Has anyone here designed a fighting game that at least made it through the prototyping stage of development? How did you go about plannnig the moves and how the moves interact? Designing a fighting game seems pretty difficult to do on paper because of the heavy emphasis on mind games, but making up the moves as you go along isn't normally going to be a good idea. Perhaps I'm missing something or making this too complicated, so I hope someone who's done this before can give me a few tips.

While I'm in the prototyping (technical, making sure inputs are all right and everything) phase right now, I'd want to atleast give my two cents.

In my opinion, you are sort-of over-complicating it. While the mind games or general, "If he does this, I'll do that, but I'll do this to fake him into doing that" gameplay that comes into play when people are actually playing is how these games are usually rated. While prototyping you should be concerned about general balance and ease of play across the characters.

The mind games will come whenever anyone plays it, regardless. The ones you come up with, won't be the ones that players will come up with during actual play, and people will find something horribly broken in even the most balanced characters. From there, they will exploit it to no end. I mean, look at Super Smash Brothers series, I don't think the infinite grab-chains, and invulnerability spamming were actually parts of the design.

My method has been:
1, Define a rule set. What are all characters bound by, general controls, and what each input corresponds to generically across all characters.

2, Write out the move lists (now granted my fighter isn't a each character has 70 moves kinda one ala Tekken -it isn't even side-camera-), with varying levels of detail.

3, Storyboard animations, and possibly create simple animations or animatics if I see fit.

4, Assign input combinations to moves dependent on a number of things (the damage I expect the move to do, how impressive the animation is, how humiliating the move is to the victim) and try to mirror complexity across the characters.

(( I'm currently here depending on what character you are considering ))

What's left is:

5, Set up everything with simple models and animations. So that I can get a feel for what type of gameplay arises. What people focus on, what values need to be changed, and what I need to discourage or encourage in general play. Most importantly, is it fun?

6, Polish Polish Polish Polish Polish. (pretty much the rest of the, non movelist design heavy stuff)

7, ???? - Anything else I may have missed.

8, Ship, and Profit! (potentially)

Thank you for your input.

Quote:

Original post by Noctrine The mind games will come whenever anyone plays it, regardless. The ones you come up with, won't be the ones that players will come up with during actual play, and people will find something horribly broken in even the most balanced characters. From there, they will exploit it to no end. I mean, look at Super Smash Brothers series, I don't think the infinite grab-chains, and invulnerability spamming were actually parts of the design.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. For one thing, Nintendo knew about wave dashing in Smash: Melee before the game shipped. (For anyone who doesn't know, a wave dash is when you time a jump followed by an aerial dodge at a low angle, resulting in you skidding a few feet across the stage. It looks like an exploit, but it's intentional.)

Also, there are no infinite chain grabs in Melee. The victim can use the joystick to influence the direction he is thrown, and escaping can be as simple as getting thrown off the stage. In Smash: Brawl, the chain grabbing was adjusted so you can get out on the first try... but now you can be chain grabbed by being thrown against a wall, and they had to have seen that one coming. So why did they leave it in? Because they didn't design Brawl for hardcore gamers.

In short, I don't buy into this "mini chaos theory" that states that you cannot predict what players will do. I made a game with a fighting element that had one hand-to-hand move in it. When play-testers approached each other and drew their swords, they used the exact mind game I predicted they would use. Adding more moves makes it harder to predict what players will do, but it never becomes impossible.

By analysing games like Super Smash Bros, Tekken etc I'd say the following:

You have a list of characters, which vary in speed, strength and playability/good flow of controls/whatever you wanna call it. So you have characters that are easy to control but don't deal much damage, at a decent speed. You have characters that deal loads of damage, but are slow and ok or hard to handle. And you have the characters that are fast and so-so or hard to handle. Try to imagine your crowd: you have the 6yo kids [or maybe not, up to you] who need characters which are easy to control. There are the amateur players that like having fun, but also want a challenge, so give them the ones that need a little training. And there are the hardcore players/Asian players[just kidding ;o)] who want characters where it doesn't matter how hard it is to control them, but which can be the most deadliest. Try to target all of them to get a lot of people to like your game.
As for the moves: if you're aiming for a realistic game, take a look at some fighting styles and try to figure out how it should be handled in the game (for example a punch in the face is easier than a roundhouse kick). If you want a more "fun" game try to make up your own moves [don't hate if you're more in for the realistic stuff]. It doesn't matter if it's physically even possible to perform them, it just has to look nice.

Think of yourself: how do you want a fighting game to be? Do you want to have wrestlers with blood spilling all over the screen, or do you want to have Son-Goku and Pikachu Kamehamehaing themselves all over the universe? Do you want the screen to shake and blur when a super move is done, or do you want none of these at all?

Don't try to make a science out of this. Make it fun.

By the way, my fighting game is far from being finished, but I made up some moves and characters, and the gameplay is already planned for the biggest part. My greatest inspirations are Super Smash Bros and the Xiao Xiao movies [free movies with Matrix-like stickfigurefights]. My game is gonna have a lot of combo potential by having certain items and not handling the physics too correctly, and there won't be too many moves, around 10 for each character. I think this is the most fun. I don't like spending an evening to learn a 15 moves long combo that beats the crap out of your enemy until he's finished.

Those are just my few cents.