Fifth. Fifth time. They
did a IndieGoGo, didn't get the money,
erased that IndieGoGo,
did another IndieGoGo, didn't get the money again,
erased that IndieGoGo again, started a
third IndieGoGo, got the
money,
did a KickStarter, got the
money again, now are DOING IT ALL OVER AGAIN for the
fifth time.
7th time, actually. Because they asked for Paypal donations on the Kickstarter page after it ended (which is a breach of KS ToS) and also have a Patreon.
Programmer guy (and PR guy if he's still around, which he hasn't been for like a year), I'm going to say a lot of harsh shit right now. I'm going to be objective, but I will do my best not to be insulting. If you think any of this is cruel, then that's not a fault of my words nearly as much as it is of your own failings. A spade is a spade.
Please read this page. This is you. There has been a great deal of healthy input sent your way and you have responded with basically, "I know what I'm doing!" even though the opposite is true. All the input on things like counter-hits, anchor points, memory usage, etc, was blown off in this way.
Here's a basic list of things your game needs to be playable. I have played a
shitload of fighting games, and even when I haven't been able to win at them I understand them entirely inside and out (and many people here can back up my claim). You're not a unique snowflake. I've played worse games than yours, and I guaran-fuckin-tee you that all the people making those games also claimed to be unique snowflakes.
- Negative edge. No, I'm not going to tell you what it is. You need to research this yourself as a demonstration of competency.
- Input display and movelists need to show the actual commands, not what buttons on a 360 controller you feel like are mapped to them. This is a PC game. People use different controllers.
- Unique effects provide extreme amounts of complexity. It's already been brought up that counter-hits in most games generally cause universal effects, and that's fine because the counter-hit effect is complex enough already without hampering the ability to understand the entire game's cast.
- Do not use overlapping special move inputs. Why do you have a half-circle special and a quarter-circle special in the same direction with the same button on the same character? Are you not thinking critically about this? Players need to be able to precisely input what they want when they want it in a fighting game, not risk getting the wrong move because it had the same motion as the move they wanted.
- In fact, you need to think critically about special move inputs as a whole. Street Fighter's inputs were not chosen arbitrarily! For example, the Sonic Boom motion is the way it is because it limits the amount of Sonic Booms (which are strictly better than other projectiles) you can throw in succession. SPD requires you to commit to the move. You cannot input a Dragon Punch while attempting to block.
- If at any point you unironically use the word "spamming" when describing a fighting game, you are not qualified to make a fighting game.
- Finish at least 1 character in your goddamn demo. Your team has no excuse to not be feature-complete by the time you're showing it off to publishers. The Skullgirls Alpha had IPS, tagging, dynamic lighting, alpha counters, variable team size, fully functioning physics, custom assists, and literally every other feature that would make it to launch, way before every character but 1 was animated. If you're gonna have that Rage mode thing, whatever, FINISH IT before doing more shit. If you're gonna have dynamic damage or characters that change during a match, make it work NOW. If counter-hits are gonna be random monkey cheese that requires rote memorization of every character's physics, then that needs to be a thing YESTERDAY.
- The "other fighters don't dynamically change the match as it goes on" is woefully, dreadfully, infinitely naive. Your entire team (or at least everybody who can provide mechanical input) needs to understand that fighting games are a mechanical sandbox of emergent game states. If you do not grasp the immense emergence of the entire genre, you are not qualified to make a fighting game. If you as a designer or programmer can't understand that matches already dynamically change without resorting to any of the extreme measures to which you referred, I have no confidence in your ability to understand how your own game will play.
- Download MAME, pirate Super Turbo and a shitload of lua scripts that show you how it works, and commit literally everything that is not character-specific to memory. The Street Fighter X Tekken devs nerfed throw range to 0-distance because they didn't realize they needed to make throws calculate collision boxes instead of hurtboxes. You already demonstrated that you don't have a good grasp of anchor points.
- You know the framedata. You have no excuse for basic combo problems. 1-button infinites, crumple that can only combo into crouching lights, etc, all are issues that shouldn't even make it to any playable (even beta) state if they are unintentional.
- I'm tired and hungry and stopping here.
I don't have any confidence in your game. I never did, in fact. You had a bad budget, bad PR, you focused on the wrong things, your game is bad to play, your visuals aren't even that good, and there is no chance (
absolutely none, and I do not say that lightly) you are going to release a good game at your current rate. It's rather telling that every member of your team who has posted here hasn't played Skullgirls. You are all operating from a position of ignorance, and while it doesn't have to be permanent you are going to have to do a shitload of work to alter your current trajectory.
