I’m just wondering what do you need to make a game?
A fighting game engine has been dancing around in my head for weeks and im really interested in making a 2D fighting game.
do you know what programs are used?
for sprite design?
for the engine core?
any help will be extremely useful
i have no experience 
but i just wanna get something started
mugen was a very versatile engine, too bad its abandonware now.
you can look forward to InfinityCat though. (forgot the site)
A few of us around here have working on our own Indy project. Skullgirls is pretty far along in development.
I’ve personally been writing an engine going on 2 years now, along with the tools for editing sprites/setting up collision boxes. I’m close to having a releaseable version, but I’m still considering whether I’m going to release it as an opensource “fighter maker”, and/or go ahead and create a stand-alone game.
There’s also a Openmugen, which tries to suport all of mugen’s data.
besides finding a “fighter maker” type engine like mugen, you will have to learn to code. So find some good books on C++ and then choose a graphic platform to use, and find some good books on DirectX or OpenGl. While I think having a good grasp of the how and why behind graphical applications is a good thing, you could also go with using XNA. I didn’t like it at first, but now I think very highly of it. I say that because you can get things up and rendering very simply without any real understanding of how rendering works. It’s a good and bad thing I guess, but the tech is there so we might as well use it.
Now the hard part is finding artists. I’ve written a lot of code, and in every project we have done the biggest hurdle is the artists that are working for the team. A good art team is a real blessing. Since you are alone, I can say that the biggest hurdle to my independent projects is that I don’t have an art team, and making a game (no matter how good) with borrowed assets is just not the same. Making a 2D fighting game is about as bad as this situation can get. You wonder why capcom and SNK never update sprites, it’s because it takes a lot of time and a lot of work.
One thing I did think of doing was taking the prerender approach to assets and getting the 3D models, having them rigged and then capturing them in various key frames of animations as 2D sprites. Don’t know how well that would actually work, but it’s a thought.
the first book I ever got about game making was an earlier edition of this
it teaches allegro, which is really damn simple. I never use it professionally, but it really got me started
I know some C++ i’ve dabbled in that water and im learning visual basic in school right now
and i was thinking about using XNA to make the game.
also that frame capture ran through my mind as well as the idea of using semi 3D characters ala rumble fish.
thanks for the help so far 
hey, if you use xna and release the source, i will provide an xbox 360 port.
I thought XNA had it’s own inherent compatability with 360 that made porting it really really easy, almost an after thought. I have never tried doing that, but am I wrong in that?
So long as you stick to .NET Compact Framework classes, yes, there’s nothing to porting to 360 under XNA. Just copy your code into a 360 project, and it should work. 360 distribution is non-existent as of yet though.
Rumble Fish and pre-render are two different thing. I’ve thought about pre-rendering sprites as well. (It worked for Starcraft, why not a fighter?) but while the art requirements under 3d are different, they are still significant. (I’m not bad at 3d modeling and animation, but texturing is… hard)
Rumble Fish uses ‘paper dolls’ if you will, and that graphic style probably has the smallest art requirements. You make and animate these paper dolls, and the art problem is limited to drawing the body parts.
XNA is very fun. I’ve been working on a fighting game engine using XNA that I really started when the first beta of XNA came out. It now technically is a working fighting engine but still needs a ton of refinements. I’ve programmed a little in C, C++, VB, even going back to Pascal and stuff like that. With XNA you have to use C# for the most part (I know there was work being done on IronPython+XNA but I haven’t been keeping up), and as a novice, C# was very easy to pick up, and the helpfiles for it are actually quite good.
And if you want to have the game be 360 compatible, you pretty much have to stick to the XNA libraries that are compatible with both. That is somewhat limiting. For instance, there is no networking component, which kind of sucks. If you are making a XP SP2 version, it’s fine, and you can just use whatever parts of the .Net framework you want to.
If you pay to be a member of the development community you can share your 360 game with other members of the community, but I believe the ownership/licensing with 360 games is kind of funny. There will be a more legit DevKit style release of XNA that will cost money, and from what I hear that will allow publishing of games but that’s just rumor at this point.
If you are using XNA to make a game for Windows though, the game itself is yours, it doesn’t seem like they tried any licensing hoopla for the Windows games.
im wondering what are you guys using to make sprites?
As I’m not currently developing a game, but just the engine, I borrowed sprites for testing purposes, but ofcourse didn’t want to release that. So I rendered some cheap 3d model into a series of images for demos
From what artists have told me, most sprite work is done in original paint, or paint shop pro. There is no easy answer to this, it’s just a lot of long tedious work.
The paper doll system of Rumble Fish has confused me since I first heard of it in a preview of the first game. I think I understand how it would work, but then I look at the game and I don’t notice any of the little artifacts that my idea of it’s working would have left over. They have a really great system for doing it, but I think somebody goes over the total sprite at the end and manually edits out all the little issues that the system has had.
I think that the developer liscense of XNA is fairly cheap. As of the last beta I think the price was going to be set at about $100 for it, but I haven’t been keeping up with that as I am not currently working with it. $100 is not much at all given how much other offical software can cost. Professional liscense of Maya is like several thousand I think.
[quote=“Windlord0, post:12, topic:20579”]
From what artists have told me, most sprite work is done in original paint, or paint shop pro. There is no easy answer to this, it’s just a lot of long tedious work.
The paper doll system of Rumble Fish has confused me since I first heard of it in a preview of the first game. I think I understand how it would work, but then I look at the game and I don’t notice any of the little artifacts that my idea of it’s working would have left over. They have a really great system for doing it, but I think somebody goes over the total sprite at the end and manually edits out all the little issues that the system has had.
QUOTE]
the paper doll thing isn’t new…the gundam fighters on PS1 (battle assault) did it…it looks better for mechs than people, in my opinion…and before that, Mazin saga Mutant Fighter on Genesis did it for its boss battles…and it looked AMAZING for its time
I’ve been working on a fightin game that uses some techniques that sound similar to the “paper doll” thing. What I do is instaead of having a bunch of static images that are swapped out to animate the figure, the figure is broken up into a bunch of different body parts and put together in a skeleton structure. So for instance I have a torso drawn at several different angles, which all somewhere have a left shoulder defined, and the left arm is attached to the left shoulder point.
What this allows me to do is instead of drawing 30 pictures for a second of animation, I can draw each body part from like 5 different angles and use those same pictures over and over for all the animations. It makes it a lot easier to put together animations because instead of spending all my time bogged down in MSPaint, I can just throw together a few keyframes and the engine interpolates between them. What it ends up with smoother and more fluid animations.
so like here’s an animation that took like five minutes to do:
http://www.piratedog.net/~dmanning/ArtWork/MyStuff/baseballswing.gif
You’re right too, the paper doll thing works really good for mechs. I got bored one day and threw one together:
http://www.piratedog.net/~dmanning/ArtWork/MyStuff/veritech.gif
btw I also found some people to finally play my game with over Christmas break and it’s going to be awesome 
Graphics Gale is a program I’ve seen sprite artists use as well. I haven’t kept up with it, as the last sprite project I did was for a small sidescroller, so I’m not sure if it’s still the…um…bees knees so to speak.
Just use mugen. Even with how comparatively simple it is to use, it is somewhat unlikely that you will finish, especially by yourself.
There has been a DC vs. Mugen project going for over a year (possibly 2), still not done. This is a project with 10+ skilled programmers/spriters.
I think it’s true that you should really try out mugen for yourself before anything else. It gives you a really good idea on whats goes into create a fighting game, but really wasn’t what I was wanting to use. After
This kinda leaves me in a strange position. I’ve reached the point where I’ve implemented all the main features that a fighting game needs, but I need to spend some time bug fixing and making the engine more solid in general. I could spend an additional X number of years trying to make own game, but as an undergraduate student and being part of the dev team for another game already, I dunno where I would find the time.
I’ve put alot of thought into licensing the game as opensource, but the bad after-taste left from the attidues in the mugen community, has made me reconsider not to.
Another possibility I’ve considered following is making a doujin fighter, which would really reduce the overhead of preproduction.
From what I’ve seen, there is next to no interest or motivation in the fighting game community for game development, but I could be wrong.
Ever thought of making a nurbs (very easy, very low polygon technique but looks as good as a well as a well made polygon mesh) model with displacement mapping (to give depth and height) its in Maya and other popular 3d editing programs.
Displacement maps
http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/1960/displacementmap7txxs6.jpg
http://img474.imageshack.us/img474/7196/fullbrucekh0.th.jpg
or
Nurbs
http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/4687/nurbsbivariatemeshzl9.th.jpg
http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/9177/nurbsep5.th.jpg
Now you can render this on a LAN with several computers linked to together to combine(roughly?) your resources.
Both of these can be done on the Wii and GC(why aren’t they?)and they makes a low polygon model look ALOT better.
Now if you want to make spriting easier. Get the following…
1)Adobe Photoshop
2)a packet of skittles and Barq’s or A&W root beer(optional)
3)Macromedia Flash
4)patience
5)a person who can draw(spriter)
Now draw every angle to a fully extended(arms legs extended) body in 300 degrees. Then break them up into joints, and the connected parts(think action figure).Then find something like transparency maps to the joints so they can move without artifacts. Then make several sprites for the joints(300 degrees of extension/contraction).The Face can be Extremely hard and long winded (for a simulated high-end anime-like appearance) or just make a normal static face (easy).
you can apply depth-maps/bump maps to simulate depth/height.
Now the hit detection.Since this is 2d and not 3d this is going to be a lot easier.In macromedia flash make some circles(DO NOT MAKE THEM TOO BIG match the animation as accurately as possible) then you need a script to give behaviors to them.(priority rules-grabs,projectiles,supers,super grabs,invincibility,unblockable, trade, etc. ) Then some defensive ones (your body box).Then you need objects:Items like in ssbm,automatic character weapons like Vega’s claw, stage objects balcony,cars,barrels,arcade machines ,gates,destructible environments, the stage itself. With an object as the stage you can have a terrain to a stage.It can even change dynamically(move around have weather, fall apart, construct itself, have crowds, hazards(like pits,spikes and monsters) and controlled stage weapons(like a turret machine gun,ufo,tank or chandeleer) .You brain storm.
Best custom fighting system I’ve seen was Enterbrain’s Fighter Maker 2K2, which unfortunately never got translated to English… Would it seriously be that hard for a second party to do?
