(edited the title to better describe what I'm trying for) Just thought I'd toss out an idea I've been rolling around in my skull for a while to see what people think. The idea is fairly simple on the surface: a 2D sidescrolling action/fighting game, with movement controlled by the keyboard, and fighting controlled by the mouse. Stick figure graphics at first, both for style reasons, and so I can focus on gameplay/controls. The complicated stuff comes in the specifics of the controls. I'm a martial artist by obsession, so I'm shooting for a certain degree of both freedom and realism in the attacks/defenses. Players should be able to attack where/when they want, without being tied to scripted techniques. The way I plan to do this is thourhg the mouse controls. For example, if the left mouse button controlled hand strikes, a single click would cause the character to punch towards the cursor, that is, punch at an angle that when fully extended, the arm is pointing where the player clicked. The specific technique thrown would be determined by the computer, based on the current state of the character (i.e. which arm punches depends on where the player is trying to punch, and which hand(s) are in position to punch, and which are already doing something) Kicks could then be controlled with the right mouse button with similar rules/constraints. Which leg is kicked with would then depend on the characters stance, and the leg with the least weight would likely be the one kicking. Defence would be controlled by the middle button (no, I'm not sure yet what I'd do for 2-button people. perhaps laugh at them). If the button is held down, the character blocks, and the area protected is determined by mouse movement while the button is held. Moving the mouse upwards would shift the blocking area to the upper body/head, moving down would protect the midsection/groin, and, well, unless you're a gorrila, it's hard to block attacks to your lower legs. Dodge, or something. Timing of clicks would make a big difference, allowing players to click again after attacking to pull the attack short (feint), and then attack again, or time their clicks to keep a steady progression of attacks. Context would be everything. A character moving forward and punching would do different techniques than one standing still (lunge punch vs. jab), a character who was not attacking could shift defences faster than one trying to both attack and defend, etc. What do folks think? Does it sound like fun to non martial-artists? [Edited by - fearghaill on April 5, 2005 1:29:46 PM]

I've been thinking on a similar idea... 2d fighting game, sticks/vector animation to allow freedom in moving instead of drawn moves. I wanted it to be very spectacular, sort of Matrix-style. Haven't thought about using mouse for fighting though... It seems a great idea, because you have -much- more freedom than with keyboard controls. In addition, you can put some guns and use the mouse for shooting.
I agree there should be little scripted moves, but some spectacular combos would also be great.

I've had similar ideas for weapons, but not guns. This whole idea started with an idea for controls for a stick figure archer (click and hold to notch the arrow, drag to draw back/determine power, and angle of fire on release is along the line of the mouse drag). I'm leaning more towards medieval/classical weapons, as opposed to modern stuff like firearms.

My hope is that combos could happen naturallly, if the players time it right. I'm currently trying to think of ways to increase the number of attack options available between the three buttons, without taking away from the basic attacks. Stuff like double-clicks being distinct from multiple, slightly slower clicks, allowing for more exotic hand techniques/kicks. Or combinations of clicks, like block->hand strike causing the character to try to knock one of the opponents hands out of position, possibly opening them up defensively for a brief moment.

There was one game little similair, and 3D, called Oni (see some screenshots here: http://oni.mypage.sk/combos.htm ) and also one called Die by Sword ... google for them ...

I've had a stab this before, with a sword fighting game (not any where near finished). What you essentially get is combo system combined with a black & white style pattern matching system.

For every state that the character is in there are only a limited number of mouse moves, button presses that will result in a action (combo system). The accuracy/speed with which you move the mouse dictates the speed/strength of the action.

For example (sword fighting)
view from behind character, sword held to the right.
player - arc mouse to top, straight down and back up.
character - raises sword, slices down then stabs.

player - arc mouse to bottom, straight up and back down.
character - sword pulled back behind character, stabs and withdraws.

Example (martial arts)
player - mouse right button, draw large elipse at characters feet, draw small elipse at characters head.
character - powerful sweep kick followed by quick round-house

I thought the system had potential, but found it very difficult to implement. Plus you need a good artist to put together all the animations.

There's a series of ultra-violent games/movies on Newgrounds that uses a mouse-controlled freeform combat system. It's insanely rudimentary, with the mouse just controlling your character's hand, but you can throw punches, aim guns, or swing melee weapons, sometimes two in tandem. WIth some basic keyboard inputs for jumping and interacting with the environment, the games are dizzyingly complex, and the mouse periodically leaving the Flash window makes it frustrating.

However, it might be worth a look. I'm not sure what any of them are called, but most of them have something to do with The Matrix. Your game seems to be a cleaned-up version of this, with the whack-whack-whack of quick mouse strokes being translated by your software into a more impressive sequence of character moves.

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage There's a series of ultra-violent games/movies on Newgrounds that uses a mouse-controlled freeform combat system. It's insanely rudimentary, with the mouse just controlling your character's hand, but you can throw punches, aim guns, or swing melee weapons, sometimes two in tandem. WIth some basic keyboard inputs for jumping and interacting with the environment, the games are dizzyingly complex, and the mouse periodically leaving the Flash window makes it frustrating. However, it might be worth a look. I'm not sure what any of them are called, but most of them have something to do with The Matrix. Your game seems to be a cleaned-up version of this, with the whack-whack-whack of quick mouse strokes being translated by your software into a more impressive sequence of character moves.

I've tried them... "Madness", or something to that effect. I've tried one of them, and while I found the gun controls were decent, the punching/melee weapons were frustrating to control. I did notice the "leaving the flash window" problem though, especially when trying to pick stuff up at the bottom of the screen.

The games do have a certain degree of visual style though, and the detached but constrained hands and feet would make animating the techniques considerably easier... but I haven't put this much thought into the specific mechanics of punches and kicks to change plans now.

Something like this...
http://www.blitzcoder.com/cgi-bin/showcase/showcase_showentry.pl?id=cyberseth08302002211946&comments=no
???
It's written in Blitzbasic so the source should be easy to read.

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Original post by fearghaill Moving the mouse upwards would shift the blocking area to the upper body/head, moving down would protect the midsection/groin, and, well, unless you're a gorrila, it's hard to block attacks to your lower legs. Dodge, or something.

You can block with your legs as well, it's just more common to block using hands/arms.

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Original post by fearghaill Timing of clicks would make a big difference, allowing players to click again after attacking to pull the attack short (feint), and then attack again, or time their clicks to keep a steady progression of attacks.

How will the player control the power that goes into a technique, or will this be decided by the computer?

Would the feint apply to kicking techniques as well? I know it's less intuitive to a lot of people, but it's a very good technique to feint one type of kick (roundhouse for example), then switch to another (frontkick for example) without dropping the upper leg back down at all. It would probably be perfectly reasonable for this to be left out, but it would be nice to see if you can work it in smoothly.

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Original post by fearghaill Defence would be controlled by the middle button (no, I'm not sure yet what I'd do for 2-button people. perhaps laugh at them).

Keep in mind that many people (perhaps even the majority) have a scroll-wheel rather than a middle button. This of course only applies to PC, Macs seem to quite often have 1 button, or sometimes 5.

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Original post by Kazgoroth Quote: Original post by fearghaill Moving the mouse upwards would shift the blocking area to the upper body/head, moving down would protect the midsection/groin, and, well, unless you're a gorrila, it's hard to block attacks to your lower legs. Dodge, or something. You can block with your legs as well, it's just more common to block using hands/arms.

True. I often block sweeps by turning the leg so that the sweep has to work against my stance, but that would be hard to show properly as it's fairly subtle. Also, some styles (thai kickboxing comes to mind) block body attacks by picking the leg up and jamming, but I don't think I'll be drawing on too many styles right away. Then again... this is partially covered futher down.

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Original post by Kazgoroth Quote: Original post by fearghaill Timing of clicks would make a big difference, allowing players to click again after attacking to pull the attack short (feint), and then attack again, or time their clicks to keep a steady progression of attacks. How will the player control the power that goes into a technique, or will this be decided by the computer?

I'm leaning towards constant power, based on the technique. I.e. all jabs have the same base power. Alternately, the computer could impose penalties for techniques that:
a) aren't fully/mostly extended on impact, thereby allowing defenders to jam up kicks by moving in on them, and forcing players to keep distancing in mind, or
b) Aren't thrown from a fully retracted position. For example, a kick thrown when the knee is already raised (See below) could be penalized as at that point the power comes entirely from the snapping of the lower leg, and any hip action added at that point.

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Original post by Kazgoroth Would the feint apply to kicking techniques as well? I know it's less intuitive to a lot of people, but it's a very good technique to feint one type of kick (roundhouse for example), then switch to another (frontkick for example) without dropping the upper leg back down at all. It would probably be perfectly reasonable for this to be left out, but it would be nice to see if you can work it in smoothly.

Indeed it would - this is one thing that occured to me since I last posted. Different kicks will take a while to implement (I'll explain this next), but for the time being, I'm modifying my plan for the kick controls to allow the player to hold down the kicking button to control the timing of the kick. Pressing the button would cause the knee to be brought up/forward, and releasing the button would let the kick fire. That way, clicking and releasing before the knee is in position would result in a smooth kick, with the foot firing as soon as the knee is aimed, while pressing and holding for a second can throw off the timing of the kick, or later, allow a switch to another kick. For the truly sneaky, pressing and holding, then releasing and clicking again quickly to retract would result in an aborted/feinted kick, with the knee being retracted instead of the rest of the kick being thrown. Coincidentally, this is the same (press and release (click) to fire, click again to retract) as hand technique feints.

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Original post by Kazgoroth Quote: Original post by fearghaill Defence would be controlled by the middle button (no, I'm not sure yet what I'd do for 2-button people. perhaps laugh at them). Keep in mind that many people (perhaps even the majority) have a scroll-wheel rather than a middle button. This of course only applies to PC, Macs seem to quite often have 1 button, or sometimes 5.

Granted. I now plan to allow players to specify a blocking key/button (and probably customize all the controls), although the default will still be as I mentioned. Also, the majority of scroll wheels that I have seen are clickable, and act as button#3 when this is done. One button Mac users? Well, they can either be boxers, or set the mouse button to kick and say they're using Tae Kwon Do. ;)

As for different types of kicks, or even different techniques in general, one problem I see with implementing a lot of my favorites (backfist, roundhouse, etc) is my current plan for a 2D game. Any circular techniques would travel beyond the standard 2D plane and would be trickier as such to animate. One idea I've had to get around this would be to have the characters as three-dimensional entities, with the ability to rotate into/out of the screen, but lock the view/movement into the standard 2D sidescroller perspective. That way I could properly animate more fancy techniques, while still preserving a 2D environment for control purposes.