Something that alot of you didn’t consider as well: Hourly wage
The argument shifted a while ago from “It doesnt take that much to make ____” to “Why does Mike Z & co pay that much to make ____”
Would that even be as cheap as it sounds? Remember, Mike already mentioned that it cost them over $175,000 just to reskin a character back when he was still at Pandemic.
Also, the asset pipeline that Lab Zero uses, as well as how the Z-Engine handles the assets seems to be significantly more efficient than it is for other companies. If anything, relying on contract work to do the sprites the way they did might actually have helped addressed one of the traditional arguments against 2D art - that it’s harder to get manpower to do it these days. Meanwhile, their production pipeline helps deal with the other argument against it. By finalizing everything in roughs, they avoid having to redo any completed moves/animations - something that’s considerably harder to do with 2D.
That said, a 2.5D game using the Z-Engine isn’t too hard to imagine seeing that the engine is actually a 3D engine. Skullgirls “sprites” are simply animated textures on flat polygons. It’s the same tech that most likely also allows Mike to apply depth maps and per pixel lighting to the characters in the game.
Gaming in general has gotten really expensive for AAA properties. GOW3 cost $44M to make. That’s close to 22x the cost of Skullgirls. A lot of entertainment products in general are just really expensive to produce, you hear about games today selling millions but the publishers still aren’t happy with the results. I was actually surprised to hear something like Spongebob costs $500k an episode and trailers from blur (who made things like the Mass Effect Trailers and Old Republic) get payed over a million to create each minute of a trailer.
hey i am really ignorant of the whole hitbox thing
doesn’t the chance of having silly hit/hurtbox shit and unblockables raise when you have more simplified hit/hurtboxes?
Yes.
EDIT: Except off course unblockables, because Skullgirls allows you to block only one attack if both a high and alow (or a left and a right) hit on the exact same frame.
Dont forget about sf4 unblockables… Those arent about high low at the same time but about shifting hurtboxes.
Sg’s complicated hurtboxes i can say are a godsend… Never have stuff wiffing through people in sg at all EVER.
Also, afaik there are 3 different type of unblockables… High lows, command grab and low, and hitbox… Only commnad grab unblockables are available in sg as far as im aware and they are alot harder to set up to the point of being impractical thus far… Though who knows what the future holds.
Also, though its semantics i think high low unblockable protection in sg is for the duration of hitstop… Not to be confused with hit or blockstun.
I wouldn’t say that, Dime.
Fortune’s standing jab whiffs on a crouching Cerebella if done too close, which is silly.
Parasoul’s standing jab whifs on crouching Val, which makes sense hitbox/hurtbox wise, but is kind of silly.
If Mike wanted those to hit, then those would hit.
So now that people are starting to accept that, hey games actually do cost a lot to make, they’re arguing that they should have just compromised their approach so it’d be cheaper? Even though they’re already making characters for a fraction of what other companies make games in the same genre for? Seriously, what the heck?!
IIRC, the unblockable issue in SFIV is due to straight up bad code that results in the system not being able to tell whether a character is to the left, or to the right of another, not hitboxes.
Choosing fluid 2d animation was an aesthetic choice that at the time, made sense because they had a publisher and financial backing. The team’s financial situation was able to support their goals.
Then the publisher went down and their financial backing disappeared – so now you have several options:
A) Make more DLC characters, but with reduced quality compared to existing ones
B) Stop making new content for the game
C) Ask for money and make more content based on what you can get from fans
So they picked C. Which from a fan’s standpoint, SHOULD be the option that makes everyone happy. Why some people take issue with this I’ll never know.
Now if you want to ask, “why go with 2d if it’s so expensive and time consuming?”
The answer is that they wanted an old-school 2d approach. It’s a matter of looks. And seeing how many people on these very forums are like “BLAH BLAH HOW COME THINGS AREN’T IN 2D ANYMORE WAH WAH NOSTALGIA BOO HOO THINGS WERE BETTER IN THE OLD DAYS WITH SPRITES”, I’m surprised games like KOFXIII and Skullgirls, which both managed to break the bank for their respective teams, aren’t better supported by the community. The same community that whines Marvel and SF4 stopped using 2d.
Yes, they could have done 3d models which would have saved them more time and money in the long run. But you wouldn’t get the same type of visual effects that are in the game now, and I bet a bunch of people would bitch about the game even more than they do now.
There’s no pleasing people it seems. It’s unfortunate.
I’ve considered trying to make a fighting game several times since graduating from school. I’m a trained animator and I even did animations for a complete character once. But the more time I spent on SRK the more I realized that a lot of fighting game fans are unappreciative, uninformed, and won’t appreciate the hard work you put into something. It’s disappointing that Skullgirls, whether you’re a fan of it or not, is an extremely well put together game on a technical and visual level, and of all things some people hate on it for, it’s the fact that it costed money to make.
If you’re talking about the budget, unlike SNK, I don’t believe Reverge was ever at the point of being bankrupt during the development. At least not after they got signed by Autumn/Konami.
Your whole post is true, but this portion I relate to especially. I think that unappreciative & uninformed mindset spans across the arts in the general & not just the fighting community. Ppl SAY they want this & that, but the reality is that they are not willing to support it when its smack dab in their face if its not coming from familiar avenues.
The public is more sheep-like than they would like to believe. Capcom can serve us steak on a trash pale & most of us will eat it. But when Skullgirls comes along, all of a sudden everybody is pick & choosey.
I’ve been deep into animation myself with plans of possibly creating my own games, but it seems like if you don’t have a cosign from somebody big or a ton of money then ppl aren’t giving you the time of day. It’s real discouraging & gives you better understanding as to why artist/developers would rather just sellout and make a simple iPhone game for a broader audience.
It was a figure of speech. I didn’t mean LITERALLY bankrupt them. I just meant it cost them a bunch of money. Though in SNK’s case it did almost make them go bankrupt.
Also there are some things they do with their animated characters that would be hard to pull off with 3D models. Look at hoe much the characters stretch and squish during some of their attack and hit animations. Also modeling Double’s opening and idle animations would be hard to get looking right with 3D.
Double, in general, would have been next to impossible to do with 3D models.
Had they used 3d models, their budget would’ve been substantially higher. There seems to be this fallacy amongst gamers that 3d is cheaper than 2d, but that’s just not the case at all.
Plus people seem to conveniently forget that they still managed to sell it for a measly 15 dollars.
In other genres, 3d would be more expensive, but in a 2d fighter I’d have to disagree.
From an animation standpoint, 3d models are infinitely faster. As long as a model is rigged properly, making/tweaking moves is super quick. Check out those quirky mods where people take the PC version of SF4 and make Balrog have Chun-Li’s moves, etc. Sure they look derpy as hell, but it gives you an idea of how quickly you can manipulate a model to do different moves.
In 2D animation, every time you want to make a new move, you have to draw it, clean it, and color a whole new set of drawings. Then, let’s say you want to make a move come out 2 frame faster. You can remove several drawings, but then will the animation still look smooth? You may have to go back and edit the existing animations so that it still looks good after having some drawings taken out. Same goes for ADDING frames.
SNK tried to make this process simpler by tracing over 3d models after all the tweaking had been done, but it STILL took forever.
Also, in 2D animation, alternate costumes are a nightmare. You have to redraw/alter EVERY drawing a character has. In game like SF4, you can just take Ken’s model, give him a different costume, and not even have to touch any of the animation/rigging.
Whereas other games in 3D require you to make an entire environment, and thus require you to make an insane amount of art assets, a fighting game generally only has characters and a relatively simple background that is only seen from one angle.
So in the long run for a fighting game, 2D is definitely harder and more costly.