Kerfuffle - Local Arena Brawler (NEEDS YOUR HELP)

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
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Kerfuffle is a local multiplayer arena brawler. Unlike most games in this genre, all of the characters in Kerfuffle are unique in their abilities. I have been developing the game for the last 8 months in my spare time and its finally in a place where I can start testing. Since I am working on this alone, with no one to play it with, testing it is actually super difficult for me. That’s why I have this thread. I need your help to test this out and provide feedback so I can make it better. If you want to help out please send me a PM and I will hook you up with a build. I am not posting the download link publicly for reasons.

Anyone who plays the game and provides feedback will be given future builds AND the retail game for free upon release. Any and all feedback is welcome, no matter what it is you have to say!

Current Characters

Momo:

[details=Spoiler]The fastest character in the game! Momo’s attacks are short range, with quick start up and recovery. She is the only character with a super jump (down, up + jump), and a give kick (down + attack in air). Short range dash is cancelable into her side attack to extend the range. She can also dash cancel out of most of her attacks recovery frames. She probably needs another gimick? Wall jump maybe? I don’t know but she feels pretty flat compared to other characters. However I think she plays extremely well and is fun in her current state.

Attacks
Quick Slash - super fast but short range. nothing too special about it.
Shoryuken - its a shoryuken. what else do you need to know? recovers in air.
Dive Kick - dive kick with long recovery so don’t miss.
Down Slash - straight slash downward. used for edge guarding and attacking through thin platforms.
[/details]

Shellby:

[details=Spoiler]Slow and deliberate, Shellby is built to control the ground. Equipped with a mega man type buster arm, Shellby can release a charged shot to fire a cannonball across the stage. The higher the charge the faster the projectile. Shellby has a straight down dive while in the air (down + attack) that is pretty fast, but the hitbox is probably too small? All in all her recovery is kinda high and will probably need to be lowered. Currently she has the best dash in the game to offset her horizontal movement speed.

Attacks
Cannon Arm - can be fired instantly or charged. charging increases speed of projectile when fired, thus increasing range.
Cannon Balls - Shellby can dash into her cannonballs to relaunch them.
Butt Spike - down attack in the air. sends Shellby straight down on her opponent. Long recovery.
Up Spike - good anti air. big ass spike comes out of her hellmet. same thing in the air.
Double Spike - spikes come out of either side of Shellby. pretty basic stuff. Long recovery.
[/details]

Jiro:

[details=Spoiler]Sushi Chef Samurai. Jiro’s gimmick is that some of his attacks are randomized. Decent range and speed, hes kind of a middle of the road character. Currently the random attacks are only cosmetic. I don’t want to have random startup/active/recovery frames because that could be super shitty. His up attack, which is a vertical only projectile, will be entirely random once there are more projectiles added to him. Each projectile will have different behavior. Right now he just has the fugu which has a slow descent. I’m still trying to figure out what other kind of fish he could throw. Jiro has a spin attack in the air that gives him a bit of vertical movement.

Attacks
Side Stab - horizontal attack. decent range and speed. random weapon used to attack. knife, cleaver, or fish.
Down Slash - this move confuses people so i probably need to change it. hitbox is ONLY below him. it does not hit in front or behind.
Fish Toss - throws a random fish into the air. each fish has different properties. currently only has one fish, the fugu, which has a slow descent.
Spin Attack - full 360 attack. long recovery. has landing recovery if you touch the ground in the middle of the animation. adds slight vertical movement.
[/details]

Quark:

[details=Spoiler]Flooaaattyyy. Quark is a duck in a space suit with robot arms and a laser. Almost all of his attacks are projectiles so I wanted him to be slow and somewhat hard to control to offset his offensive power. Projectiles are super strong in Kerfuffle right now. His up attack acts as a jump, and the fire trail it leaves can hurt enemies. I wanted Quark to be a character that does well in the air so I gave him as much air time as possible with low gravity and a triple jump (if you use the up attack that is). He is the newest addition to the cast and by far the least polished.

Attacks
Side Laser Blast - short range projectile. projectile and explosion are deadly.
Down Laser Blast - on the ground, this creates a shockwave that extends to the left and right of quark. in the air its a projectile that travels down. probably need to change the on ground variation to something else.
Jet Pack - up attack. acts as a 3rd, and potentially 4th, jump. fire trail causes damage.
[/details]

Future Plans

Extended cast of 8-10 playable characters.

Single Player Modes
[list]
[] Bots
[] Survival
[*] Story Mode
[/list]

**Custom Games **
A full arsenal of modifiers and mutators to make your own game types.
[list]
[] Stock
[] Health
[] Abilities
[] Available Characters
[] Time
[] Game Mode
[] Gravity
[] Speed
[] Damage
[] Hazards
[*] (and maybe a level editor if I can swing it)
[/list]

Multiple Game Modes
[list]
[] King of the Hill
[] Keep Away
[] Money Match
[] FFA
[] TDM
[] Juggernaut
[*] Soccer
[/list]

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I like the name

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http://i.imgur.com/3W0dycz.gif

**Updated first post with relevant information. **

I finally have a new test build ready and I’m calling upon the SRK community to help me out. I have no way of testing this game with multiple players since I’m developing all alone in small town Missouri. Now that I have 4 characters (mostly) done I have a lot of variables to test with. I just need testers.

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I completely missed this thread the first time around but I’ve been following it via GD. It’s looking good. You’ve definitely come a long way from the concept animations you showed a while back; I’d love to give it a try this weekend with some friends.

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I’m gonna see about getting this game to our local sessions to get hella feedback.

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Send it, i should be able. To have enough pads together to play with some friends.

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Thanks dudes! I really appreciate it.

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Wow, how did this thread die down, this looks absolutely awesome.

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Thanks man. If you want to give the game a shot, and help me make it better, let me know and I will send you a build. That goes for everyone. So far I only have about 10 people in total testing the game and I’d like to get as many as possible in on this.

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Someone was nice enough to record 22 minutes of video for me. The game is definitely a little slow right now and needs some kind of moving camera. This static camera has gotta go. Nobody even tried to attack projectiles, which you can. Shield is almost never used but I think thats more of a product of the game type.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msSG3UuaHIc&feature=youtu.be

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The 2 double KO’s in the first 30-40 sec was sick. The characters have more movement than you think.

0:54 Quark up launch from grounded and double jump held right carried him all the way over the deity monument, shows you how well he can float.

3:23 Jiro nearly outrunning a cannonball, but no Indiana Jones escape

6:20 being killed from that high, he went offscreen, made Quark float all the way down, and took up 10 secs of game clock. Momo’s last death was only 4, when I noticed the last one was hovering around 8-10 sec and wanted to time it, paying attention to the next 2 between death and respawn.

Its more pronounced with only the 2 player 1 on 1 game, but I guess that could have a defined limit to not drag it out and bounce all over the stage on 3 ledges and things before corpse removal. Is “timer scam” a thing in stock lives games too?

Funny I don’t notice the monument is the stage ledges, knees and hands until its on video. That’s why they are where they are on the stage. Sometimes that’s hard to traverse platforming, especially while in the heat of a fight.

(Like with Momo, making me think of walljump for her, when her face kept getting stuck up against a wall, but if Shoryuken gets bigger that might go away.)

Having to do perfect jumps to get over. A more generous 1st jump could alleviate that, but change the game. The falling speed being floaty might be what makes it feel ‘slow,’ but being faster there would make it harder to get back on stage. Is it possible to come up with different falling speed, after a set time/distance like velocity?

That could give one character, more character like a trait, since he could be the heavy one that falls faster. But that could screw up how he can get up and down just the same.

Oh shit, that might just be user error, like we think we have to double jump all the time, immediately, and don’t remember to Mario 2-style, hold the button down to go highest before our 2nd jumps. I’ll have to check that out more keeping that in mind. But Momo still feels like she’s better at the high ground, and this isnt her kinda stage.

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Double jump has to be timed correctly. Two quick jumps, like the players constantly do in this video, do not get you high enough to make certain jumps. You can see towards the end they start to get it, but I like the idea that they are falling into the monkey pit and panicking so they screw up the jump and die. It makes the monkeys more deadly, which is good.

I am working on a new system for respawns. Should be much faster when its done.

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the movement and attacks are fast enough from watching that clip. it seems the reason it feels slow is because after only one hit you die. there’s a long time of bouncing to a stand still and then an animation of the character exiting the screen and you have to wait through all that to fight again. if that’s part of the design, how about a much faster, instant animation for restarting the losing character?

i’m loving the art and animation of this game. please keep it going.

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Rabbit, you have been putting in work my dude.

Make sure you put in a character that looks suspiciously like Goku and one that looks waaaaaay to similar to Supascrub so the battle can rage on for eternity.

Oh and a dlc character that bares a striking resemblance to a penis.

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ive dramatically sped up the death and respawn timers, and intend to do so again. im going to replace the tractor beam with a laser that just blasts the dead player into a puff of smoke instead of waiting on an animation. if you hit a player who is dead, they will blow up immediately and respawn instead of waiting for the laser.

Gopu and Scooper Mang? planned characters already.

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Heading out to happy hour(s) shortly and then we’ll likely come back here for some drunken gaming. I’ll see if I can compile some (mostly) constructive crticism for you from a mix of gamers, skill levels ranging from “OMG Candy Crush is, like, soooo unfair!!!” to “We traveled to CPL for CS back in1.6”. :stuck_out_tongue:

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i highly recommend downloading the newest build before playing. there were some serious bugs that needed fixin.

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Momo attacking right out of the divekick divebomb to cancel recovery is pretty strong

in current version

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At the end of August we put out a test build and let me tell you something, kids. It was shit. As it turns out, it is very difficult to develop a multiplayer game alone with no one to test with. Let alone four someones. A handful of people were kind enough to test the game, and one guy was super great and recorded some video.

Slowness
The first major problem I noticed was how slow the game was. Characters have long attack animations, long death animations, bounce around forever before despawning, and then taking even MORE time to respawn. Originally I thought it would be good to allow the players some time between a kill/respawn to re-position themselves on the map. Which is still totally a valid idea but the time between kill and respawn is just too great.

To fix this I’ve dramatically shortened the time it takes to despawn the character once they are dead. Instead of a beam from space to pick up the players, they explode. This despawns and then respawns the player instantly. No more waiting around. If a dead character is hit BEFORE the initial despawn explosion happens, they explode and despawn when hit. This, in theory, allow players to have more control over the pace of the match. It still grants a second or two to re-position yourself if you need it. Also explosions have a habit of making everything feel much more urgent.

The second big problem is that some of the characters have really lengthy attacks. Take Jiro’s spin attack for example, or any of Quark’s attacks. They just take forever. Quark in particular slows the game to a pace. He is able to zone out opponents with his projectiles, effectively creating a wall between him and his would be killers. When this happens the game just stops. The attacking player isn’t advancing. No one is dying. Nothing is going on. That sucks. However fixing this problem leads me into another major change to the game…

Simplicity
When I started to make this game I had big ideas for asymmetrical combat. Characters with crazy move sets that were totally different and completely unique from one character to the next. So thats what we did and it turned out to be a bad idea. It turns out that none of your big fancy moves are worth a damn when the guy you’re fighting dies in one hit, to any of your attacks, regardless of their fanciness. Play testers were confused when switching between characters, projectile attacks, and how all of this shit was supposed to work together. The confusion was justified though. None of this shit worked together after all.

I still stand by my asymmetrical design for this game. Characters still have unique movement speed, fall speed, acceleration, attack speed, attack range, attack hitbox angles, etc etc. Aside from that I have chosen to just gut all of the goofy attacks. No more one off confusing attacks from one character to the other. No more projectiles for ANY character without the use of items. All characters now have the same 4 attack directions. Now, as I’ve had to explain to every single person I have talked to about this, that does not mean every character is the same.

Lets compare Shelly and Jiro under this new design. Yes they both have up, down, left, and right attacks. Yes they are all the same button presses. This is where the similarities end. Shellby attacks with spikes that protrude from her helmet. Her up attack is a tall, narrow attack with quite a bit of vertical range. Her down attack is much shorter in comparison. Jiro has a wide, short range up attack. It covers his entire sprite from left to right but doesn’t extend nearly as high as Shellby’s does. His down attack, while also fairly wide, has much more reach than Shellby’s down attack. By having this simple difference in range, these two characters now play entirely different. Shellby has the tools to control the space below her opponent, while Jiro controls the space above. The goal of each character becomes different.

Get under a guy and jam a spike into his soft butt cheek meat.
Jump over someone and brain them with high quality tuna.
And so on and so forth until the end of time.

Combos
I finally got around to allowing players to add more HP. You can choose anywhere from 1-10 HP, and each attack does 1 damage. When hit, you are put into hitstun for x amount of frames based on whatever attack actually hit you. After that time expires you can tech roll forward, backward, or neutral. This system still needs some work but it already makes the game feel much more fun. Here are a couple of gifs.

Dropped combo.

http://i.imgur.com/6OPEbqt.gif

Tech rolls.

http://i.imgur.com/gOiMeOY.gif

Right now I am trying to find a nice balance for executing the roll. This is something that will require lots of testing so if you guys want to give it a shot and provide feedback just let me know and I will set you up with a build.

Thanks!

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Nice work Rabbit, it’s lookin really cool. Sorry I didn’t get a chance to try out your demo, got buys, but maybe I can get in on the next round. Either way keep at it man, lookin really fun.