Rumble Pack : New indie fighting game

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
1

Hello everyone!

I am here to reveal Rumble Pack! What’s Rumble Pack you ask? Well, to put it simply, it’s the greatest fighting game ever made. Seriously though, it’s a 3 year project that started off as “something to do” and turned into the master of my free time.

I intended Rumble Pack to be an easy to learn game with some mildly casual elements implemented (i.e. easy to execute commands). However, I also intended it to be difficult to master and have a great deal of flexibility when it comes to how players choose to play. I have played a great deal of fighting games where the characters that were most appealing to me were rarely the most fun for me. I had sometimes said “man I wish this guy was faster”. I’m sure many of us have had this exact sentiment and with that in mind, I’ve developed the 3 fighting styles feature (probably needs an official name). Hopefully, you’ll find more of the characters appealing this way.
Down to basics. Rumble Pack is a 4 button fighting game with a light, mid, strong and a Radix button (to be explained later). Pretty much everything you already know from fighting games transfers over - from cross ups to linking to extending combos through OTG attacks; it’s all here. What sets Rumble Pack apart from other fighters, however, is the art style and the Radix system.
It’s hard to say what, exactly, influenced the art style, but it’s something that just came along after years of drawing. All of the characters, effects, GUI, etc were created by me; either animating by hand in Maya, or a combination of the two.

The Radix system allows for a very flexible style of play that will allow you to play each character the way you want to. There are currently 3 fighting styles: Hex style (for more defensive players), Decimal style (for the rush-down oriented), and Binary style (for the technical player). As an example, consider Ryu, Ken, and Akuma. They have similar move sets, but they play very differently from each other and even have totally different approaches as to how your offense should be utilized. They key difference here is the 3 fighting styles share almost no identical attacks. They are very different from each other. That is not to say, however, that the theory surrounding the character changes per fighting style. For example, MC Supercut is a rush-down character pretty much all around. The difference between the 3 styles is how you would like to approach rushing someone down. Decimal style is for those who want an unrelenting, all-out offense. Hex style is for those who like to wait for a mistake and then rush. Binary style caters to those who like to set up their attacks and then drop large amounts of damage in a short period of time. Radix is all about how you want to play the character.

In addition to the different types of attacks, each style is given a set of special abilities that are assigned to the Radix button. Typically, at the cost of some special meter, pressing the Radix button will perform special abilities such as rapid cancelling (Binary style) or activating a custom combo mode (Decimal style). These special abilities can be crucial to your character’s success. For example, Hex Yoko, while adept at comboing and maintaining a high level of pressure, has no reversal options at all. If he gets pinned down, it’s pretty much over. He does, however have access to Hex style’s special parry which can help to alleviate pressure.

Having said all that, I intend to release Rumble Pack fairly soon (hopefully before the end of the year).Oh, did I mention it will be totally free?10 characters and 4 stages will be included with 3 complete fighting styles for nearly the entire cast.Until that time comes, check the links below for video footage of the game.

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Finally, I suppose I should mention; yes this game was developed in MUGEN, but do not expect broken, ridiculous game play. I have taken balancing this game quite seriously while having help from seasoned fighting vets. I promise you wont see typical MUGEN nonsense here.

It should also be noted that this version of Rumble Pack is a playable proof of concept developed in a freeware engine. The final version may or may not look or function differently.

EDIT (09/15/2012):

Here we are! Finally the release of Rumble Pack! Simply click the link below to download. To install, just double click the downloaded file to extract everything. The game is fully portable, so you’ll be able to extract it wherever you want, though I recommend not playing it through any sort of USB device as you will experience loading times.

Rumble Pack 1.6000 (09/15/2012)

Once you have extracted Rumble Pack, simply double click “mugen.exe”. By default, it will try to run in full screen at 1280x720. If you have a resolution lower than that or if you do not wish to play in full screen press Alt+Enter to play in a window. Keep in mind that if your resolution is set too low, things will get cut off. Having said that, to optimally play Rumble Pack, you’ll need at least a Core 2 Duo Processor, 2GB ram, and a decent graphics card and monitor capable of getting to at least 1280x720. It should be noted that there are ways to lower and modify the system settings for MUGEN, but there is no way for me to put them in the options menu. Sorry about that. If you need help with this PM me (or google it).

Finally, I HIGHLY recommend that you check out the included instruction manual. There’s some stuff going on in this game that you likely don’t know about. Plus there’s info on the default controls and other basic game info. It’s especially useful if you’ve never touched MUGEN before.

I should also note that, due to recent changes, some of what you’ll see in the system demo video above is now out of date. The video needs to be redone and re-uploaded. I apologize for any confusion it may cause.

Known issues:
[LIST]
[]There appears to be a problem with some character’s voices being too quiet. Working on a fix now.
[]The AI for some characters is lacking.
[/LIST]
Missing / Pulled features:
[LIST]
[]Currently, not everyone has a taunt (C+X). I wont bore you with the details, but files were lost…
[]Similar to above, not all Binary styles have Overdrive attacks (QCFx2+ABC)
[]Not all characters have all 3 fighting styles. This is due to time constraints. They will, however, be made available shortly.
[/LIST]
Online Version:
[LIST]
[]This will be released separately (hopefully by the end of today).
[]It will be buggy, it wont have lobbies (you’ll need the IP of your partner), and the interface is not pretty but is functional.
[]Currently, the only issue is certain effects are scaling incorrectly. As minor as this sounds, its actually a huge pain to fix and is very time consuming. Also my stages aren’t working so well. I guess that’s two issues.
[/LIST]
Other notes:
[LIST]
[]If you find any bugs/infinites/general technical problems, feel free to PM me to let me know. You can post it here in this thread, but I’d rather you didn’t.
[/LIST]
Other contacts :
[LIST]
[]Like us on Facebook here : http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rumble-Pack/212414002133803
[LIST]
[]You’ll find news here
[/LIST]
[]Check out our Tumblr here: http://rumblepk.tumblr.com/
[LIST]
[]You’ll find random musings related to Rumble Pack here as well as behind the scenes development work.
[]You can also directly ask me questions here.
[/LIST]
[]Subscribe to our channel here : http://www.youtube.com/user/rumblepack10
[LIST]
[]You’ll find related videos here and (once we start doing them) combo videos and recorded matches between the developers.
[]I also intend to record online matches once they are made available
[/LIST]
[]Check out our SRK thread here:
[][LIST]
[]You’ll find discussions from fighting fans here
[/LIST]
[*]In the future, I will also be broadcasting play on some streaming site (not sure which one yet). I also lack the equipment to do so, currently. I’ll post it in this spot once it’s ready.
[/LIST]

2

If you don’t have proper voices for your game don’t jack them from other games, it sounds awful.
It’s better to not have them for the time being.

3

Dude it looks awesome!!!

shhhh

4

Shouts out to the creator for not using words like BEAT or HIT for the combo counter. Praise be to the BasedGod for thy great word known as SWAG has finally graced it’s holyness into a FG at last.

Honestly though, it doesn’t look that bad. I would give it a shot but KOF XIII drops tomorrow.

5

Keep the Melty Blood voices in Melty Blood please.

Otherwise I’d very much love to play this.

6

Pretty interesting concept. I’d like to see how this pans out.

Sigh @ no MUGEN netcode.

7

You do have a point, but they are just meant to be place holders until I can get the normal ones recorded (hopefully soon).

Heh, well once I finish the story and reveal it to everyone, perhaps my choice for using SWAG will make slightly more sense. Also I live in California, so it’s sort of required.

Maybe someone will accidentally leave them in as an option. By accident of course.

Yeah no netcode for it hurts, but I’m currently working to find a way to make this work anyways. Also, I’m talking to a few local arcades that may be willing to have this available to play. Granted it wont exactly help if you don’t live around where I do, but it’s sort of the best I can do at this moment.

8

Y NO LOW PARRY?! Y THERE PARRY & REFLECTOR?!
Y YOU CAN INPUT special~6+attack AND GET OPTION SELECT PARRY\SPECIAL?

9

So basically…
Binary - Full/ASW style, Hex - Crescent/MB style, Decimal - Half/Rushdown right?
I think I saw the alpha watching a few MUGEN indie games two years or so.
However, its the little things that throw me off? Burst Dash? Instant step-in teleports?
The combo proration seems pretty hard on a lot of combos.
And then there’s Yoko. Oh lord, I see Nanaya’s shenanigans with him already.
Is the hitbox view not going to be locked just in case of problems?

10

I’m going to try to answer this based on what I think you’re trying to ask me. I used to have a low parry, but due to the speed of the game and due to the cancellability of many moves, I felt it made parry to risky to do and thus not worth it. The parry and reflector do different things. Parry doesn’t always put you at an advantage and it’s free to do. Parrying is really great for negating chip damage and, if you’re up close enough, can potentially put you in an advantageous position. More often than not, though parrying ends up putting you at best -1 frame. You’ll very likely not be able to punish after parrying unless your opponent does something unsafe . The reflector, on the other hand, guarantees you the advantage. It just costs meter to use. With regard to that particular option select, you’ll just end up grabbing (assuming that you press light+special). A good option select is actually forward+jab. That tends to work very vell on characters with 2 and 3 frame jabs.

I definitely got the idea for the 3 styles from Actress Again and I suppose that breakdown fits. I mean it’s not exactly like that, but it is a good comparison. Burst dash may seem strange, but think of it like an FADC. It just sort of combines the super armor property and the dash into one move. Out of curiosity, what do you mean by “instant step-in teleports”?

By combo-proration do you mean damage scaling? If so, I’ve recently completely reworked damage scaling to work like this: after the third hit, each landed attack decays the next attack’s damage by 92%. This progressively stacks until eventually you’re doing no damage (kicks in ~35 hits). Multi-hit moves only scale after the last hit and supers are not internally scaled; meaning if you are currently at 50% scaling, the super will do exactly 50% damage regardless of how many hits it does AND the number of hits applied towards scaling only amount to 1. If you manage to combo out of a super you’ll be doing pretty well, though typically the only way to do this is to Rapid Cancel and by that point you’ve already spent 2 meters. It should also be noted that some of the characters (Sofie in particular) have really really low damage output.

If, by combo-proration you meant “some of the combos seem hard to do” then that’s sort of what I wanted. I’d like this game to be easy to pickup but I want challenging links in order to have expanded combo for the more advanced players who choose to learn them.

Yoko is a very impressive character to watch, I’ll admit. Though he looks a lot better than he really is. He is absolutely terrible with anti-airs (in other words, he has no reliable method of doing so) and he does not have a reversal other than his special back dash. On top of that, he requires a lot of work to win. I’ll give you a quick run down on how he plays.

Yoko is a stance character. In Rumble Pack there’s going to be a few of these. What this means is you’ll perform a standing normal attack (or certain specials) and continue to hold a button. By doing so, you shift into a different stance with a set of different normals. While in these stances, you can’t block, jump, walk, or crouch. You can only attack and dash. The stances, however, have ridiculously good normals. Basically you have to shift, constantly, between stances to get decent combos and damage.

I don’t see any reason to disable hitbox viewing. I’d like people to be able to tell me my hitboxes suck so I can fix them.

11

This looks more weeaboo than Skullgirls.

That’s hard to do. Congratulations.

12

The select screen looks like a typical deviantArt friends list box. Are you sure this is going to be the diversity of the game? I don’t see any heavy Zangief-like types in the cast, and it looks most like ‘fursona vs OCs’ on variation

13

2 liero116
Then please add link to your game. All I can find is Rumble Pack 1.031d where parry have frame advantage.

14

Any game without a traditional grappler is…not as good as a game with a traditional grappler.

15

Luckily for me I didn’t play melty blood, so the voices are to new to me! :smiley: I’ll try it out.

16

its cool that you actually put forth the effort into making a game, unlike most of srk’s “ill write the story!” guys.

17

First off, good job on getting this done so far. Making a fighting game this big must have been a lot of work and it’s one thing I’ve been wanting to do myself. Saw the system video and some gameplay and it all seems pretty solid and I would like to play it. Please finish this thing.
This will sound harsh, but I also gotta say that I really don’t like the art and the character designs are very uninteresting to me.

18

congrats on finishing the game and stuff :slight_smile:

19

Despite how it looks, the characters are very diverse. I have spent very little time on deviantArt, so I’m not sure what you mean. With regard to heavy types, there are actually 2. One is a traditional grappler (Tsukiko) and the other (Nadia) has a fighting style which is a mixed grappler like Abel. Tsukiko’s style of grappling changes depending on which fighting style you pick. If you select Decimal, it’s not as traditional and it relies on mix ups. Her Hex style, however, is very similar to playing as Zangief.

The most current public version of Rumble Pack is actually 1.031d. There is a private beta version out to a select few and it’s up to 1.410 as of yesterday. I stopped releasing versions to the public because I wanted to make some big changes. The games has actually drastically changed between 1.031 and 1.410. I’ll be releasing it soon, once I completely work everything out that I want to. I’m expecting mid-to late December.

I have to say that I was fully aware that some people would be put off by the art style in Rumble Pack. I did it anyways because I liked it this way and I figured that some people would even like it just because of the art style. What I’m trying to say is that I’m not offended at all that you don’t like it, but I’m sure impressed that you still want to play it.

Here’s the thing; the game’s not done yet and even after I release it, I’ll still be adding new stuff to it like stages, characters and music. I fully intend to continue to provide content for this game up until I get fully caught up on the next version of it. I’m basically working on porting this game to another engine so I can have more control over what goes on in it. More details on that will come later.

The funny thing is that I sort of suck at story development…

Can’t wait to see what you, and everyone else, thinks once it’s out!

20

Looks pretty cool, will definitely check out.