Shattered - New Fighting Game in Development

I’m not even a fan.

Talking about how much of the sprite stays the same and doesn’t hide it. I’m sure you know majority of the sprites in old games reuse chunks yet they look different. It’s cause that the position of said chunks aren’t in the same place. Best example I can think of right now is Jedah’s standing in Vsav. Even though most of majority of the sprite is the same the y movement of the sprite makes it look like there is more going on with the animation. Just having it stop suddenly for a lot of frames makes it look stiffer than it should be.

Hey guys, thanks for the kind words!

Been up to a lot more than this, lemme tell ya. Unfortunately I’m really busy at my actual job, so animation on this has been pretty slow lately. Most of what’s left for Julia is long chunks of animation, like supers, knockdown, throw, that kinda thing, so it’ll take time before we can show off something new in terms of animation.

It’s pretty cool to finally be involved in what has been a childhood dream though: working on a 2d fighter! I’m not a 3d guy, so giving up feature animation to pursue a career in games isn’t really an option. Glad this happened to come my way.
Drawing in pixels presented a whole new challenge in itself, which is pretty cool. I know what you’re talking about, jed, even though I don’t think it’s going that badly so far. Most of the times I reused stuff is in tiny movements, like jabs and such. Just sliding things over is only part of the solution as there is a very tight limit to how far you can take that. One pixel is basically like an inch, maybe two on the character, scale-wise. I even have trouble just drawing her nose sometimes, because it can look weird/too big very quickly. If we were doing this on paper, I’d have no trouble adding tiny movements to things that stay relatively still.
Timing is another thing, since you can’t have a big wind up to a punch or kick, otherwise you get the Prince of Persia jump effect(Vanilla PoP :P), where moves come out way too late. There’s only a few frames to do pretty big, complex moves sometimes and even though it runs at 60fps, it can be a real struggle to fit everything in the short amount of time alloted.

Anyway, these guys have put a lot of thought into this game and we can have endless discussion about even the most basic normal moves. Here’s hoping the time will come soon when we can get some of my buddies in there to help animating all the other characters that are gonna be in this game. There’s several I’m pretty excited about trying out.

So yeah, spread the word, glad you guys like it so far and we’ll keep you posted on any new developments!

Yes I agree, pixel art is hard. Also, a Standing and crouching animation will go a long way.

Off topic example of pixel art is hard.

Spoiler

When I do scripts to games I’m stuck with resolution of the system. So making a small input display so it doesn’t take up a huge strip of the screen with out scaling is quite hard.

http://i.imgur.com/sjDjKsd.png

Since it’s CPS2 I’m working with 224p. So those buttons on the side had to be 8x8 and I have to deal with Pixels aren’t square on cps2 as well. You don’t want to know how many times it took to draw that foot.

:rollseyes:

Standing and crouching animation is not really all that important at the moment. She can stand and crouch. Right now, that’s enough.

I think what he is saying is that the move looks more static because they are shown out of unmoving idle animations.

sooo the soundtrack’s gonna be The Stones, right?

Man I hope not.

We updated the blog with a new post on the Look & Feel of the game!

Check it out on: http://blog.team18k.com/characters/look-feel/

Aaah, noooooo! I’ve been slowly drafting this post in spare moments for over a week now. I guess I’ll just stop editing now and post what I got to. I swear I composed this before your blog post went up!!! Hahaha. I’m pretty proud of what I picked up on, and you might be interested in hearing how it came across to me.

Julia is visually reminiscent of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (the LucasArts point-and-click adventure game) to me on a number of different levels: her clothing, that colour palette and the texture/gradients/shading, the selective emphasis of outlines, the balance of detail against resolution, and to some extent her proportions. And probably some other things that I’m not registering individually. These are all a good thing, in my mind. Her movements and postures and facial expressions have so much personality to them, too.

More generally, it reminds me of old American 2D computer game graphics more than it does any of the typical Japanese or Japan-influenced art styles in old arcade fighting games. Like the high end of the DOS era. Of course you’re working with a higher resolution and more frames, and everything is more kinetic, but I feel like that flavour is there. The spritework has a really sweet classic quality about it.

The attack animations generally feel like they carry a lot of weight behind them. Really going out on a limb: I probably have a bias here (ST!!!) but… are you guys currently thinking you’ll use longer-than-average hitstop?

First of all, it’s even better that you were working on that post before our post, that way we have “confirmation” so to speak, that we’re communicating it well.

As for the hitstop/freeze: Hitstop will be variable per attack strength (unlike ST and KOF98). Hitstop is currently subject to change. It used to range from 7 frames to 15 frames, and it currently ranges from 8 frames to 12 frames. So I guess that qualifies as ‘shorter-than-avarage’ to a ST-biased player :wink:

Especially some of the higher strength of attacks (like her tatsu) looked kind of funny with very high hitstop (it used to be 13 frames, now it’s 11). But it’s something we’ll experiment with, and see how we and testers feel about it.

What you have show looks good.

Thanks deadfrog, that’s exactly what they asked me to do. :slight_smile:
Thank you ascensionX.

(No more like button all of a sudden?)

That’s awesome, I actually really like that you’re trying it out to see what feels right for your game. (And for what it’s worth, I love the feel of Melty too, and that game has like the shortest hitstop ever.)

Are you planning on some frame skip to be in the game like the Capcom games? 12 can become 7 really easily with it.

Hit stop being global value was more a hardware limitation than a design choice. Marvel 2 had where it could be different per attack.

Nope, we’re not doing any frame skip, every frame processed will be drawn on the screen, so that’s nothing to worry about at least.

Hey everybody, it’s been a while since we updated, due to the holidays getting in the way. But that certainly doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting on our asses.

We’ve decided to finally show off the game system, which has now be added as a page to our website: http://blog.team18k.com/system/

Note that quite a few of the systems are still subject to change, and we will be iterating designs and decisions as when we get feedback from upcoming playtests experimenting with these different systems.

We’ve also been making some great progress on the engine and some of the animations, which we’ll be showing off soon.

I don’t like the idea of the “Shatter” gauge filling on hit. It sounds like a guard gauge, which a lot of games have, but you shouldn’t make it harder for someone to defend after they eat a big combo. Just my two cents.

It’s basically a stun gauge.