires a year of schooling at a university and the other 10 years…

[Carthage]

Making a fighting game is about as hard as making any other type of video game.

It’s very hard.

[Pifactor]

The thing with hitboxes and art syncing is not so bad if your lead designer is also the artist/animator, which is rarely the case but definately possible.

Assuming the art is already drawn, the hitboxes can pretty much be done by anyone, as it is a matter of just taking the sprite and putting the dimensions in the format that you wrote your engine to read. It’s just easier if your artist does it for you since its pretty mundane work, lol.

The hardest thing about making a game is definitely in getting the art done. Anybody with decent programming skills can hack together an engine, but being able to do good pixel art is a talent that isn’t so easy to come by.

[frustratedsquirrel]

Making a fighting game is about as hard as making any other type of video game.

It’s very hard.

detective point and click adventures are not hard to make. Neither are visual novels.

and yeah, the art is the hard part, but if you can find an artist who cares about the quality of their work and who has experience in both programming AND artwork it helps a lot. Because an artist who can effectively communicate with programmers is really important.

[Zinac]

I think you are all underestimating the importance of hitbox design. Ofcourse physically placing them isn’t hard! I forgot SRK doesn’t play fighting games, what would they know about faulty hitbox design making or breaking a character.

[shoultzula]

Think about this:

You are a fighting game developer. It’s time to design your characters normal attacks and special moves.

You set down to do it and realize you have no frames of animation to draw the hitboxes on top of so you have nothing to go on at the moment.

Ok, time to draw some frames of animation then right? Well, you think up some moves for the artist to draw and now you want him to make them. But there’s a problem. In order for you to tell him what he needs to draw you need to have some vague idea of where those hitboxes are going to be that you are going to draw over the not-yet-existant-art.

It’s a paradox, you need the art to draw the hitboxes right, but you need the hitboxes to draw the art right. One of them will be shitty the first time around.

The solution is that you must become something of an artist yourself to make good hitboxes. You can draw crude silhouettes of your character to give you something to go on. Then you draw your hitboxes.

At this point you either make up some crude test sprites yourself, or you get an artist to do it for you.

I’ll assume you already have an engine ready you can drop the frames of animation and the hitboxes into. Don’t even worry about damage or hit properties at this point. Moves either hit or they don’t.

Now you have a playable fighting game. You can mirror match your one character against itself. You begin playtesting.

Oops, one move is beyond broken. It outpokes every other move in your characters arsenal. The game boils down to that one broken move. This is unacceptable and you have to go back and redesign the character.

Now, skip forward a bit and you have redesigned several times probably to get this one match of your one character to feel pretty fair. All the characters moves are useful in different situations and the game feels good.

I’m just throwing a number out here but I bet you couldn’t do all that in a week.

Now, it’s time to do character #2!

Start the character design process over from scratch, but multiply the complexity of design exponentially. Now your game has three possible match-ups. 1-1, 1-2, and 2-2. All these matches have to be “fair” and need to be roughly as common as one another in the game. Otherwise they will never occur in the context of competitive play and your time spent designing them will be for nothing.

Think about this process even for 8 characters. It would be long and arduous to say the least. That doesn’t even take into account the damage and hit properties of each move. For a game with 16 characters or so this becomes completely unmanageable unless you build design guidelines for yourself that will allow you to know ahead of time that something won’t be broken. Things like “no hitbox can be larger than this x-y” or “no hitbox can hit low higher than this y point” or “no single move can be active for longer than this period of time”.

You can’t make “stereotype fighter” either. Nobody wants to play a game that is just an inferior clone of another game. If you’re going to put yourself through the game design process making up clever character designs is the one redeeming value. That’s the “fun” part.

You’re right though about the fact that character personality and looks have a ton to do with making a fighting game. It’s equally important to gameplay. Games like Vanguard Princess and Arcana Hearts would be played much more commonly in the USA if they had a more masculine theme. But the anime-girl theme is incredibly popular in Japan, and the designers know it. That’s the audience they designed to and the were extremely successful. If you want a game to be popular then you need to know that the character personalities will be appealing to at least some large group of gamers.

Personally though, I think that is a load of shit and I would make exactly the type of game I wanted to make and damn the consequences. If nobody thinks it’s cool then whatever. Somebody will appreciate it somewhere. It’s a dice roll anyway that some games catch on and some do not. For whatever reason Samurai Shodown never made it to the big time. That game series had an equally large budget and as good of gameplay as any game for it’s period. Other games might have crowded it out, maybe the aesthetic just wasn’t that appealing, it could be anything.

nice read.

[The_Damned]

Hunh. No hits in my thread. Damn.

Think about this:

…I’m just throwing a number out here but I bet you couldn’t do all that in a week.

Now, it’s time to do character #2!

Start the character design process over from scratch, but multiply the complexity of design exponentially. Now your game has three possible match-ups. 1-1, 1-2, and 2-2. All these matches have to be “fair” and need to be roughly as common as one another in the game. Otherwise they will never occur in the context of competitive play and your time spent designing them will be for nothing.

Ah, so that’s what you meant. I see now.

Yes, that’s rather impossible to disagree with. Playtesting is of course the hardest part of any game, especially since lack of playtesting makes itself quickly evident in several games.

However, I would still say that to some degree, it’s not something you should really worry about it, at least with regards games that would disturbed through computers, since you could have other people playtest it for you. Even the most playtested games usually have quite a few things that found in a couple of months to a year after their release and since you can patch it more easily than with standard distribution games, that seems like it should take off some of the pressure.

Of course, that starts to get into the slippery slope of whether you should patch certain things, especially you used the word “fair”. I’m guessing you mean “fair” more in that “the character has a fighting chance” rather than something like “all characters have 5-5 matchups”. It’s unfortunate, but true “balance” seems like it would ultimately end up in blandness.

Personally though, I think that is a load of shit and I would make exactly the type of game I wanted to make and damn the consequences. If nobody thinks it’s cool then whatever. Somebody will appreciate it somewhere. It’s a dice roll anyway that some games catch on and some do not. For whatever reason Samurai Shodown never made it to the big time.

I feel the same way you do, which is part of the reason for my initial disagreement (though I do see where you’re coming from now).

I also do wonder about Samurai Shodown not catching on. I think part of it’s because, IMO, 2D games are “supposed” to be more special-move based when it comes to casual audiences, whereas 3D games can easily whoa casual audiences with what seems like “normals” (or, rather, would be most likely be normals or command normals) in 2D games.

Samurai Shodown wasn’t flashy enough and, considering that pretty much everyone was either a samurai or a ninja (before ninja were cool to American [teenagers]), probably not accessible to anyone outside of Japan (or at least not near to it).

I’m sure they were other issues as well, like possibly the damage on things or the “weird” amount of buttons. (Didn’t Samurai Shodown only have three buttons for the longest time?)

shrugs

[System_1]

Not hard at all, in fact it is very easy. That is why everyone complains when there are some mistakes in released videogames.