Hello Shoryuken! I’m Rynhardt, creative consultant, writer, and PR for Gemhead Studios, and we’re currently working on a retro-style tag-team fighter with art and design influence from Garou: MOTW, King of Fighters series, SFIII, and Smash series in a sci-fi fantasy universe, working titled “Space Punch”. The game is currently very early in development (Expect development posts soon!), but I’d like to periodically post about design topics the group has been discussing, and today I’d like to take a moment to talk to others in the fighting game community about unique online game modes. Of course there will be the standard online free play, ranked play, but we’d like to explore other options that give players fun ways to show off their skills or just have fun. What kind of game modes would you like to see in fighting games? Automatic tournaments? What about something more creative like Online Survival?! The idea doesn’t have to be fully concepted, just post what you think sounds fun 
Rollback netcode.
A valuable technique and we do intend to make sure online play is as seamless as possible, though it’s not necessarily a game mode in itself! XD The technical aspects will be discussed at a later time.
the main ones i wish for in games usually are…
online training mode
online team battle
matchmaking options to search for or limit lobbies to players who main certain characters (for learning matchups)
I really like these ideas! Do you mean online team battle as in cooperative play? This is something we’d really like to consider. As for online practice, I assume you mean full access to practice options but with a friend controlling the other character?
EDIT: An idea occured to me for searching by character. Perhaps when a lobby is created, the lobby owner can either choose their character, having it be displayed in the room title and be filterable, or they can choose the blind pick option in which they will select their character at the same time as their opponent. Perhaps the lobby owner can pick both characters upon lobby creation as a sort of invitation for challengers with specific mains?
Sorry about the hiatus! Some recent unfortunate events unfolded that required law intervention and a hospital trip, but everyone is fine now :3 Our artist is about to send me a sprite portrait for one of our main characters that I’ll probably show off in this thread soon, but I’d like to keep up this discussion if possible.
Another note regarding such lobby options I mentioned before. While giving room owners a lot of options to customize a match can seem good, we must be careful not to give TOO many options and generally make it difficult for players to agree on and play with a set of rules.
i’d suggest throwing in anything you can think of or implement into a section called advanced options or something. you don’t have to limit what people are capable of, just display it in a sub-menu.
I agree, have a basic ruleset, call it standard or tournament mode or some shit like that, and then all other options go into custom. So you can search by the standard and anything else is extra. I’m tired, hope you understand what I mean.
I totally understand you not wanting to give too many options so that the playerbase is split or unable to find each other so maybe have it so that if someone is searching by criteria and there are no/few results, it also shows results by the nearest match (and displays that they aren’t exact matches).
Yeah, probably for private matches or unsearchable lobby rooms.
Don’t worry, I gotcha XD
If the game’s as early as it sounds, there’s very little to gain introducing people outside of your core team for discussions like this. I think you should keep this matter internal. There’s been a lot of indy FG projects popping up and I’ve had some concern for some of these guys letting people in on projects that are either too early or too delicate to allow public opinion.
This is especially true if you don’t have a running alpha up, or so much as a well written and clear design/concept document/essay. If if just a conceptual phase with ideas for modes being riffed about, that is not for public participation. Just my two cents. Good luck.