The Mugen Fighters Guild - Interview with Jango on character creation

I was digging through my documents folder and found the unedited text of my interview with Jango (aka WaruiGouki) for that project I was doing and abandoned cause I didn't have time for it. I spruced it up for your reading pleasure, it's really informative and fun. Italics are me.

...

So let's begin. As always, let's start by introducing yourself and giving a short overview of your contributions to MUGEN.

Jango: Alrighty, I'm Jango, previously known as WaruiGouki (and I used to vandalize Wikipedia's MUGEN page under EvilThouther but that's a long story) my contributions were mostly stages, mostly arranged from platforming games. I made a few characters: Bonkers, Burnin' Leo, Ren Idagawa (who The_None took over in updating), Takagi Yoshiyuki, Scrooge McDuck (it's horrible, download Caddie's), and Mr. Jones, with Pupa and BH Mario on the way. I think that's everything.

Alright. For quick clarification, roughly what year did you get involved with the community?

Jango: Well I was a leecher when I was 14, but I actually started contributing around... 2007 I think? It's been a long time. Most of what I did was making stages, and most of them were shit until I learned how to make dynamic layouts from MUGEN Superstar Di Gi Jared (DGJ for short). He also started me on character creation around that time I believe. I also wrote two terrible reviews for both Doki Doki MUGEN and a handful for Randomselect back when I was running with the elitist crowd.

The elitist crowd? Can you clarify for me what that means, or will it step on too many toes?

Jango: Nah, nah, this is ancient MUGEN history, and I believe Guild made a joke about it on AF a while back

I'm always one for history.

Jango: Anyway, most of this was before my time, but I'm sure you know about the whole "creator's ethics" thing, like "don't use ANY of my code or I'll report you to the modstaff to get you banned and try to get your characters removed." MUGEN was pretty tough to get into. But yeah you had the big names like Big Eli King, Splode, Sunboy, etc etc who all churned out really innovative characters (well at the time anyway) or at least really good ones. And to make matters worse, when they "quit" MUGEN, the rules were still in effect AND you weren't allowed to ask people to send you said character. So there were a few people who tried really hard to make characters the elitist dudes did but because they lacked the coding experience and didn't really know how to do things, and most of those characters were shitty.

By shitty, I'm not talking about the current "Oh you didn't get your values from KOF, stop winging things" that you see a lot of nowadays. I mean "You're missing every other frame of animation and it sounds like you recorded your audio by holding up a tape recorder to a TV" bad. So I'm going to sound like a total gold digger here, but part of my main motivation to be with the elitists was to snag these "elite" characters that were totally off limits normally. It worked. Now don't get me wrong, I really did end up like creation, but I'm not going to deny that getting your hands on "rare" characters was a big deal. Back then, considering you would be socially ostracized or banned for requesting those characters, I think "rare" works in this case. Today it's a total fluff word. I will say though, the whole elitist illusion kinda faded when Kung_Fu_Man started using archive.org to download elitist characters and host them on Randomselect.

That's super interesting to think about... I suppose that was the source of much of the ire over "warehousing" rare/forbidden characters came from? That had never made sense to me.

Jango: Yeah, in a way warehousing was kind of a way for people who wanted those "forbidden" characters to get those. Of course the elitist groups would go out and whine at them to pull the links, and sadly, a lot of warehouses folded. I dunno why either, although I imagine there were some really stupid reasons for it. I remember just before all the creators' rights stuff folded, there was this guy, Laxxe32 IIRC, he actually pushed legal action to get people to stop warehousing one of his characters. It worked... somehow! I think a big part of it was that the char was drawn in MSPaint so it was technically his work, but when it worked, the elitist group was like, "See, we are protected by law."

Well this is all certainly interesting, but I'm going to focus today's interviews on your thoughts on character creation rather than the community's past. First, nowadays, what sort of process do you for through for creating a character?

Jango: Oh yes, much better. Well when I go about creating a character, first I try to get an idea. Usually it's "Okay is there a good version of this character out there.” Now I'm still kind of from the old-school mindset of where you have to do everything yourself or it's not legit, so for most of the chars I've done, I've usually ripped the sprites/sounds by myself, except for Ren Idagawa, I grabbed those from... kaihoku I think?
ANYWAY, my old way of making characters was pretty darn chaotic. I'd basically have MUGEN side-by-side with the game and just manually guess the values. The ROTD chars got everything from Artmoney though. ADDITIONALLY, I don't like to do straight-up conversions from the game because hey, if I wanted to play a character like they were in the game, I'd play the actual game. So I try to change a few things around in the character, sometimes it's minor fixes to stuff that I feel was too weak or too strong, other times it's stuff like "wouldn't it be cool if," like my cancelled Michaelangelo WIP that shot Makankosappos out of his mouth.

That's actually super interesting. In terms of accuracy, do you think with the resources we have today people have any excuse for not getting their characters close to source? Some people have expressed fear over the complexity of artmoney. Is this a case of nut up and be a man, or can we make exceptions?

Jango: To be totally fair, Artmoney is actually a really good tool. If you're a perfectionist, it's a godsend. At the same time though, I don't believe you actually *need* it to make a good character. Before you had people like Vans and Koopakoot and the like (who make amazingly good KOF chars btw, everyone should have at least one of them), there were some creators that actually made really good KOF chars. OrochiKOF97, and... Iron IIRC. Before getting artmoney values was a thing, these guys were doing it by *counting pixels* and just manually converting it over to MUGEN. By today's standards, that's super outdated, but in my opinion those are still some of the best chars out there, and are a testament to how you don't need to go for 100% accuracy to make a good character

So I guess the short version is, if you want to go totally accurate, use artmoney. But you don't need it to make a good character (although it probably helps if you try to make it at least *feel* right, which is kinda hard to explain, but most people can tell if something "feels" right)

Let's say someone totally new wants to get into the creation scene. He has to learn the coding, building sffs/airs, and on top of that, his character is meant to play like a source game. How long and involved a process is this. Whats easy, whats hard?

Jango: My perception is a little bit skewed because when I got started, we didn't have most of the tools we have now. Granted I got started when there was MUGEN Editing Ensemble (think of it like Fighter Factory but shittier), but for a lot of shit I did end up having to use sprmaker which involved making sure all the palettes were correcting and typing up a text document detailing every single sprite I was going to use (thank god I only did this for stages). Now if you're going to start out, trying to make something accurate to the source game is basically suicide. Don't get me wrong, felineki did it with his Akuma, but felineki is an amazing coder in general (before he did Akuma, he made a stage that was an almost completely accurate representation of the Cyrstal Labyrinth stage from Graduis III) and that was his FIRST stage. But yeah, for someone starting out, it's usually just better to learn the basics to first before you worry about accuracy. Either that or I guess you could do ROTD which has really simple vels to calculate. Wow this is actually a kinda hard question.

I hate giving timeframes because I suck at being on time myself, but if someone is starting out from scratch, but has a lot of support and people to help him out, and learns the ins and outs of his tools relatively quickly, and they don't have any other engagements like work or school or a social life... maybe a month? I dunno.

In terms of making things accurate, sometimes games just have thos elittle quirks thatd ont translate to MUGEN directly. I've seen people talking calculus to get their characters right. If we're moving past vels and getting these characters to truly emulate a system, just how good do your coding chops gotta be? Have you run into any of these kinds of situations?

Jango: Well, personally, I've never really gone past the minimum math requirements needed for my degree (Math 100) but I think I've been able to make stuff that isn't totally horrible (although pre-The_None Ren is an abomination). But at the same time, I generally haven't done anything super crazy so there's that. As far as crazy stuff I've run into, the craziest one I've done was Gato Z2 for that April Fool's joke two years ago. Obviously it's not accurate to the source game at all, but just getting him to behave like a boss and do things correctly was a huge leap in difficulty for me. And Dragon Tank Z2 (which I'm still working on intermittently) is all sorts of crazy. So in hindsight, it would probably help to know some of that thar crazy calculus shit to make Dragon Tank's neck waggle exactly right, but if we're talking a difference of like three pixels in a character's movement, why bother?

Oh, I guess outside of the obvious stuff like "you'll probably drop a combo you would've gotten." But I'm not a computer, I can't tell if I'm in a pixel perfect spot for something

Just how different is coding a boss/ai-controlled character like Gato Z2 vs. a regular character anyways? Largely the same or are there major differences to how you must approach it?

Jango: Well Gato Z2 is actually playable because I have a thing about making bosses you can play as, but yeah there are a few differences. When you're making a regular character, you're trying to think of balance and making sure that it's not too weak or too strong. With bosses it's KINDA the same thing but for different reasons. With a normal character, if your character's broken, you'll either have people who won't play it or people who have terrible taste who will use it in their next "CHEAPIES BASHING VIDEO" or whatever. WIth a boss character, if it's broken, you'll mostly just frustrate the person playing against it. On the flipside, if a normal character is too weak, most people won't play it because, well the disadvantages of using it are too great. If it's a boss character that's too weak, people won't play against it because it becomes a total waste of time.
I guess the short answer would be: When you're designing a playable character, you're focusing more on balance and making it play good. When you're making a boss character, you're focusing more on making the fight "fun."

Switching gears a bit, how important is the public beta testing process?

Jango: Actually, Pupa was my first character that I had public beta-tested. In the past, betas were only given out to close friends or people I knew who were really good at coding/fighting games. But after Pupa's, I think public beta-testing is probably the best way to go, By keeping it private might help with building hype and shit, but you'll probably get a lot more comprehensive feedback. Back during the "creator's ethics" period, I used to do private beta-testing, and I'll be honest, while I was encouraged to tear the character apart and find what was wrong with it, it's really hard to do that when, say, the guy who's giving you the beta is a good friend. Now granted, a lot of people will just be like "oh cool free download" and not contribute anything in a public beta-test, but I think it does a good job of eliminating bias in testing, so yeah, it's definitely better.

But I suppose there is still an implicit risk in publicly posting unfinished work. Some people are very harsh on betas despite the beta status and have caused the authors to meltdown or get overly defensive. What do you think of this?

Jango: Well it's the risk you take even when you release a finished character. I think a big part of the harshness of the feedback comes from the tester's bias. Like for instance, if you're really good at KOF chars and you see someone make a PoTS-Style Iori, naturally you're going to be disappointed if the Iori doesn't have move properties like the KOF version and you might rage (btw did someone do a POTS Iori because if they didn't what the hell is wrong with this community)

Oh wait! I think Jmorphman did, I feel so ashamed…

....He didn’t.

Jango: Oh god I'm such a terrible boyfriend. BUT ANYWAYS, In terms of people giving feedback, the most negative I've seen is from people who go in "knowing" that the creator isn't going to meet their criteria, and probably has no desire to, but will still attempt beta it anyway for some reason. So while I wouldn't totally discredit what they're saying, the resulting feedback is probably a lot harsher and more negative than you'd normally get. ON THE OTHER HAND, when you see a creator getting defensive over their characters or having a meltdown, it happens.

It happened that way for Ren Idagawa. But I think a big part of it is maturity and actually knowing the purpose of a public beta test. Because yeah, those characters are kinda like your kids after a while, especially if you spend a lot of time on them. When someone insults your kids, you want to stop them. However in the end, you have to remember that (for the most part) a public beta test is for people to help you make those kids better. I dunno. Maybe the analogy was falling apart near the end, but you get the idea.

To move back towards your own creations, why ROTD? What about the system has drawn you towards it? I think I may have asked this in the Ask Thread, but you're buried under everyone else.

Jango: Ahahaha, alright, well there's multiple things with ROTD. The first is the aesthetics of the game. Your line-up of characters isn't too wacky or too dark, just a nice in-between. The designs are also pretty simplistic and to the point, but are instantly recognizable to me. I really hate it when current fighting games put ridiculously flashy costumes on a character and make them look like a character that the Final Fantasy team would've ditched for being too complicated to look at, but ROTD manages to keep it looking simplistic. Not to mention you can just look at character and know everything about them. Like how Pupa is super happy go lucky, and how Oni is psychotic, or how there's something that MIGHT be wrong with Alice.

Now aesthetics are a big part of what draws me to the game, but the gameplay is also really fun too. It's not too complicated like a lot of fighters today are, and it's not too simplistic, it feels like it has just the right amount of options.

From a MUGEN perspective, they're super easy to make. I mean you have a sound test, a sprite viewer, the data on artmoney is very straightforward, it's like it's just ASKING to be turned into MUGEN. It doesn't have a hitbox viewer but oh well

How did you manage the hitboxes then? :O

Jango: Oh easy, I just make very educated guesses… and I know I just made everyone's balls shrivel up into their chests just now but a lot of it is pretty straightforward. It involves playing it a lot to try get a good idea of where the hitbox should be. Like just positioning the characters at certain points to test something out. Yhen of course, sometimes you want to buff or nerf something, so you just adjust it from there
.
Going off of that, can you explain to me just how important proper clsns are to any character, custom or accurate?

Jango: The first aim should be to make sure that the hitbox placement won't break something: So while most infinites can be fixed in the coding, sometimes it's just because your hitbox is probably too large and you should shrink it. Of course there's also the accuracy bit, because it's frustrating when you're trying to do a combo you know how to do in the source that now won't work in MUGEN because the hitbox is wrong (although most of the time that's also coding.)

Balance is still the top priority for me. I know I keep bringing up Ren, but if you aren't familiar with him, he has a big ol' wooden sword. At the time me and a few others were of the mindset "it looks stupid if someone takes damage when their sword gets kicked.” So none of Ren's attacks that used the sword had blue clsn, only red. This caused a huge problem because it meant that for one of his moves, Ren could reach halfway across the screen without worrying about getting hit. So yeah, even if it doesn't "make sense," sometimes you have to make adjustments so that you don't break your character. Also about Ren, pretty sure what I just described doesn't happen like that in the game, so again, it was guesswork (although a lot less educated than I do now.)

What kind of limitations in MUGEN frustrate you the most when making a character?

Jango: Well to be fair I don't usually hit those limitations a whole lot because I'm a simple dude, but I do have a few things I wish MUGEN could do. The first obvious being in-game transformations that aren't limited to palette swapping. Since custom states use required sprites, there are moments where a transformed character will revert and it'll look wrong, so if there was a way around that which didn't involve coding a fullgame around it, that would be great

ALSO, I dunno if you checked the Optional Coding Standards thread, but PotS and a few others have something for Trait Identifiers. Basically they're optional empty animations you can plug in to kind of give some background to your characters. So for example, I put a few in Pupa to tell the engine that she's female, kinda ditzy, and knows capoeira. The sad thing is, that's not a standard. Who;e that doesn't sound like much, think Vega from Street Fighter. I mean Claw, not Dictator. Sorry I'm an AMERICAN, and AMERICA is always right…

God bless.

Jango: Anyway, you know how he's always into beautiful women and shit. Well I dunno, it was in the example in the trait modifiers. If applied properly, someone could make a Vega that has an intro unique to female fighters at a certain age with a certain level of attractiveness (Pupa has a moderate level of attractiveness in her coding btw) UNFORTUNATELY, that's not a standard, so whenever there's a MUGEN character that wants to do something with a female character, they end up having triggers for EVERY FEMALE CHARACTER THE AUTHOR KNOWS.

Example: The_None's Beavis has an intro against female characters where he shouts "We're gonna score! We're gonna score!" The_None had to put in every female character's name he knew for that to work. So if someone makes a new female character and it's not in that code list, too bad, Beavis doesn't consider you a woman. So maybe if MUGEN had something like that standardized into the system, it would be good. I'm PRETTY sure it has more useful applications outside of some MTV character's intro though.

I know that your last answers weren’t that extreme, but on the flip side, what keeps you coming back to this engine and creating more after all these years?

Jango: Well it usually happens in inspiration sparks or something, I dunno if you wanna call it that… but a lot of it is still mostly "I really want to see this in MUGEN but it's not there yet, so I wanna do that." Recently a BIG factor in that is the amount of spriters who are coming forward offering to sprite original work for the engine, because now it's like "wow, we can actually do the characters we WANT to do" (provided you have the money.) So needless to say, I currently have four chars with commissioned sprites that will (hopefully) see the light of day soon. Gato was one of them so I guess he already did

Yeah, I think that's a big chunk of it, seeing how there's a real push for originally sprited chars now. It really does feel like you're limited only by your imagination… and I guess Beavis' ability to tell if you're a woman or not.

Okay last one: Who's your favorite current MUGEN author and why?

Jango: Wow that's a toughy, do they have to be currently active?

I suppose that makes it more interesting

Jango: Well at the moment I'm a huge fan of Rajaa's Street Fighter III conversions. While I'd normally throw the Z2 chars there, I'm not a huge fan of the playstyle,although the animation is beautiful. If we want to talk about old creators, Pneophen, hands down. Pneophen was probably the biggest influence for me when it comes to creating characters because he wasn't afraid to throw in his own flavor to the existing character, and it worked out. If we're doing new stuff, Rajaa in SF3 MOODO is probably my favorite. I know Kamekaze is going to kill me for that since I love his Dudley, but if he wanted that spot he should've made more SF3 chars

Alright thanks man for the interview.

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