I’ve designed & published a few fighting games in the past decade, including the Deadliest Warrior series and Atari’s Godzilla series. I’ve enjoyed the work, but it’s always rather upset me that the publisher’s goals don’t really have much to do with making the game really excellent.
So, I started my own studio. We started doing mobile games, but eventually we realized that what we really wanted to do was make another Giant Monster fighting game - on our own terms.
We’re calling it Kaiju Combat. Mechanically it’s just a refinement of the work we’ve been doing for 10 years with our past games - it uses the same engine (engine is continuously updated, obviously), we’ve got the same content team, we’re looking at the same basic features : 4-player fights in cities between giant monsters.
But we’re trying to innovate in other, broader ways:
1 - We’re focused on a PC release. This lets us patch and improve the game continuously.
2 - We plan to release new content as stand-alone Kaiju Combat games every 4-6 months. But! - you can load all the content you’ve purchased together, so it plays like a single game that keeps getting bigger and bigger.
3 - We’re opening up the design process, trying to make it transparent to all our fans. We’re sharing beta builds, putting up character renders, discussing how and where to spend our money - everything is out in the open.
4 - We’re funding the project via kickstarter. This means no loans to repay, so we can sell the game way below the standard $35 price point, and still make enough money to fund continuous content-creation.
I’ve been a bit apprehensive about posting on shoryuken about this project - because I know many folks think the Godzilla games aren’t hard-core fighting games. They’re a bit slower-pace, with bigger health bars - a deliberate choice I made to make the combats more film-like and strategic. But I’d really like to make this project a reality - and I think it would be a great move for the future of fighting games to move away from the strangle-hold consoles have on them these days.
So! Check out our kickstarter, and tell me what else you’d like to see!
The previous titles were rather well-balanced, asymmetrical fully-3D fighting games. Godzilla: Save the Earth was tournament-worthy. I played it competetively online for years. So this has real potential.
I really hope you get to make it, so with that in mind I hope you don’t mind if I have some requests:
could you showcase your current engine/give a glimpse of how the game could look like?
and could you put up some artwork of your original monsters? if you don’t have original monsters yet: make some. maybe do a high res picture of 2 of your monsters fighting with “KAIJU COMBAT KICKSTARTER” on it. it gives everybody a better idea how it will look like and could be used by websites and such.
with those 2 things your kickstarter page would look a lot better.
I make these requests, because I don’t want to see a repeat of the TakeDown kickstarter. they made it in the end, but unless your kickstarter is somehow affiliated with Skyrim(in which case people will throw money at you without even knowing what kind of game you are going to do), people want to see some work upfront and want to have a clear picture of the end result, before they invest.
you probably have looked at the TakeDown kickstarter, but in case you haven’t you should check it out and the Serellan page.
I’ll send your kickstarter page around and hope to get some people interested. good luck!
I ABSOLUTELY agree. As pretty as my face is, we’re going to replace it with some sweet concept art ASAP. Unfortunately, Matt Frank is doing a convention this week, and our contractor’s first pass was… not acceptable.
The engine is exactly the engine I’ve been using the past 10 years to make Deadliest Warrior, Rampage, the Godzilla games - and most other projects Pipeworks put out. Leveraging their existing tech (and the fact that it’s already ported to all consoles…) is a big cost-saver for us.
We appreciate the support, and I’ll see a bunch of the shoryuken crowd tomorrow night!
The combat engine is the one I built at Pipeworks between 2001-2007. It was used in all three Godzilla games, and the Deadliest Warrior series.
As for netcode, we actually had one of the very best networked fighting experiences ever in 2004’s Godzilla: Save the Earth. We specifically designed our input system and monster fighting animations to absorb latency - whether from netlag, or other sources. Along with an action queue, this did essentially the same thing as GGPO - but at a lower level in the code.
Many fighting games were designed without network play in mind, so their event interpretation happens late in their processing cycles. This means that any delay can bump an event to a different frame - screwing things up. This is like driving right on the bumper of the car in front of you at high speeds.
The Spigot engine was designed such that input events actually drive the frame - they are the first thing to be processed. This means the game doesn’t have to back anything up to react to missing data - because it can account for that missing data during the main processing. It’s like keeping a safe distance between you and the car in front.
In 2004 online fighting wasn’t ubiquitous, so some people felt that we wasted a lot of time incorporating such a fringe feature into our engine. But I feel pretty vindicated these days!
Oh, and donate to the kickstarter! Even $5 puts you on the design team. $120 gets you early access to the alpha, and $500 lets you design your own custom monster to become a playable character!
Well you’ve got a very solid foundation, there. G:SE and Deadliest Warrior were both very solid games. Will definitely throw in some money after I get caught up on rent. >.>
Never played Godzilla online. All that matters though is if the system doesn’t introduce variable input delay and stuff looks/works almost the same online as it does online.
On a related issue though, please let us see ping times. Too many games these days (especially fighting games) use vague “bars” as a representation of connection speed/quality.
I can vouch for Godzilla: Save the Earth’s online play. It played smoother than pretty much any modern Capcom fighter does today. And it even supported 4 players at once!
Unfortunately, you can no longer play it on Xbox Live online, since original Xbox Live games are no longer supported. Not unless you play the PS2 version, which is not ideal.
So, I spent some time at the downtown Shoryuken opening today, and had a blast! I was able to hold my own in most games - that is, walk away with a win ration better than 1. The big exception? MvC3 on the PS3 - on which I was humiliated several times in a row. Next time I’ll bring my stick, so I don’t have to deal with shoulder-buttons…