This is an up-date to this post: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/61383307/

SO, I took a break because I had some personal IRL stuff to focus on, but I also felt like I needed to step back to consider a lot of things for this project and where I'm going with it, and PARTICULARLY after Furpocalypse and seeing people play my characters on the "Mugen" (It was actually IkemenGo running a made-for-Mugen build, lol) setup in the game room. I feel that I perhaps started to VASTLY overthink things. I knew that I needed to make some changes to the game concepts and design, but I think I knee-jerked a bit too hard, especially after I stopped the vaping habit. Was also just a bit of self-reflection on where I've been and where I'm going that's been on my mind lately. I'm doing great, but some of the "panic" I'm experiencing is just me attempting to make up for lost-time. I assure you, things are pretty nice, so no worries there, just a bit of gettin into my own head a lil too much. hahah.

SO WITH THAT SAID, I'm actually going to continue on closer to how I was originally developing these characters, more fighting-game-like, BUT with some simplifications to the controls that I learned from research, my dabbling with a beat'em-up format I worked on AND what I saw people figure out on the fly while watching people play my characters there.

This was the first time I really got to see a bunch of people actually PLAY them in front of me, which was incredibly useful insight for me on top of just being plain fun to get to see people at random, pick and play with my creations that were featured in the videogame room.

Big shout-out to NutDog for setting that up and allowing me to work with him on it, as well as feature some of my work! I think this is partly something I needed to see to kind of reassure me.

Generally, it seems like people figured out how to do some things with them, despite the unusual control setup for fighting games, especially on the arcade sticks. I made the default layout with pad controllers in mind, since that's how I usually play. With that, I'm actually going to make a toggle option bit of code for pad-mode and stick-mode layouts that can be swapped with a simple 0 or 1 in that "VVconfig" file I'll add to their builds soon.

SO, WHAT'S CHANGING FROM THE PREVIOUS POST ABOUT THIS!?

As I said, I'll be sticking closer to my original build, BUT the key difference is that I'll be STANDARDIZING most of the control inputs for all characters, most likely to simple "quarter circle" type inputs. I may leave room for characters to maybe have 1 or 2 unique (still simple) inputs like double-tap direction or something like "Down, up" things.

My idea is to make is so that, when a player knows the controls and inputs of 1 character, they will know ALMOST EVERY input for all the other characters, save for whatever 1 or 2 unique things a character might have. This will help players just pick up and play with easy to perform moves, so that the focus is NOT HOW TO DO THE MOVES, but rather learning on WHEN TO USE THEM. I think pretty much most gamers can do a quarter circle input just fine, especially when they are made lax on timing and precision as I and most moderns games then to make them.

This will also allow for there to still be the fun aspect of learning how to chain stuff together and find fun combos, without needing to learn a bunch of technical inputs.

SO, controls will be more standardized across the cast, some movesets simplified a bit for ease of production on myself.

Also, jumping and blocking at still done with buttons, like in Smash Bros, which I already had, but I want to make it known that my characters honestly handle a lot like Smash characters, but with some motion inputs, like Ryu, Ken and Terry in Smash, but a key difference is that special attacks are performed in the direction you perform the input. As an example: a quarter-circle to the left + 1, will do that attack to the left. Quarter-circle to the right, will do it rightward.

LANES
Instead of a free-moving z-axis, I'm instead going to focus on a Real Bout: Fatal Fury-styled lane system. (But I've also had it mentioned to me in the IkemenGo server that a game called "Guardian Heroes" did a lane-based beat'em-up with fighting game elements, so I suppose there is also some comparison to that) After a lot of thinking on this, I felt it was best to simplify the game space into lanes and keep the action focused in. It's much MUCH easier for me to design characters and moves around simpler 2d motion. 3D I feel, would end up breaking a lot of how certain characters of mine work. A lane-system would give me the best of both worlds.

The beat'em-up mode of this will be focused on this lane-switching system when you can pull enemies into or push them out of lanes. I will also have an "enemy only" lane for when larger hoards are incoming, basically as an "bench" for enemies that adds to the atmosphere while they wait their turn to hop into the battlefield.

GOING FORWARD

I'm still going to release a test build open to the public with a prototype beat'em-up mode ready to go for you all to play. I donno exactly when, but This prototype will drop sometime over the winter, after the holidays. When I develop the story mode officially, that will only feather 3 of the characters to start, Gejhi, Aurumo and Rael with a 2-character tag team format, but I will likely also continue to refine the 8 characters I have in various levels of WIP in the engine currently. I think with this new outlook and motivation I can make all of this work.

I've already made a lot of these changes to the characters to refine their control and such., and I wanna carry over some of the stuff I made for them from the beat'em-up test builds I made to integrate them into the new mix.

Sorry for the weird back and forth. I think my head was a lil up and down this season about stuff, but I think I've leveled off. Hahah.