Shattered - New Fighting Game in Development

[AirLancer]

Reading the word “shatter” so many times in such a short space of time is making it sound hilarious…

[phoenixnl]

I wrote up an update on our blog on our plans concerning netplay.

http://blog.team18k.com/gameplay/netplay/

[phoenixnl]

On April 18-19-20 there will be a large competitive game event in the Netherlands: “The Party”. This year there will also be a AE and UMvC3 tournament (by the name of RSD x TheParty). Shattered will be there, showing off a playable build of the game.

I hope that some of you will be able to make it! And those who can’t, we’ll of course try to record match footage, and hopefully we’ll get some screen time on the stream at the event.

[Boodendorf]

Wow this looks great! I’ll definitely follow this closely.

[COAL]

We’re really excited since that build will (if everything goes as it does now) include a lot of game mechanics like shatter and super. So you will pretty much be able to play ‘real’ game rounds.

[COAL]

A new post for our blog! This time a bit of in-depth about character design! http://blog.team18k.com/design/220/

We have previously discussed a large portion of the system mechanics, both in our blog posts and on our System page. But, while we set out to make a simple but engaging game system, it is only part of what makes it the game. The other half is arguably the one that will be much harder to get working properly: getting every moveset of every character balanced, while staying different enough to deliver good character diversity.

While we do not intend to make every character so different that it is as if they come from different games, we want to have wildly varied movesets.This however forced us to make some strict agreements so that it would prevent designs from going overboard.

One of the most important limitations we have set early on was that no character would have character-specific set of resources.

The basic resources in the game are:

- Super bar
- Health bar
- Shatter bar
- Time

The amount of impact these will have, differs per character and resource type. Super bar, for instance, will always play a massive role for every character, while fighters that rely on health for special mechanics will be comparatively rare.

One example where we changed the impact of the super bar would be for Roxanne, whose supers are more akin to EX moves than to actual supers. We initially planned to split her super bar up into smaller segments, but we eventually decided against that, as that would qualify as a character-specific subsystem, which is something we specifically try to avoid. Instead, her super bar will fill much faster than that of other characters, which is used to power stronger versions of her special moves, but these will obviously lack the punch of actual supers.

This gave us some issues with her shatter super, which obviously uses the same bar, possibly giving her way too many opportunities to use that super on a shattered opponent. While we could lower the damage of this super, to be more like her “EX moves”, we felt like this would reduce the excitement of landing a shatter super. Instead, we want to solve this by lowering her overall shatter damage and thus decreasing the chance of shattering her opponent.

Another example is one of our future characters, which will feature a cancel that the player can use at any moment to reset their frames to neutral, effectively resetting the character and giving the possibility to retaliate out of blockstun or to extend combos. This ability uses the super bar as its resource, just like her super moves do. Of course, this ability needs to be balanced in such a way, that her super moves do not become useless, while keeping her from becoming too strong.

The mechanics that use shatter/time/health as resource are more difficult to implement, and are definitely further down the road. The chances that we use time as a resource to power a character’s abilities are very slim. Note that utilizing a resource doesn’t mean to us that it will necessarily be consumed, it could also mean that having X amount of health/time left has a certain effect on a character.

Over the next few weeks we will do a more in-depth introduction to our 3 other alpha characters Usha, Cole and Roxanne.

[phoenixnl]

We set up a Facebook page for Shattered. So if you’re interested in following the development a bit more closely, like us on facebook!: https://www.facebook.com/ShatteredFighter

[COAL]

Tonight we’ll be playtesting and maybe running a mini tournament at LLL.MBR’s bootcamp. It is still an early pre-alpha build with some bugs still around and the super and shatter system is not yet implemented. So far people have been very excited to play it, and we’re getting lots of useful feedback. We’re seeing some nice footsie and mindgames developing as the guys are exploring the game.

We will try to find out if there is some capability for streaming, otherwise we will just end up making some videos and post it later!

[COAL]

Blog post about our adventure last weekend:

http://blog.team18k.com/gameplay/playtest-at-mbrs-bootcamp/

Last weekend we had a good opportunity to playtest our game at LLL.MBR’s bootcamp. More than a dozen people tried Shattered over 2 days and gave their input. While the game is still in a fairly bare bones state, the people trying the game weren’t hampered at all in exploring the game, developing inventive footsie games and quickly discovering new tech. People seemed to enjoy the game a lot and were eager to give suggestions and their opinions.

Seeing people enjoy our game is incredibly satisfying and one of the reasons why we are making this game, and why we will continue to push forward.

We were aware of the presence of some bugs in this build, and another few others were discovered, but overall the game is really starting to come together and become a truly playable experience.

We’ve of course made some recordings of the matches as well! In these videos you will see one of the most prominent bugs that we were aware of even before this testing session: Multiple fireballs can be on the screen at once. The players were quick to find out that this meant that throwing fireballs is very strong, as you will see in the videos below.

The first match is between Pr3y on the left and LLL.MBR on the right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=najJKXq3zvo

We also ran a small tournament with the guys present at the bootcamp. We’ve made some recordings of the finals between LLL.MBR (left) and EX Snorlax (right), some of the rounds of these finals can be seen in this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEqN7nvm8Ug

Shoutouts to Miku for managing to unintentionally crash our engine every 20 seconds.

[MooiboyRoy]

hi guys,

MBR here and I got the honours of playing this game and winning the first tournament ever held :D.

The game feels really old skool. The fireball game is really strong and DP’s are also invincible. Think of it like Super Turbo.
But there are other ways around fireballs after fooling around with the current build for a while.
If you time it right you can just go forward by cr.mk’ing under fireballs and putting insane pressure on your opponent.
Combine this with jump ins and hops and you got a good basic offense to work with.
I recon the shatter system will also add to the offensive capabilities of the character Julia.

Needless to say if you outread your opponent you can always find that window to defend yourself.
Whiffpunishing is very effective and if you bait a shoryu or throw you can do 40% damage.
I personally really like this balancing as it promotes a great value to the better player.
There is no cheap winning (yet), as in you have to stay solid and win solid.

I’m greatly anticipating this game as this game feels like taking the best from Super Turbo and the KOF series and adding it’s own flavour to it.

[COAL]

New blog post:

As promised we will commence with introducing our future characters. The first character that we will start working on after Julia, is the monk Ushah.

Ushah is a veteran of many battles, his unwavering resolve to combat supernatural creatures has made him an experienced and formidable warrior, but it has had a high cost on his body. Scarred, battered and having lost one of his arms in one of his many battles, he now wields an ancient artifact fused with his prosthetic arm. The artifact resembles the Lion, a long extinct animal in the world of Shattered, but revered as a beast of mythical proportions as a symbol of courage and perseverance.

Ushah is less mobile than other characters, and this also reflects in his moves. Ushah does not have moves that can be used to improve his movement. Rather than that, he has moves that allows him to strongly defend the position he is in, while slowly inching closer to his opponent.

Most of his heavy normals have armor (meaning that parts of the body during the move can absorb an attack before hitting the opponent), he can also generate a steam attack from his mechanical arm that has a pretty big area of effect and is able to negate enemy fireballs.

His normal attacks are strong, long-ranged attacks, which are slower than those of other characters. For example, Ushah’s hard punch is a high straight punch with his mechanical arm, whose armor can block jump-in attacks, and blast straight through. As such, the move is quite a potent anti-air move.

Once Ushah is able to get close, the opponent is forced to choose to stay standing and risk getting grabbed or jump away from Ushah’s command grab and risk getting hit by one of Ushah’s excellent normals that can catch jump-aways.

Below you find a concept art of Ushah’s mechanical Lion arm, and an early concept of Ushah.

http://blog.team18k.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/LionHead2.png

http://blog.team18k.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/monk.png

http://blog.team18k.com/characters/ushah/

[phoenixnl]

All the people who’ve tested our game so far, have always been very nice to overlook problems with the game, which has of course still very much in development. One of the obvious problems in the last testing session a couple of weeks ago was a lack of corner knockbacks, which led to corner infinites.

But now testers need not worry about avoiding the problem anymore, as corner knockback has been implemented! First half of the video below shows the old corner infinites, and the second half shows what it looks like now.

We’re now working hard on getting all the features of our game system implemented for the testing session in April at RSD x The Party.

[JohnGrimm]

The push back looks weird, like you’re still moving after your move already happened. I think it would look cleaner if the pushback only lasted during the active frames or something similar.

[phoenixnl]

The push back looks weird, like you’re still moving after your move already happened. I think it would look cleaner if the pushback only lasted during the active frames or something similar.

The pushback lasts as long as the hitstun of your opponent lasts. So if a move is positive on block, you continue moving backwards after recovery. But that is basically the way it is done in every fighting game (definitely in all KOFs and Street Fighters). I agree that it’s still ‘slidy’-looking though. The way the knockback decelerates is something that definitely still needs tweaking, it probably doesn’t decelerate quickly enough, which makes it so that after recovery you sometimes actually still slide quite a lot, instead of just 1px per frame.

[Zinac]

Shattered doesn’t seem to be a combo heavy game, so push back probably isn’t that important of a balancing issue. Just make it feel nice. The faster your characters slide, the less likely you can get more hits in a combo, even if the final distance of the push back is the same. It’s a critical balancing point for Fearless Night, because it can make or break corner pressure.

[JohnGrimm]

Shattered doesn’t seem to be a combo heavy game, so push back probably isn’t that important of a balancing issue.

KoF98 isn’t a combo heavy game either and the push back is probably one of the most important design choices SNK made with the game. You don’t need a focus on combos for push back to matter.

[nsc]

I’m digging how that pushback looks!

[COAL]

New blog post:

Cole is a former Inquisition soldier, he used to be part of one of the elite mutant hunting brigades, equipped with powerful hook weapons that were used for both combat and terrain scaling. He is now on the run, branded as a defector by the Inquisition as they consider him a threat to their cause.

While Cole will be a ‘basic’ character in the sense that he has a lot of basic and easy to understand tools, his moveset has its own little twist. Cole does not have special moves in the traditional sense. He has a set of normal moves, just like every other character, but besides that he has a second set of ‘normals’ that can be accessed by holding back or down/back for a short period of time. As soon as he is charged, all his normal attacks will change into these ‘charged normal’ attacks.

Cole’s regular normals are simply a variety of punches and kicks, but his charged attacks uses the hook on chain that is attached to his glove. For example his crouching hard punch is a uppercut move that works well as an anti-air. The charged crouching hard punch will grab people out of the air with the chain and slam them onto the ground. Other moves will allow him to use the hook for sweeping, poking, launching himself towards the opponent, pulling the opponent towards him or latching himself to the ground from the air.

Next time we will discuss the last of our four alpha characters Roxanne,

http://blog.team18k.com/characters/cole/

[Mad_Mistress]

That is a really interesting concept. Can’t wait to see Cole in action.

[COAL]

And another!

ALSO: We will be showing a pre-alpha version this weekend at RSD x The Party @ Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Get hype.

Roxanne Vasquez is a famous Inquisitor, one that descended out of a long line of commanders, investigators and warriors. Where most Inquisitors specialize in hunting mutants, vixens or cultists, Roxanne has secretly been fighting the rotten parts within the Inquisition and the entirety of the armed forces. Armed with musket, sword and two decades of field experience, Roxanne is a force to be reckoned with.

We have always made an effort to make a proper mixture of characters that are innovative, and introducing the classic archetypes in our game system. After Cole, a pretty experimental character, we have now arrived at the fourth and last alpha character: Roxanne Vasquez.

Roxanne is a charge character in the classic sense, as such she has solid pokes and quick specials. Unlike other characters that have one or two supers (excluding the shatter super), Roxanne has powered-up versions of every special attack in her repertoire. While these powered-up moves lack the devastating damage of most supers in our game, they are potent reversals that should keep the opponent on their toes all the time.

In lieu with this design, Roxanne builds bar way faster than the average characters. This allows her to incorporate these supers into her combos more often than other characters.

We had some worries about how this will pan out with her shatter super, since she would build super at such a rate that hitting a shatter would almost always end up in a shatter super. We have chosen to not diminish the damage on her shatter super but rather to make hitting a shatter a bit more difficult for her than it would be for other characters.

Roxanne’s game plan is about about zoning, strong reversals, and decent pressure strings. Roxanne is a solid wall with strong footsies, but lacking the superb offensive capabilities of grappler and mix-up characters.

http://blog.team18k.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Roxanne_cropped2.png

Characters in development stage and subject to change.

http://blog.team18k.com/characters/roxanne/