Swordsman’s counter allows for immediate follow-ups

What you’ll find is here small passion project made by one person (that’s me, if you didn’t catch my drift there). The goal for this project is to create a fighting game that experiments with the formula for traditional platform fighting game mechanics. My vision for the project is small scale and by that I mean I’m gonna try to do enough to call this a game without going crazy. So for now I’m sticking to 3 full characters with distinct play styles and movesets. There’s hope for an online mode but let’s be real I don’t know the first thing about networking let alone networking for a fighting game, and learning that right now would be way above my paygrade. What I will be including is standard local play with up to 4 players battling in stock and timed battles. Oooooh, aaaahhhh. Yeah who am I kidding, just read the damn rules. 

Gameplay:

Heavy attacks are slow but will send opponents flying at high percents

If you’re unfamiliar with platform fighters (games like super smash bros) then here is the gist of the concepts this game shares with that genre. The goal of each match is to knock your opponent off the screen until they run out of lives or until the time runs out. Attacks deal damage in the form of percentages. The higher an opponent’s percentage the farther they will be sent flying across the screen making it easier to knock them off. The combat in these kinds of fighting games revolves around the mobility of characters. Fights take place in 2D arenas, but they are filled with platforms and walls that all players can interact with. This allows them to move around in a similar fashion to games of the platformer genre. Such movement causes fights to be both fluid and chaotic.

Some of the more unique mechanics of the game are the extra abilities I’ve given the players. Players can run and jump, but they can also dash in the air or on the ground and each character can jump off walls. Aside from movement players have a wide range of offensive and defensive options. Each fighter has light attacks, heavy attacks, special attacks and assist attacks.  What makes this interesting is the chain combo system built into the game. This means that many attacks can simply be canceled into one another leading to strings of attacks. Players can block these attacks with no repercussions of a limited shield. However, there is also the ability to grab which can affect even blocking opponents. This forms a rock paper scissors system like many other fighter games. Blocking beats Attacks, Grabbing beats Blocking and Attacks beat Grabs. Many of these mechanics will be getting posts all to themselves so that I can explain them in even further detail. Keep in mind I’m also still fairly early into development, at least I think I am. I’m more than willing to make major balance and mechanical changes to create a fun environment to play in.

Upcoming:

After a few months, progress has been steady and I’ve made a summer end goal to release a demo of the game for anyone to play. Theses are the features I plan to have done and available for the demo:

•       One finished and fully playable character
•       One Assist character(a.k.a bullet one in assist form)
•       Timed and stock battles
•       Four player local functionality
•       1-2 stages
•       Basic CPUs

I’m hoping to get a lot of constructive feedback to make the game better and I just generally hope people enjoy playing it.

Conclusion:

Game development has always been a great interest of mine and I’m using this project to act as my self-given test to see if I’m really dedicated enough to commit to this career path. I’m setting goals and deadlines to challenge myself and to quickly get the game out to people who want to play it. I’ve been experimenting with social media to get the game seen and to get people interested and I’ve already gotten some cool results.

But hey, who knows? With enough support and positive reception I could spend more time on the project. I could make polls for upcoming characters and color schemes for current fighters,

and create a beta-testing community for balance changes and new mechanics.

Then again everyone might hate this game, which if you do, it’s totally fine. Not like I’ve dedicated six months of my life to this for you to enjoy or anything. It’s chill, bruh. Either way I at least hope someone finds some joy in it and maybe even takes up game development for themselves. (Kidding, don’t do that to yourselves unless you too aspire to devote your valuable time and energies to making stick figures who punch each other).