Why am I not making a fighting game?

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
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Over the weekend, I managed to pop down to a local USFIV alpha location test here in Nagoya. I was quite happy because due to the time of the day there were not so many patrons, enough however to try out a bit of this and that with humans. So, in all, a good time.

Then I came back to SRK and saw the explosion of posts and complaints and was rather intruiged. Aside from the usual theory fighter nonsense so common here and elsewhere I noticed a lot of familiar Capcom hating. I have no truck in this debate - I rather like SFIV, I’m an AE weekend warrior, trying to get better by playing smarter and without blaming my medium.

Then it struck me: there are so many people whining about how capcom are messing up the franchise, “don’t know what they’re doing” etc. While, no doubt a lot of this is just zeitgeist hyperbole made worse by contemporary social media short attention span, attention seeking modes of communication it did seem rather unbalanced (ho, ho! Pun intended!).

So many “experts” and “opinions” around here on how to make and balance a ***perfect ***fighting game but no one it seems to want to actually walk up to the plate and make one.

With all the access to knowledge, skills and people power we have as a community why aren’t we making better indie games? Are we going to see an explosion of customer produced products at high quality or just more app store style get rich spam? Now that the playing field is somewhat level - what are we, the FGC going to bring to the community in terms of concrete innovation and new franchises, etc. It no longer takes a giant corporation such as Capcom to bring a game to completion, so where is the innovation, the inspiration and the risk taking of a new generation? Just some food for thought.

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  1. Mike Z
  2. I’ve often wondered about the motivations behind SRK giving out scholarships for games design
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yes your random srker can talk a big game but did you need to make a thread calling a non existent bluff? theres lots of reasons why someone can’t just go out and start building their dream game right now.

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See, that’s the thing. There’s an element of bluff calling but it’s also to do with a call to arms. Why aren’t we doing it ourselves? Forums such as SRK are an amazing resource overburdened by trash. (Frankly, that’s not just in the FGC, it’s everywhere, all over the internet)

Meanwhile…

Why haven’t we developed the 2D FG equivalent of the Unreal engine. A tool which devs (pro or otherwise) have to create and fine tune games - whether by working on templates or completely new ideas?

Why do we keep getting the same recycled pseudo-anime aesthetics from Western developers (SG is all fine as a game but the visual style? 90s Nickelodeon via yesterday’s played out loli-manga is kind of lame)?

What directions will we take when the tools for indie developers (whether Microsoft or Sony or PC) are in our laps?

So, this thread is not just a bluff call, but a call to discussion. Should anyone be interested.

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People have tried in general. It takes a lot of dedication and most people here seem to want to throw out ideas for what they want in a fighting game but not to many are keen in putting in the midnight oil and slaving for hundreds of hours on animation. Also a lot of the ideas I’ve seen become an amalgamation of what people want from previous fighting games rather then a unique new fighter. Doesn’t help when you get a bunch of fighting game fans together everyone has there own favorites which they want the game to be based on.

Programming a fighting game and everything isn’t hard. Generally the difficulty of an indie studio is much, much more in the asset creation and production (models and animation or shit ton of sprite animation). Paying an independent studio per character is also going to run you ~$1k for high quality models that are rigged and textured with most likely some tuning. Add in another $200 or so for a lot of concept art. Then add in each animation which will probably cost you ~$40-100 per move for 3d. Sprite animations will cost you $200/10 frames (that was a price I got when looking around for 720p sprites and it was a bit on the cheap / sketchy side) generally but could be more or less just depends. Also you need touchups? Might have to pay more. Each character needs ~20+ moves counting movement animations, hit animation, block animations many which need standing and crouching versions. You can imagine this gets expensive quickly. Also you will need to redo some of them at a later point. Intro cut scenes or something like that will cost more. Essentially to make a quality project for 8 characters or so you are going to be spending at least $40k (that’s a pretty low ball to be fair) unless you can get someone to that extremely tedious work for free (power to you).

Programming a fighter is pretty easy but netcode is another monster. Do your programmers have netcode experience? Are you going on console? Each console has it’s own rules so you can’t necessarily role out some generic p2p scheme on some (xbox …) like you could playstation or pc. Oh you want on consoles? Well if you don’t write the engine from scratch you have to pay a console fee to use something like unreal or unity which will cost at least $30-40k per console platform unless you get a publisher to pay some of these fees in exchange for some of the profit. Neither of those work? Write a multi-platform engine yourself.

This also isn’t fun. This is work. So you need leadership and people getting shit done they probably won’t want to do after a few weeks. If some guy isn’t getting paid you can’t exactly just be like ‘oh yeah i know you have your paying job but can you maybe not sleep for the next 3 days and catch shit up?’. Really relying on professional or students trying to be professionals really is necessary to make a quality product.

Also imo you are making an original IP. This means you don’t have guaranteed sales like Capcom who has iconic characters that people will pay for if they shill out feces. You need originality and something likeable or else your just making a game the community will drop after a couple months like everything not SFIV or UMVC3 the last few years.

Source: tried but between work and everyone not having a lot of animation experience things didn’t work out well. Wrote a fighting game engine on top of some 3rd party libraries in Unity3D and could easily port to Unreal. Cut out because I realized how much money it was going to cost just to get to the make it showable for kickstarter phase.

Also if you are wanting a 2d fighting game engine without netcode there is a lot of bare bones ones that exist. I know someone tried paintown, but there are others. I like mine personally because of the hitbox editor i designed being really intuitive / easy and letting you completely design everything about the move and then play it back in editor but it isn’t production ready and can’t be released because of some 3rd party dependencies.

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Thanks for the info, really enlightening. To be honest, as a programming luddite myself, I hadn’t even really thought about netcode… which I imagine, given the state of net code in a number of big brand titles is not an uncommon occurrence.

What’s interesting to me is are we going to start seeing a situation in which the cost overheads start to come down due to scripting tools, copy and paste code and even automation of animating processes. The technology is changing so quickly it’s hard to know what’s coming next.

The new IP issue is rather interesting. We are starting to see a situation in which yesterday’s behemoths (Capcom, SNK etc) are having to change business strategies to account for differing gaming habits within their customer base. Given that FGs are a niche genre, with shrinking budgets and profits to be found in cross media licensing it is likely that the current re-Golden age of fighters made by the big boys is over.

Will diversification result in a further splintered audience? Will players become more tourist-y about their FGing habits? Are we starting to see a situation in which FG tech is becoming standardised, entry barriers becoming lower and high level play a given?

And to anyone thinking I was unfairly ragging on SG in my earlier post - It’s a solid game with flaws (what games don’t have them) it’s just to me personally the visual design while well done is not my steez. SG also has the best overall fighting game tutorial I’ve ever seen (that said, the new Blazblue and all Arcsys games have excellent presentation in this area).

To return to your costing. I find that so interesting and it reveals the double edged sword of kickstarter and other crowd funding technologies. Even if you get what you need, it’s such a large investment of time and labour that you really have to consider it as a business venture, have a solid plan etc. Anyway, no answers from me but I’m still interested in thinking all this through.

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Happy to look into anything you have to share. Again, definitely a skill set outside of my league but I would be very interested to help work on something. Again, work, life, kids etc make it hard to give it full attention but with a clear strategy etc I’d be happy to step up. I’m a better analyst, number cruncher than player anyway…

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Understand the costs i gave you had nothing to do with scripting / programming / playtesting / game-design if you don’t have a quality 2d fighter engine those will be additional costs and some amount of that will be required. Also for a fighting game the game has to be iterated many times in beta to get a quality product to the consumers on the first try. The costs I gave you were for assets only and I promise you there is almost no way at all to reduce those without reducing the quality of your game. Might get better prices but it still is going to cost alot. Even in a fighting game engine if you go 2d you are going to have to hand place each hitbox,hurtbox, and pushbox. In 3d you can some generation schemes but for a 3d fighter as Ono pointed out in some of the original SFIV interviews you can’t just do traditional drag and drop 3d game collision because it doesn’t behave as you would expect. This is why SFIV still uses hitbox based collision to give it that traditional 2d game feel (hit spheres are also acceptable for people who are going to nitpick … they accomplish the same thing) Plus you don’t always want a move hitting only where the animation is for game balance so there are issues there.

Also there are some patent issues with some stuff you wouldn’t expect like adjusting controls as the character select screen … which is as retarded as it sounds but someone has a patent on that (or did haven’t looked in awhile).

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Their is also the fact while one game may not have done it “right” their is more than likley another game that does. Personally if one game isn’y my cup of tea. than I just try different flavors till I find one that is.

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Although totally obvious/predictable those additional costs are very interesting. It’s the sort of thing that a lot of complainers on SRK, EH, CU etc don’t seem to realise. You’re talking about an indie project and the amount of time and cash required - imagine the same thing but on a huge AAA level title. The costs, both financially and in terms human resources must be huge.

Being a player not a maker, what you say about hitboxes, 2D and 3D is so interesting. It’s making respect the work of indie developers (such as the folk behind Chaos Code) a lot more.

In your opinion, what kind of directions do you think (indie) game making will take in order to keep costs down or even reduce them significantly? It’s a problematic comparison but, if people can keep churning out sub-par quality smartphone apps, are we any closer to a FG equivalent?

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I don’t know why you’re under the impression that one has to spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of work hours to create a fighting game to know when someone does something questionable in a fighting game.

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Wuh?

Who are you talking about (ie - the actor responsible for executing the the “something questionable”)? Character in a fighting game? Player playing the fighting game? Developer making the game?

Periods, commas, subjects and objects… got em? Use em!

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The community did make a fighting game. It was called Dive Kick.

But speaking seriously, a fighter developed by the best and brightest of the community and somehow sponsored by the community at large would be interesting. It has no chance of happening because everyone has different ideas of what makes a great fighting game.

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Nice gag.

Meanwhile, diversity and disparity in opinions while frequently leading to stalemates, could actually be productive. Here’s a few example scenarios (again, thought up by me, if any of them are too over the top or seemingly impossible, let me know. And why.):

  1. The focus on indie development with the new gen of consoles could lead to a greater number of game creators. Diversity and disagreement in this case seems almost irrelevant. After all, people working on similar things tend to attract similarly minded people. And since the talent pool (and let’s not forget the whining pool of shit that seems to be pooling around the feet of the FGC) is increasing I can’t see that it would be a problem for coders etc to find a home.

Remember, your average arm chair theory-fighter just wants to be the director/CEO/社長 etc. Meanwhile there are hundreds and thousands (and growing) of talented (amateur) programmers, artists, animators looking for platforms to get exposure, to have their work on display, to develop portfolios, resumes etc. Agreement on what to make might not be so hard provided there is diversity and channels available to pool talent with similar outlooks.

  1. The development of more sophisticated game creation tools. Like I said in the initial post - we might start to see a shift in who designs once the entry barriers are lowered. Sure, it might result in some (a lot??) cash grab crap (a la the app market) but can you imagine something created by some kid who loves FGs and just created something new and original in his/her free time?

We are going to start seeing generic bolt on netcode applications. Not all of these will be good or even useful but they will contribute to possibility and increased tools for creation even by those without the traditional skill sets.

Of course this is all speculation but not entirely unreasonable, IMO. If anyone thinks otherwise, tell me where I’m wrong. Why? If you agree, extend the ideas, suggest newer, better directions/developments.

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Those people who claim they now how to make the perfect balanced fighting game have no idea what they are talking about.

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That would never work, everyone has a different idea of how a fighter should be. The best you’ll get are hacks of existing roms, and even then there are purists that will refuse to play them.

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First of all, I didn’t use punctuation because it was not a sentence that needed punctuation.

Secondly, anything questionable. You complain about people theory fighting about Ultra SF4 and hating Capcom for their decision making. There was no specific attributes or decisions listed specifically, so I didn’t list any either. It doesn’t matter though, because there are good legitimate reasons to dislike anything that you don’t need to have made your own game to prove. In fact, making your own game is so irrelevant it wouldn’t prove anything about the original game in question, i.e. USF4.

A lot of people like to bring up the retort “You don’t have a right to speak on something if you haven’t done it yourself,” but that’s a fallacy. I don’t need to be a chef to know when food tastes bad. Making a soufflé doesn’t prove my point that the gorgonzola pasta someone else made was bad, the two items have nothing to do with each other. Thus, I am confused by your point of view that people who disagree with how a game is made should spend time and money to make their own game to prove they know what they’re talking about when discussing a different game entirely.

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Wuh? No need to get defensive. This ain’t grade school and I ain’t your teacher. Hell, I don’t even care about punctuation as long as what is written makes sense.

Perhaps the punctuation jibe was a little disingenuous but what I was interested in was your response to my question. Which was and lemme quote myself here:

My question was in response to this statement:

I still don’t know “who” you’re talking about in the fighting game. The player? Developer? Character behaviour on-screen within the game?

For the record, I wasn’t complaining about USF criticisms (especially legit ones made by people who were actually there at the tests over the weekend… like me). In fact, the word I used about the criticisms was intrigued. Indeed the entire opening paragraph was a setup for the rest of the post - which was (and still is) about the topic of why we aren’t making our own games.

The reason I’m asking is (if you read past the first paragraph) that since there is an increasing pool of talent and tools for creation and since corporate budgets for Triple A FG are shrinking and since there seems to be so much dissatisfaction by online theory warriors and scrubs with keyboards (not insinuating, btw)… why aren’t we making our own games? The FGC is getting bigger and better, better organised etc, this sort of creativity could be what takes the community and even the concept of the FG to the next level.

Now, moving on… for the record, I’m quite a cheese fan and when dissatisfied with cheese produced locally (a fine and reasonably priced cheddar is hard to find and you can forget about feta around here in Aichi - unless you pay up or make it yourself)…

I feel like you’re missing the point in order to construct a nice metaphor.

Me: “I’ve got this idea, what if more of us channeled out dissatisfaction with current gen FG and concretely address continually repeated issues by making games ourselves? TL;DR - If you don’t like it, do it yourself we might come up with something good!”

You “Pfft, make it myself? I’m a consumer, corndagnit and I’ll buy whatever hoondogginit game I want and I’ll exercise my god given right to critique, however, wherever, whenever I want”.

Am I reading you right? If so, that’s fine. Do that. Maybe my cheese is not to your taste.

***This thread is for those people who are interested in taking their dissatisfaction to the next level, of going beyond the usual cul-de-sac that is online forum critique and thinking how the industry/community might push forward, innovate and create. ***

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SkullGirls exists you know.

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You talkin’ to me? Cos I mentioned it, albeit in abbreviated form (SG) (and my oh my did the SG players come out in force to slay my visual design jibe - wot? No room for personal opinion on SRK?).

Visual aesthetics aside it’s a high quality, polished product that I’m not good at (but getting better) and quite interested in. Would love to know more of the back story that led to production - if such a thing exists in non-fragmented, non-twitter feed form.

What’s interesting to me is (a) skull girls often gets critically overlooked because of indie-taint and (b) when are we going to see more new and original IPs like it? and © Are the next generation of consoles going to bring with them new generations of game makers?