It shows the last 30 frames of whatever the character is doing. The colors can get a little confusing, but multicolored bars are attacks, because we divide it into the startup, active, and recovery. It also fills up for hitstun, blockstun, and wakeup throw invulnerability frames. Usually you’ll be able to tell what it’s showing you from context.
Something I missed the first time watching the kickstarter video, but figured out later and didn’t like that much:
As I understand it, special moves won’t have ‘motions’ at all, but will simply use diagonals, correct?
I obviously haven’t played it yet, but I can imagine that this could be kinda problematic, or, at least, rather unintuitive to fighting game players. And I can imagine that, blocking something down back, and then trying to punish with a normal, and, instead, dragon punch comes out, could be rather frustrating.
What’s the reason why you didn’t go with a ‘quarter circles only’ approach, where special moves are only done with quarter circles. No half circles, no dragonpunch motion, just quarter circles. It would seem that it would keep the inputs still reasonably accessible without it feeling completely alien to players.
Just noticed this now.
Not liking this at all since it means that you can’t just hold down back to block and then immediately counterpoke without returning the stick to neutral crouch.
Did I just hear you guys say the Neo Geo Pocket fighters had minimal combos? Because seriously, pretty much all the expected KoF combos were in those games, they were actually pretty faithful to the main series games. And SNK vs Capcom Match of the Millennium even had a groove with a chain series. I could get down with some Terry cl.C f.A xx HCF+K DP+K, Kyo cr.BA xx Final Showdown, Iori cr.B cr.A f.A, A xx QCB+C QCB+C QCB+C, Shingo j.C cl.C f.B xx QCFx2 QCB+D, so on and so forth. They were no more minimal combo than KoF98 is. What you may be overlooking is that even though these games only had 2 buttons, they crammed 4 buttons worth of attacks into those 2 buttons so that you could still play KoF like it was KoF.
Also, from the looks of how you’ve simplified and universalized the movelists of every character, or as you say in the video at least, I get the impression that you guys either never played the Neo Geo Pocket fighters or didn’t play them for very long.
At this point, I’d just say “drop it” and let the game develop it’s own identity. In any case, the current features (short combos, heavy emphasis on meter, universal overheads, etc.) make it feel more like a “pocket” 3rd Strike without parries than anything KoF.
Yeah, it’s fine for the game to be it’s own thing, it’s just that my immediate reaction was to be flustered at them advertising it as a Neo Geo Pocket style game and then the game being nothing like a Neo Geo Pocket game in basically any regard besides the art style. I apologize for the outburst, but hopefully people can understand my frustration.
Looks really really good, most fighting games these days seem focused on having players play 75%+ of the time in practice mode instead of real fights to get better.
It would be nice to be able to remap the special moves to quarter circles though. I think it’s great that it’s an option to have them as just a direction and a button since it’s gonna lower the barrier of entry; as easy as quarter circles are to us, there’s no way my non-gamer girlfriend is gonna stick with a fighting game long enough to be able to do it consistently, so this would be a great fighter to get people like that into the game. People that haven’t played many games get very discouraged when they feel like they can’t do even the basic moves the person they’re playing against can. That said, people more experienced with fighting games might get pretty pissed trying to do low kick after having blocked low and accidentally doing a special move and things like that; it wouldn’t hurt to make the controls customizable to fit them as well.
what’s with this not being on SRK front page? there’s a post about some yu yu hakusho thing, and some pokemon thing that might not even be a fighting game, but not this for some reason.
I think this is front page material.
I’ll check with my editors (Ian) if we can run this on the front page.
That said, more support for it on the thread would help.
Would’ve rather seen a Fantasy Strike character I actually play, but I’m happy to see one of those guys appear in a fighting game proper.
+1 for putting this on the front page, the more fighting games that encourage strong fundamentals over gimicks, the better the FGC will become as a whole. Also, more available fighting games on computers means more people joining the FGC overall.
Agree, it’s nice to finally see some Fantasy Strike love in a fighting game.
Yeah this should definitely go on the front page, I don’t see how any fighting game player could be less excited by this than like ios games
C’mon devs, update your thread so it can get to the SRK front page.
From Terry (kineda) in response to whether or not I can run this on the front page.
Maybe you should just decide on a rigid guideline and stick with it.
Hey everyone, sorry we haven’t posted in a while.
We hear you on the diagonal special thing. It’s pretty easy to adapt going neutral down to do your normals on keyboard and d-pad, but on stick/saturnpad it could definitely be a problem. We are looking into an alternate control scheme at the moment that would fix this issue. It wouldn’t be just making quarter circles specials though, we don’t want to force stick players to do a motion that can take up to three frames when a keyboard/pad player can do it in one.
We are currently working on a dev diary talking about the usefulness of the frame data bar during wakeup and during throw invulnerability frames post-wakeup. That’s sort of why the frame data bar got invented in the first place. Hopefully that will be out before Friday.
Front page would be great! We have Divekick and Fantasy Strike cameo characters, so it should be more news than the average fighting game Kickstarter.
The problem with using diagonals for specials is it makes it so that you always get an AA when you’re crouch blocking. It also means that it’s harder to just crouch block and then counterpoke with a crouching normal since you have to move to down from down+back first.
MikeZ mentioned you guys the other night during the twitch feed. I can’t remember what he said, but he’s also against the diagonal specials. I like SG, but I don’t consider MikeZ to be the authority on fighters. Still, people listen to him.
Yea, the alternate control scheme isn’t going to have diagonal special move inputs for basically that reason.
EDIT: Here’s exactly what we decided: We’re going to give players the option to map shortcuts for the special moves. Shortcuts can be a button or a combination, and when you map a shortcut for a particular special it will disable the normal diagonal input and remap it entirely. This preserves the Neo Geo-style 2-button scheme for players who want it but gives others the option to choose whatever control scheme they like. If you want to play with three buttons like Mike Z suggested, you can pick a third button and set your shortcuts as that button neutral, that button + back, that button + down, and that button + forward. Or if you’re someone who is maybe more adjusted to something like a MOBA, you can just set each to its own button.
We’ll talk about this some more in the dev diary.