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[Skofo]

That is why I'm voicing my opinion so roughly - to attract attention to my arguments and to kick your asses in the right direction. ....... if this is done right.

Who are you to decide what the right direction is? You are so hypocritical and you are all over the place with your argument.

I'm just pointing out the obvious. You guys are debating little, EASY-to-adjust things like shield HP and whether or not there should be a big, black cock outline around the characters, when it is highly apparent that you guys don't even have the core engine ready. Your focus and priorities are all wrong. There is no way to argue against this. You don't cut bushes with a pair of toenail clippers when there is a pair of shears right next to you. If you spent as much time debating so-far-pointless, so-far-arbitrary topics (you cannot decide how much shield HP there should be or whether or not there should even be shield HP until you see the core game in question) as you did actually developing this, we'd be seeing some REAL progress on this. You guys are practically fooling around with these useless debates, and there needs to be some shaping up unless you want to see the project die like it did back in 2007. Leave room for these little questions AFTER you get a modular core engine finished.

Team projects need to work on a strict priority system to be efficient and to see success. Right now you guys are ears on a big, rectangular rock prism, instead of focusing on making a general human (or animal) figure.

Every word you speak makes you sound more like a jackass. If you want to try and make a point, be less arrogant about it.

If you want to try and make a point, be less of a pussy about it. Right now all you've accomplished is making me want to call the wambulance. Cry me a river.

[Alec]

Aight, reign it in.  You aren't doing yourself any favors at this point.

[Derek]

Skofo, I think you're making a good point, but it's buried under a metric ton of abrasiveness that's probably doing more to hurt the project than help it.  You're like the dad that wants his kid to go to Harvard so badly that he goes crazy and ends up ruining the kid's life with his overbearingness.  So CHILL OUT, BROSEF.  With all due respect.

The good point I think you're making is that these kinds of online collaborative projects can easily die if there's too much back-and-forth discussion over minutiae without any real work being done.  That said, we have a project leader (Nightshade), we have a basic design document, and we have an engine test... as long as the project leader makes sure that, amidst the noise (which is helpful, mind you), there is still forward movement, I think we're gold!

But let's set some milestones... like in two months let's plan on having two more-or-less fully-playable characters (Naija and Quote?) in the game, kicking ass and taking names.  Each character should be able to move around, do basic attacks, guard, etc.  Each character should have at least 1-2 special moves.  They should have rudimentary animations in place for each move.

I think that's a pretty reasonable goal to start with.

And in the spirit of getting somewhere, let's stick with Game Maker because it's what the project leader is comfortable with.  Porting the game to Flash after we have all the assets and mechanics in place wouldn't be difficult.

[Skofo]

Skofo, I think you're making a good point, but it's buried under a metric ton of abrasiveness that's probably doing more to hurt the project than help it.  You're like the dad that wants his kid to go to Harvard so badly that he goes crazy and ends up ruining the kid's life with his overbearingness.  So CHILL OUT, BROSEF.  With all due respect.

The good point I think you're making is that these kinds of online collaborative projects can easily die if there's too much back-and-forth discussion over minutiae without any real work being done.  That said, we have a project leader (Nightshade), we have a basic design document, and we have an engine test... as long as the project leader makes sure that, amidst the noise (which is helpful, mind you), there is still forward movement, I think we're gold!

But let's set some milestones... like in two months let's plan on having two more-or-less fully-playable characters (Naija and Quote?) in the game, kicking ass and taking names.  Each character should be able to move around, do basic attacks, guard, etc.  Each character should have at least 1-2 special moves.  They should have rudimentary animations in place for each move.

I think that's a pretty reasonable goal to start with.

And in the spirit of getting somewhere, let's stick with Game Maker because it's what the project leader is comfortable with.  Porting the game to Flash after we have all the assets and mechanics in place wouldn't be difficult.

Righto, it's refreshing to see a reply which isn't primarily focused on the steel shrapnel icing of my arguments. Most people don't realize that nothing good comes out of projects when everyone is acting like everything is going fine and dandy and perfect. I'm glad that at least one person managed to shine out and look past the attention-whoring dirty words and provide a neutral synopsis of my suggestions.

With that said, I like those goals. But... 60 days? Really? I think that two artists working on seperate basic, rough sprite sheets and a programmer working on a simple, rough 2D combat engine for about an hour per day would take a week. Two, tops! I don't mean to be a Satanic slave driver, but with idle/wandering hands comes a decrease in interest.

[skaldicpoet9]

Could go into more detail there, because you are being a bit vague.

No problem.

What I am trying to describe is a system in which the combos themselves have weaknesses and strengths against other combos. Instead of just dishing out combos mindlessly you would be focused on your opponent's attacks and use them to your advantage. Say that your opponent uses Gomez's Super Chainsaw Puree combo against Quote's Bubble Gun Blast combo, but let's say that Gomez's combo is of the speed variety while Quote's combo is of the Balanced variety. Using this diagram you can figure out who sustained more damage and who caused less damage:

Rock > Scissors            =              Power > Balanced
Paper > Rock               =              Speed > Power
Scissors > Paper           =              Balanced > Speed

Quote's attack would do more damage against Gomez's attack due to it being more powerful in the rock/paper/scissors sense. Gomez's attack would still do damage but less damage then it would against a Power attack. This way when you begin to pick up on someone's fighting style you can then exploit it's weaknesses as so can your opponent.

I love Smash Bros. but the one thing that I don't like about it is the random button mashing that frequently ensues while playing it.

[kyn]

when I play a web browser game there's a certain feeling of detachment.

I always feel that too, I always try to download the .swf and run it in a flash player in my desktop. But even that is becoming impossible.
Perfect example, the other day I was playing that new flash game final ninja, and as I tried to play it outside the browser, it had a protection, it didn't let me play it outside the website, I can understand why, just a protection for people who put these games in their own websites without permission. I was really enjoying the game but if you played the game you'll notice that sometimes when you try to shoot or throw the grappling hook with the mouse you'll click the bookmarks in your browser or the refresh button or whatever by mistake. This really put me off a game I was actually enjoying.

[PenguinHat]

What I am trying to describe is a system in which the combos themselves have weaknesses and strengths against other combos. Instead of just dishing out combos mindlessly you would be focused on your opponent's attacks and use them to your advantage. Say that your opponent uses Gomez's Super Chainsaw Puree combo against Quote's Bubble Gun Blast combo, but let's say that Gomez's combo is of the speed variety while Quote's combo is of the Balanced variety. Using this diagram you can figure out who sustained more damage and who caused less damage:

Rock > Scissors            =              Power > Balanced
Paper > Rock               =              Speed > Power
Scissors > Paper           =              Balanced > Speed

Quote's attack would do more damage against Gomez's attack due to it being more powerful in the rock/paper/scissors sense. Gomez's attack would still do damage but less damage then it would against a Power attack. This way when you begin to pick up on someone's fighting style you can then exploit it's weaknesses as so can your opponent.

I love Smash Bros. but the one thing that I don't like about it is the random button mashing that frequently ensues while playing it.

Trust me, I hate SSB:B, but I'm still not sure what you want? Do you want each attack to have an alignment of Power/Balanced/Speed in addition to the Normal/Special/Block RPS system we have, so that we have two RPS systems in effect at any one time? That might be a bit much to cope with, how would you show and tell the player the difference between Power/Balanced/Speed attacks? Are we expecting players to cope with a mental model of two RPS systems?

And what exactly do you mean by the word combo? I've always thought that word meant "scripted attack that happens when you press some buttons in sequence" and because most of the time this is going to be played with a keyboard, we really can't expect people to do that.

when I play a web browser game there's a certain feeling of detachment.

I always feel that too, I always try to download the .swf and run it in a flash player in my desktop. But even that is becoming impossible.
Perfect example, the other day I was playing that new flash game final ninja, and as I tried to play it outside the browser, it had a protection, it didn't let me play it outside the website, I can understand why, just a protection for people who put these games in their own websites without permission. I was really enjoying the game but if you played the game you'll notice that sometimes when you try to shoot or throw the grappling hook with the mouse you'll click the bookmarks in your browser or the refresh button or whatever by mistake. This really put me off a game I was actually enjoying.

They want you to play it in a browser so that you have to view the ads on the page. It's how they get their money back and make a profit.

It would be great to make this playable in a browser, but right now, we have an infrastructure in GM. We should use that infrastructure to create a prototype as soon as possible. Once we have a working prototype, we should make it so that we can easily add more characters and stages. Then we should add characters and stages as block graphics, and then replace the blocks with graphics. Unless anyone else has any ideas?

Also, it's getting easy to hide the fact that you have made something in Game Maker to be honest. You need to suppress/change the default loading bar, and maybe do some custom asset loading to speed up the startup time.

How many people have access to GM7 Pro? I do, Nightshade does, anyone else? And Nightshade, can you make the download for the engine test accessible in a .gmk file as well as an .exe? That way more than one of us can code at a time.

And how is version control going to work? Don't Google have something like that? Or shall a make a thread for it to act as a big storage area?

[skaldicpoet9]

Do you want each attack to have an alignment of Power/Balanced/Speed in addition to the Normal/Special/Block RPS system we have, so that we have two RPS systems in effect at any one time? That might be a bit much to cope with, how would you show and tell the player the difference between Power/Balanced/Speed attacks? Are we expecting players to cope with a mental model of two RPS systems?

And what exactly do you mean by the word combo? I've always thought that word meant "scripted attack that happens when you press some buttons in sequence" and because most of the time this is going to be played with a keyboard, we really can't expect people to do that.

I figured that the combo system would be used in conjunction with the current control setup and it would be simple in execution so as to be more tailored for use on the keyboard. Combos would consist of no more than two to three buttons and creates a scripted attack (or counter-attack) crafted specifically for each character. In order to differentiate combos from each other the counter for how many hits in that combo would be a particular color for a particular combo. I don't think that adding a few combos for each character would be too daunting at all. The trick is to make it as streamlined as possible by only allowing for a stratified button sequence for all characters. So there would only be one sequence of buttons for each respective combo type for each individual character.

[PenguinHat]

Do you want each attack to have an alignment of Power/Balanced/Speed in addition to the Normal/Special/Block RPS system we have, so that we have two RPS systems in effect at any one time? That might be a bit much to cope with, how would you show and tell the player the difference between Power/Balanced/Speed attacks? Are we expecting players to cope with a mental model of two RPS systems?

And what exactly do you mean by the word combo? I've always thought that word meant "scripted attack that happens when you press some buttons in sequence" and because most of the time this is going to be played with a keyboard, we really can't expect people to do that.

I figured that the combo system would be used in conjunction with the current control setup and it would be simple in execution so as to be more tailored for use on the keyboard. Combos would consist of no more than two to three buttons and creates a scripted attack (or counter-attack) crafted specifically for each character. In order to differentiate combos from each other the counter for how many hits in that combo would be a particular color for a particular combo. I don't think that adding a few combos for each character would be too daunting at all. The trick is to make it as streamlined as possible by only allowing for a stratified button sequence for all characters. So there would only be one sequence of buttons for each respective combo type for each individual character.

I really don't think that we should require players to input sequences of characters on a keyboard to gain access to their characters attacks, escallipy when we already have an uneven reward RPS system to attacks (Block beats Normal attack for no damage, Normal beats Special Attack for low/mid damage and Special defeats Block for high damage) as well as a range game as players will have to position themselves so that they can use their character effectively.

Combos create a barrier to entry that I don't want. Instead of practices skills to defeat other players, you have to learn how to defeat the controls themselves before we can get to that. Have you ever tried to teach someone how to Hadoken or do a combo? It's really hard. Let's just leave that alone, and focus on the important stuff.

[skaldicpoet9]

(Block beats Normal attack for no damage, Normal beats Special Attack for low/mid damage and Special defeats Block for high damage)

Hmm, I had no idea that the current system was like that. I guess I wasn't paying enough attention. I assumed that the controls were basic attack, block, special without any further stipulations. This is pretty much what I was talking about with certain exceptions (I just figured the special, default attack and block would be separate functions). As long as there is something there to break up the monotony of executing the same chain of attacks then I'll be happy.

[moi]

The good point I think you're making is that these kinds of online collaborative projects can easily die if there's too much back-and-forth discussion over minutiae without any real work being done.  That said, we have a project leader (Nightshade), we have a basic design document, and we have an engine test... as long as the project leader makes sure that, amidst the noise (which is helpful, mind you), there is still forward movement, I think we're gold!

Totally agreed! IMO there should be some prototypes released instead of discussing every details to death.
Let your audience give you feedback on the code while it's still in its early stages.
Here are a few things that teamwork taught me (unreal modding) :
-Actually releasing prototypes, even unfinished is the best way to progress toward completion
-less promises, more releases
-design by comitee gives horrible results
-democracy isn't appropriate for game devellopement
-There needs to be a leader and the rest of the tea must follow only one vision.

[kyn]

They want you to play it in a browser so that you have to view the ads on the page. It's how they get their money back and make a profit.

Doesn't everybody use adblock+ by now?
I rarely see any ads

[J.W. Hendricks]

Other Characters That Would Be Nice To See:

Lemeza (La-Mulana)
Ghost (Obake) |this would bame a great wild-card character|
Sam (The New Satan Sam)
1213 (1213)
Kitty (A Game With A Kitty)
Soldat Guy (Soldat)
Tela (Guardian of Paradise
Oswald (Ocular Ink)
Blob (The Blob)
Ball (Within A Deep Forest)
Mr. Blocko (Mr. Blocko)
Sumo Guy (Somotori Dreams)
Zaikman (Synaesthete)
Hilbert (Last Scenario)

[Skofo]

Could go into more detail there, because you are being a bit vague.

No problem.

What I am trying to describe is a system in which the combos themselves have weaknesses and strengths against other combos. Instead of just dishing out combos mindlessly you would be focused on your opponent's attacks and use them to your advantage. Say that your opponent uses Gomez's Super Chainsaw Puree combo against Quote's Bubble Gun Blast combo, but let's say that Gomez's combo is of the speed variety while Quote's combo is of the Balanced variety. Using this diagram you can figure out who sustained more damage and who caused less damage:

Rock > Scissors            =              Power > Balanced
Paper > Rock               =              Speed > Power
Scissors > Paper           =              Balanced > Speed

Quote's attack would do more damage against Gomez's attack due to it being more powerful in the rock/paper/scissors sense. Gomez's attack would still do damage but less damage then it would against a Power attack. This way when you begin to pick up on someone's fighting style you can then exploit it's weaknesses as so can your opponent.

I love Smash Bros. but the one thing that I don't like about it is the random button mashing that frequently ensues while playing it.

Oh god. I can already hear this project going down the drain. If you were good at Smash at all, you would know that it doesn't just employ the use of random buttons. The controls are simple enough that a person can put on a blindfold and smack his controller and do at least some damage, and that's okay. Things should be simple to understand for any player, and they shouldn't have to be able to read a manual to memorize unintuitive scripted combos that you can't escape from unless you're just happening to dish out corresponding combo at the same time.

Above all, even popular fighting games WITH scripted combos don't have a system like that. Combos there aren't nonstrategic movie sequences that you have to wait through (think Final Smash), it's actually a chain of separate normal attacks, just stronger or faster than normal. But I regard these as unintuitive to learn and really think that they're a bad idea.

If you've played ANY good fighting game for more than 5 minutes, you'd notice that every attack has different priority and positioning. If one fighter strongly high-kicks while the other fighter is crouch-punching, the strong kick will prioritize over the weak punch (or the weak punch won't reach the other player at all) and get kicked in the face. To avoid this, instead of punching he could've evaded and blocked.

This'll be the last time I'm going to post here. I've lost the greater of my faith of anything good coming out of this project under the current direction. Unless your definition of "good" is a half-finished messy, broken, and boring game.

inb4 good riddance, I've tried to help you guys.

[Inane]

I agree that the artificial rock-paper-scissors system is unintuitive and unneeded

[Valter]

No, I really don't want this to be like other fighting games. Most require stupid-long button combos and joystick rolls just to do anything, and then you get people who just button mash or just stand in a corner and hadoken for the entire battle.

What made SSB unique was the simple attack system. You just held a direction and pressed a button and you had all your moves available for you. I think that adding long scripted "combos" would just alienate most of the indie/casual crowd. Not quite what this game is looking for.

So, I would prefer the SSB set up, or something similar. Having to press thirty-two buttons in sequence perfectly does not interest me. Make the controls simple!

In other words: I agree with Skofo.

[policedanceclub]

yeah, definetly keep it simple!


If you don't, i'll call everyone involved a douchbag.

[Inane]

In other words: I agree with Skofo.

Shh, shh, don't say it directly or you lose street cred

[Inane]

Also, how about a soldier from Cortex Command as a character (either one of the original 2 robots or one of the clone soldiers)?

[Soulliard]

No, I really don't want this to be like other fighting games. Most require stupid-long button combos and joystick rolls just to do anything, and then you get people who just button mash or just stand in a corner and hadoken for the entire battle.

What made SSB unique was the simple attack system. You just held a direction and pressed a button and you had all your moves available for you. I think that adding long scripted "combos" would just alienate most of the indie/casual crowd. Not quite what this game is looking for.

So, I would prefer the SSB set up, or something similar. Having to press thirty-two buttons in sequence perfectly does not interest me. Make the controls simple!

In other words: I agree with Skofo.

The controls for Indie Brawl work exactly the same way as those in SSB. Making special attacks unblockable adds some depth to the game without adding many complications.


By the way, there's apparently a new version of Game Maker in the works that's compatible with Macs. If it works out, Indie Brawl will be cross-platform.