The Mugen Fighters Guild - New Team of Developers and a New Game Project (still Untitled)

Aright so here goes...
I'm taking the first leap out here to introduce myself and the team i'm representing as well as a new project being developed for mugen by your's truly.

I'd like to start by just saying that i've been a constant visitor to the Mugenguild forums for a few years now and am a huge fan of many of the current contributors and look forward to hearing your opinions as well as to welcome any advice/criticism you have to offer. So i'm glad to say our team and i can finally bring something to the table.

I'm a member of a group of college students currently goin' to ITT Tech in Minnesota who are all in the game design program as well as members of the IGDA here on campus. This is our very first project as a team most of whom are completely new to the idea of making games. Having said that I'd just like for anyone reading this to keep in mind that we're (for the most part) complete nubz.

For those of you who actually care to hear the story out on how we started/came up for the concept of this game from the very beginning read this

Spoiler, click to toggle visibilty

Congratulations if you took the time to click this link you've gained my favor (for whatever thats worth) and accepted the loss of the next 5-10 minutes of your life. $:-\$ but anway, taking it from the top.

We are currently in our 3rd term in our first year here at ITT so going back to the humble beginnings we pretty much started off all within the same class ("strategies for the technical professional"

) well a few weeks later we ended up in a meeting set up by one of the staff members to create a new group for people interested in jumping ahead of their studies and right into making games. skipping a ton of boring get-to-know-each-other details we eventually elected our prez, vice-prez(now former thank god), Secretary (your's truly

), the slave, and more recently- the slave's slave. The other members are just kinda there...

Fast forward a few days and we get to selecting our very first project as a development team. Keeping in mind we are all fresh-slate we had ideas for several FPS, an RTS (fun as it would be), and two survival horror games. So lil ol me who's sittin there thinking these guys want to make fully rendered fully operating games (that we couldn't even publish much less own the rights to) with little to no experience, i decided to come up with a concept for a simple 2d fighter (save a few tweeks on conventional gameplay but we'll get to that later) a few rough drafts, concept sheets, and energy drinks later I presented my concept to everyone and we took a vote...one thing led to another and...well...here we are.

The first thing we had to do is come up with a plan of attack being the general blueprints for the game... At first we were gonna divide up into different teams and work on separate segments of the game until me and another member (one of the asians, cuz everyone knows that every game needs at least two asian's on board to be legit

) (no racism intended

) thought it might be better since this is our very first project to let each and every person be involved with every aspect of the game so no one would stuck in a position they're not comfortable or capable in. So we decided that we were going to start by having each member of the group come up with two of their own concepts of characters they'd like to see in the game and vote on who makes the cut at a later date.

Jumping ahead with the removal of our ignorant former VP and our ongoing struggle against addiction to playing DOTA rather than working on the game. We've reached the point now where we've started defining the key aspects to the battles in the game.

Right now we still have alot of work to do on characters unfortunately with me and the aforementioned asian stuck going back to help others with concept art, character Bios, and move sets (sadly we were the only two people familiar with mugen at all until now.). The good news is though we're managing to go forward bit by bit despite only having aprx. 1 hour a week to work on the project due to scheduling issues with our members. As time goes on we will continue to grow in size in terms of members and elements being presented to the game's general concept.

The Concept:
Alright the premise i came up with is for a Speed and combo based fighter (sounds simple enough i'm sure.)
However I want to express a few tweaks we came up with regarding game-play that i feel should make this stand out quite a bit from most traditional 2d fighters. A few examples of those tweaks being...

Single Button combos- To some this might seem like overkill in a 2d fighter but keep reading and you'll find why we think we could balance the game play well with this system. (An accurate example would be games like the Dragonball Z Budokai (1-3) series.)
Dashing and Dash Attacks- Take the classic leap forward/ leap back idea to the next level by adding the possibility of not only having two different levels of dashes (see Dashing and Grazing next) but also being able to turn that leap forward into an on-coming attack. (A good example of dash attacks for those familiar with the classic PSX fighters would be Rival Schools, I.e. running drop kick, running slide kick, running tackle etc.)
Dashing and Grazing- The general idea behind the different level of dashing would be in their use in combat. Dashing mentioned before would be meant for attacking purposes while grazing would be meant more for defensive purposes. Grazing in particular would be aimed for countering projectiles by launching the character forward through the projectile canceling it on contact. The downside would be that this launches you much closer to the your opponent and doesn't give you the option to attack while being propelled forward although depending on you timing it makes it possible to begin a combo on the defenseless opponent still coming out of the state of throwing the projectile. Dashing on the other hand doesn't send your character as far out and also allows you to turn the dash into a single heavy blow that would knock the opponent back. The downside of this being that because this is knock-back you can't follow up with a combo as easy as grazing but also that should you be struck by a projectile while in mid dash you would take additional damage (argument being insufficient momentum to shatter the projectile.)
Guard Breaks- Meant to counter those pesky characters/players that like to spam blocking. To keep this from being too effective in order to make the guard break successful it would require a slight period of time to charge the attack before it would capable of breaking the guard. This of course would give the defender a split moment to react by throwing their own attack before the hit lands.

The Story:
While still working on the story i can give a general idea of how the state the world is in came to be.

Basically the game's world was divided in several different groups which we were initially going to call "schools" but decided against because too many of the group's members got caught up in the literal idea of schools acting as the government. Basically the groups are divided up into different categories. You have traditional modern everyday theme, your assassins/ ninja themed group, your Junk/poluted/post apocalyptic themed school, etc. etc. Well basically up until recently all the different groups (or nations) were all secretly run and kept in balance by this kind of Mother nation that kind of worked behind the scenes to make sure the that each and every nation was kept in balance to prevent the fall of the next one. Resources, food, water etc were evenly distributed among the nations to keep the world in peace. The goal of this mother nation was to basically create a perfect world, free from famine, disease, etc. Unfortunately they were willing to go so far as to attempt improve human beings themselves. The started conducting experiments on human subjects in order to try to "force evolution". By doing so they created numerous artificial beings formed from human lives. Long story short they made the ultimate mistake when they tried to create a human that was immune from all forms of disease by using experimental substances (bacteria) found only on other planets. The bacteria had an unexpected effect and basically took control of the persons body changing and adapting it at will. The person basically became an alien. ( Final Boss- rough example of his look would have to be reminiscent of Xion's Beast form from the Bloody Roar Series, with our own original style of course.)
The new being basically decimated and destroyed everyone in the that secret mother nation and took over using some form of mind manipulation on the other test subjects.
Now each character depending on their own individual story some how becomes involved with this turn of events along with realizing that the world that was once kept i balance by this secret guardian society is already showing signs of descending into chaos.

So there you have it... There's still alot more that i didn't and probably wont cover but if you have any questions feel free to ask.

I look forward to updating and giving progress reports and will be searching the forums for tips and aid on aspects for the game that may prove difficult. For those instances i'd be truly grateful to anyone who is willing to help us out and will gladly give special thanks to you in any and all areas that you guys can give you support and advice.

on one last note i'd like to point out that we should have an official webspace to post and make notes on in the near future. On there we will not only be posting info on the characters to be appearing in the game but also will be glad to post any beta content we can come up with before the final release (which hopefully wont take all 4 years of college to complete

)

I look forward to your questions & opinions.
-Recklesone8968, your friendly-neighborhood forum browser

shamrock said, April 23, 2009, 06:22:34 am

My first question is are they going to give you credit?

I don't see anything crazy with the game system. Most of that shouldn't be to difficult in mugen.

I suggest you check out P.O.T.S Guy on your dashing.

Also the tutorial section for guard crush.

Check out the code archive for the added damage by pushing a button at the moment of projectile impact. With a little modifying that should work for your increase damage by forward momentum of a projectile.

Also Jz's damage calculator is useful. Or is that's E's program. Anyway that is at trinity Mugen.

By credit i'm assuming you mean the college for graduation rather than for the work itself. sadly no but the bonus would be that all game design students need a demo reel by the end of their time at ITT to present to employers and companies looking for new employees, and we've already been told that should we complete this project that we have permission to put this is in our portfolio along with our demo reel or even make this our demo itself as long as each one of us were to go back and customize the aspects of the game to represent our own individual abilities and tastes.

and i actually agree that this shouldn't be too difficult now that i've gone through and looked at some of the examples of coding that people have posted in the forum (which we wont use without permission of course.)

also looking back on what i said about dashing i realize now that i might have made it sound like something different from what i intended especially considering the example i used about rival schools. i guess a more accurate way of describing the idea would be to say leaping (SF3/alpha, MVC for example) rather than dashing but i'll be sure to give a better and more in-depth explanation at a later date.

anyway i'll definitely be looking into those tips you mentioned... right now everything we've been doing is in coordination with Fighter Factory.
i appreciate the input man 8)

nerubian_assasin said, April 23, 2009, 02:42:54 pm

hey, are the characters in this game big?(I mean the size) because I really don't like big chars like in marvel vs capcom or some other things like that, I like the size of the characters like the card saga wars game.. ^^

i actually agree in some aspects (i.e. Juggernaught

) but we're aiming for a general look and feel so i wouldn't go as small as card saga wars. a good representation for character sizes and looks would probably your average CVS chars.
If you're more into smaller characters we're hoping that the way we're building the stages (which probably won't be all that impressive visually

) will kinda help with any size/gameplay issues anyone might have. To put it simply: what we're aiming for is to have longer fights than what you'd typically find (kinda like the Touhou project fighter- Scarlet weather rhapsody but not quite as eccentric and strategy oriented.) therefore we're going to try to make our playing fields wider in aspect to compensate for the combos and the knocking-back that's going to be involved. (The life value's are probably going to be set at 300% with single round fights. Just fyi.)

so yeah i'll definitely be doing some research and experimenting with programs and we'll do our best to make a game that most everyone will be able to openly enjoy no matter what your playing preference.

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