My name is Alan Noon, and I am a recent employee of Epic Games. I was hired on as Developer Relations Technical Artist, which largely means I travel around from game studio to game studio, demoing Unreal 4 and solving any issues folks come across during the course of development.
In order to be super effective at this job, I need to know just about everything there is to know about the engine. Thing is, up until this point in my career, I have not had opportunity to use Unreal in a professional game development context.
What better way to learn how to make a game with Unreal, than to make a game with Unreal?
Upon arriving at Epic, it was suggested that I pick something I was interested in and then start building it. Now, I’ve been out of the fighting game scene for quite some time, but I have long maintained massive appreciation for the genre and community. I have decided that in order to educate myself in the ways of Unreal 4 game development, I am going to start putting together a fighting game frame work.
This sounded like something Shoryuken.com might be interested in, and thus here I am. I invite you to come along and help me learn how to make a fighting game in Unreal.
I’d say the easiest way to turn it into a fighter is to keep it 3d this doesn’t mean you can’t still do 2.5d cause Street Fighter EX is fully 3d collision and all.
I’d say this as you don’t potentially have to rework how collision works in the engine. I don’t know how it’s done in UE4 is done by default.
No, I have not. Obviously, some very kickass and very successful fighting games have been made in Unreal before, but the idea is that we (you, myself, and the rest of the community,) are going to work through the process of building a fighting game framework together, from scratch in Unreal.
Those guys have years of invaluable, (and proprietary) experience behind them. The point of this venture is that we’re going to make mistakes and we’re going to have debate, but most importantly, we’re going to learn.
I have some ideas as to how to move the characters through a 3D environment while keeping the gameplay 2D. Had some interesting discussions with a couple of coworkers… I’ve prototyped the desired action in 3dsmax and it seems to work. Going to have to figure out how to replicate the desired action in realtime. Definitely looking for feedback from the community in regards to this. We’ll get there eventually.
Stick to 2.5D since theyre the most populat fighting games nowadays. You should try to make a game that SF 4 should have been and was saying it was going to be by going back to the SF 2 direction. Make a game thats easy and teaches fundamentals and still has high damage in it. Fast games are what people want, and if you had the easiness of pulling off moves in SF4 with the grounded basics and high damage of Super Turbo, then youd have a really cool game that would interest people who have gotten into fighting games through SF4 and people who like the older games.
Well I assume that you’re not building a full complete game with a dozen or so characters and all that. Mainly a proof of concept with maybe 2 characters. I am serious about 3S Parries though.
Throw in character creation if you can. UE4 with Soul calibur V like character creation would be pretty great if there’s no hitbox issues, and yeah good netcode should be a main priority.
Example being 3SO’s netcode as of recently being preeeettty amazing, Skullgirls as well.
*character creation is just fluff. Just throwing an idea.
I was kinda hoping SNK would have remade 98 in XIII’s style, but with FULL movelists for everyone. Vice and Mature lost their coolest moves in that game.
