Hey guys.

This is an idea that I've been thinking about for a long time. I had a lot of different ideas about how to approach it, but when the theme of "sports" was announced for this competition, I decided I would take a crack at it as a simple fighting game based on mixed martial arts. In my opinion, fighting is the purest and oldest of all sports.

I'm planning to use a skeletal animation system which I foresee having certain advantages, but also certain disadvantages (such as making it difficult to animate like spinning around). We'll see how it pans out. I'm really most excited about all the juicy details, like dynamic blood dripping from noses, basic cloth physics, and that kind of thing. I also have some ideas about a dynamic soundtrack that layers on instruments as the intensity of the fight increases. I'm just gonna start very basic, and if it ends up being promising, I would like to expand into a full size project, once I've finished all my current commitments.



The most difficult part will be dealing with grappling and submissions, since that's the area where I have least personal experience. I did Tae Kwon Do for many years so I think crafting the striking part will be pretty easy. It might be useful for me to check out UFC Undisputed or that EA MMA game to see how they handle it. I'am also looking at games like Nidhogg, Hotline Miami, and of course regular 2D fighting games. If you have any ideas, I'd like to hear them.

Life/Death/Island is on hold for now. No one seemed to like the demos we showed much, and me and Dennis don't really enjoy the gameplay the way we made it anyways. We will consider re-designing the basic combat and level generation a bit to make it actually play well. But right now we have more interesting ideas to focus on. It feels like a waste to just let it go completely, though. So hopefully it will be released eventually.

Ah ok cool, totally understand.

Are you planning to finish Life/Death/Island at some point? I was really looking forward to that one.

http://youtu.be/EHrZ8bTo7oE

Looks great! The lighting reminds me of Diablo II which is great.

I think experimenting with smaller heads would be a good idea. I think the "big-head" style works best in games where the shape of the character is important, like sidescrollers/platformers (ie. Cave Story), because then having a box shaped character makes it easier for your brain to quickly read the scene. But for RPG games like yours, I don't think that's as important since the character art is just an indicators to show which tile they are occupying, what equipment they are using, etc. Their shape or height is less important for gameplay.

It would be like making a painting, but calling it a sculpture, because it is a painting of a sculpture. It's just doesn't really make any sense. So people get confused when you call a sprite that looks like a cube a voxel.

Awesome, I love the new version!

No worries. Sorry if I sounded harsh as well. It's just that I really like the game and I felt like the video didn't do it justice.

I agree with green, it does need music. The ambience can barely be heard and what can be heard sounds bad - like it's just static, and there are also no sound effects. There could also be some text so the person watching knows what to look at. The poor presentation in this trailer unfortunately doesn't reflect the game's quality at all.

I suppose the ambiance needs to be louder because there are sound effects...you do need to turn it up a bit, I should see if I can replace the audio. Without hearing the ambiance the trailer doesn't really work at all...the ambiance I made for the video, in a way actually is a song....

I will try to raise the volume of the audio.

I don't want it to have music or text. It's not the release trailer and I wanted it to capture certain things from that one point in the game

I understand you're attached to it, but as it is right now it's just confusing (and not in a good way). It feels like when I watch it there was a rendering error and it's missing the soundtrack.

If this is just a neat video then that's fine, but since you are labelling it as a trailer, it doesn't do it's job. The point of a trailer is to highlight the parts of a game that are interesting so people can get interested in it. Right now it really has nothing to do with the game, which actually has a very good soundtrack. It's just some poorly recorded wind sounds on top of game footage.

Also, you can't realistically say "turn up the volume so you can hear the ambience." The job of the trailer is to sell the game - it has to do the legwork of delivering the idea to the viewer. People will watch it with all kinds of sound and video set ups so everything has to be very clear. Once the player is in the game you can create more of a "walled garden," where you can ask people to tune the audio and video settings, but trying to do that with a trailer is not very useful to anyone in my opinion.

gam

Lookin' great dude!

I do think it's disingenuous to say that violence in Hotline Miami, or any videogame, is inherently worse than violence in movies. In both cases, the feelings are represented through the visuals, and not the actions.

I totally agree with you on that, and it's something I've been thinking about for a while.

I've never actually played a videogame that has rewarded me for behaving violently, or rather, thinking a in a violent way. I think the reason that games with a violent aesthetic are so compelling is because they are a complex puzzle of timing, spatial relationships, and resource management (health, stamina, ammo, etc.), with a gradient of success and failure (you may complete the fight but be wounded in the process, or get a perfect victory, or a complete failure), all wrapped into one. The violent aesthetic just makes that kind of puzzle completely intuitive since an understanding of combat is built into our DNA.

So when you play most games like this you are really just trying to achieve the optimal outcome of this complex kind of physical puzzle. I'm really curious to see what a game that is truly violent in terms of it's mechanics would look like.

Mine would be a 5v5 multiplayer combat game framed like CS or GoW multiplayer, but set in a kind of austere dark ages/fantasy world like Shadow of the Colussus with a dash of the movie Mongol and Dark Souls, and it would have deep hand-to-hand combat like Mount and Blade. The weapons would be limited to melee weapons with a few ranged weapons like Franciscas or throwing spears, and maybe a bow with limited arrows. The characters would have very lively animations and the horse riding would feel very realistic like in shadow of the colossus, not like riding a horse shaped motorcycle like it does in most games.

I want to be in this argument too.

What are you actually asking? Each of your posts has a handful of vague questions in between a bunch of reference pictures.

The best advice I can give is practice and experiment. If there is a style you like, spend some time studying it. And by studying I don't just mean looking at it, I mean making copies of it. By reconstructing someone else's work in your own head, you gain a deeper understanding of their techniques. Then strike out on your own.

As for having trouble sticking with a project, just understand that inspiration comes in waves. Just stick it out during the low points, and eventually you'll get a spark which ignites your interest again.

This should be a bit better:

Nice, that looks way better.

Oh, ok yeah, well that's really dumb then.

Gamasutra may be going down the drain, I really don't know because I don't read it, but in its defense, that was a post in a member blog, not an official article.

I felt the same way about it though. This was my tweet:

"Devin Wilson, you're an idiot of the highest degree. Fuck you to hell."

I didn't realize it was by the same guy who did the article about Minecraft. I remember laughing about how mind-bogglingly moronic that was. So that makes sense at least.

Are you summoning Beatrice?

Holy fuck, I love this game so much. It's the game I had been wanting for so long but I didn't even realize it. Thanks cactus. You're a hero.

Edit: Except the stealth mission. That shit is dumb as hell.

Edit: Actually that was an overreaction. It turns out I was going the wrong way! I actually like that it doesn't explicitly tell you which way to go, because that is how you would actually feel in that situation.

The only actual bug I've run into so far is with an enemy charging and running through the wall out of the level, and then having him not count as being killed making it impossible to finish the level, but that only happened once.