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Them's Fightin' Herds

Ninja said:
i did say that they shouldn't take my idea in the tweet dude. like come on
They don't know that you're a nice guy, but hey, it's done now. At least your idea didn't have a name attached, so that makes it easier for them to tweak if they ran with it. Hopefully they'll show some love for the moose.

With that in mind though, it's probably been a challenge for Mane6 to think about character ideas, even with Faust in their corner. Approaching cartoon animals in a unique way is kinda tricky to do these days, and if they start getting too many ideas from fans that sound similar to what they're doing internally, it might make them nervous about how to handle certain animals.

Like, it's safe to assume that they're probably not going to bother with a horse character for their starting roster, even if they have some cool designs for one. Certain criticisms will be a lot easier to avoid once their new brand is better established first.
 
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Ninja said:
also i would even do that cause i'm not a jerk and I don't care.
wow you would do that?
how rude.
 
it's "holding" the book of Steven, huh? Might be a Not-Fluttershy if gameplay involves summoning minions.

Any guesses what animal that is? Pointy thing on the head looks like a horn -> unicorn, but I figure they might be avoiding equine characters.
 
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Well one of their tweets says the book is called the Unicornomicon. So I guess it is a unicorn.
 
Dean[SG] said:
Good to see news from this game again. Been waiting for Nappy to pop up on steam so i can [nicely] bombard him.
If there is a stretch goal for a Dragon character. DO IT.

Seriously.
Do it so I have a main.
:PUN:
 
Muro said:
it's "holding" the book of Steven, huh? Might be a Not-Fluttershy if gameplay involves summoning minions.

Any guesses what animal that is? Pointy thing on the head looks like a horn -> unicorn, but I figure they might be avoiding equine characters.

FWIW, Chrysalis had a horn in Friendship is Magic and she wasn't a pony, so I don't think its a stretch that maybe its not necessarily a unicorn but some other kind of fantasy beast. Though Unicorn would obviously be neat.
 
I bet a unicorn character gets past legal if the design is different enough than those of MLP.

So I am very eager to see a Lauren Faust created dark-magic unicorn that is significantly unique in its design.
 
Interesting. The tail on that character looks horse-like, but the feet and style of horn remind me more of a goat. There are actually some pretty major stories/myths out there revolving around goats with single horns, so that could be an inspiration. Definitely very curious to see what unique lore elements they've developed to help set themselves apart.
 
KaboomKid said:
a goat
Now that you mention it, what I took for hair might actually be a beard, perhaps.

Also regardless of species I can see the pointy head thingies potentially as a pair of horns, with the left one (on our right) being broken.
 
Just gimme my command grabs pls and ty
 
Hmm...the book makes me think of magic spells like Twilight's, but the demonic creatures behind her make me think of summoning like Fluttershy did with her animals. Perhaps we'll see a hybrid of both of their styles?
 
SpaceCadetKeon said:
Hmm...the book makes me think of magic spells like Twilight's, but the demonic creatures behind her make me think of summoning like Fluttershy did with her animals. Perhaps we'll see a hybrid of both of their styles?

I didn't realize it was you with the new reindeer pic, keon. xD
I asked them "Would they re-use any of their characters combat styles and mechanics?"

They said something along the lines of "We have no reason NOT to", so i would expect this character to play like twilight.
 
Update!

Fighting game music and you

Basically a demonstration of how the game's dynamic music is going to work. For example, if one character is dominating, the stage's theme will change to the same style of music as the character's motif. That's just scratching the surface; the article goes into greater detail.

There were a couple of other things that were revealed in this update. The cow's name is Arizona, and the reindeer's name is Velvet. And yes, they are final. Plus it looks like Velvet does indeed have some of Rarity's old moves.
 
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- Canon Names
- Vsav style health regen
- Magic bars and Meter
- Dynamic Musics
- A smooth looking UI

b28010f165f4e874b6c9dd8ed07ffbba.gif


I just wanna toss my money at this kickstarter already
 
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SHITTTT, DYNAMIC MUSIC?
Fucking goddamnit I won't have any money left thanks to Lab 0 and Mane6.
 
This music idea is what i would have liked in KI after i was told, this is a FANTASTIC idea, even the subtly in how they "talk" to each other.
Can't wait for this game, i need this shit now.

SpaceCadetKeon said:
Plus it looks like Velvet does indeed have some of Rarity's old moves.
Told ya. <3

WaterMystic277 said:
I won't have any money left thanks to Lab 0 and Mane6.
Want to start a kickstarter to help feed us? I'm on the same boat as you, hope we have paddles.
 
My one worry about this really cool dynamic music feature is how much friggin work it is, and thus how expensive.

The music changes to suit every character on every stage.
They have at least 6 characters, and let's say 6 stages for symmetry. That's 6 versions of each stage's music for a total of 36 musical variations. That number will grow substantially with every character OR stage they add.

If they add one new stage, they need 6 new music tracks - one for each character. If they add one new character they need 6 new music tracks - one for each stage.

If they have stretch goals with new characters or stages, each one gets more expensive as others are added.

This is the same problem Beast's Fury was running into with custom finishers that are different against every character, and why Cerebella's AA grab is so annoying in Skullgirls.
 
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I'm really hype for the dynamic music. It's something I'm a big sucker for, yet hardly got a chance to experience. That said, I always felt audio gets the short end of the stick in video games. While a lot of effort and creativity goes into making graphics feel more and more real and tangible, the interactivity of music almost always boils down to "this tune plays on loop in this stage/location".

It won't be easy nor cheap as Cellsai pointed out, not a simple challenge to be taken on by a small dev team. If they succeed though, it will be so good, and hopefully an inspiration for others to make music more alive in their future titles regardless of genre. A man can dream.
 
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Stuart Ferguson stayed on the team. STUART FERGUSON STAYED ON THE TEAM.

His work on Twilight's theme is still one of my favorite themes in all of fighting games (videogames in general actually!), and his work was what attracted me to Fighting Is Magic in the first place! He is a professional musician and composer who knows that the f*** he's doing and I'm confident he can get the job done here.


http://www.rc88.co.uk/

Heard what was in Mane6's blog post and my ears are already getting their sausages wet. It may not be at all what will be in the final game, but I'm still excited.
 
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Cellsai said:
My one worry about this really cool dynamic music feature is how much friggin work it is, and thus how expensive.

The music changes to suit every character on every stage.
They have at least 6 characters, and let's say 6 stages for symmetry. That's 6 versions of each stage's music for a total of 36 musical variations. That number will grow substantially with every character OR stage they add.

If they add one new stage, they need 6 new music tracks - one for each character. If they add one new character they need 6 new music tracks - one for each stage.

If they have stretch goals with new characters or stages, each one gets more expensive as others are added.

This is the same problem Beast's Fury was running into with custom finishers that are different against every character, and why Cerebella's AA grab is so annoying in Skullgirls.
Eh, music in vidya is usually the least expensive parte of the project.
 
Just because it's the least expensive now doesn't mean you should catapult it into massively expensive tier.

I have a lot of faith in Mane6 though so I'm gonna give them some slack and assume they have it thought out.
 
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Dynamic music is certainly a rarity. I know KI 3 did it, to a lesser extent DoA 5 did if you knock them to different stage areas, and maybe a few arc sys games when you fulfill certain conditions, but not as in depth as what this game will do.
 
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I feel like they're biting off a bit more then they can chew with the music. It just feels unnecessary and I would rather them focus their attention/work on other things with the money and time it is going to require. Hopefully they can make it work, though. I'm not personally a fan of this project because I don't like the aesthetic, but I'm definitely going to watch it as it looks interesting.
 
Well even if quantity wise there is gonna be a lot of variations, do we know how different they will be? I mean if it's like six variations but they are barely different from each other outside of speeding it up, adding a few new parts, different instrument style, etc then I can see how it would save them cost. I doubt it will be six completely unique themes per stage where each one requires work from the ground up which would increase costs for music budget fast.
 
Guys, let's just wait until they drop the demo of it o we can hear it and see just how it all fits. Yeah it might be a little complex but that's what is going to make it stand out, having character specific themes chime up up ontop of the main stage's theme as you get a combo or a ko.
 
Forreal, people. The game hasn't even started its kickstarter yet. Let's s l o w it down a little, yeah?
 
Here's my guess from watching their sample videos:

If one parses out different sections of a stage's musical track, one would need to have:

- Character intro music
- Default background music
- Downtime "both characters are idle" music
- "Get back into the swing of things from downtime" music
- Character Domination music
- Hype "both characters down to a pixel of health" music

(Not an exhaustive list, but hey)

In particular "Default background music", "Downtime", "Get back into the swing..." and "Hype" are independent of which characters are used and can be included in one continuous track where different sections play according to the situation. Killer Instinct 3 has this. Street Fighter 2 had this.

The only parts of a stage's music that one would need to vary per character are the Character Intro themes and Character Domination music. The intros are easy, just a 10-second blurb for each character, play the first 5 seconds if Arizona is player 1, play the second 5 seconds if Arizona is player 2. For character domination, if one has the melody from the "Default background music" down already it seems to be a matter of changing the tracks' instrumentation to suit the individual characters. It doesn't even have to be the whole Default track that needs reinstrumentation, just maybe one repeating motif. That's not the same thing as rewriting entire tracks for each character.

If the musician is smart about how to divide the work and the tracks, sure it isn't cheap, but it isn't impossible or bank-breaking to do this.
 
Man, I'll be honest when I say I had absolutely no interest in this, given it involves fighting animals and started as an MLP fighting game, but seeing what its amounted to so far, how nice and smooth it looks, and just how pretty it all is, I might have to support this, as well. The content and style it seems to be going for, gameplay wise, from what I'm reading here, it also looks to be pretty fun. Glad I decided to read up on this today XD
 
Even if it's not a major amount of work anything that requires them to go back and add content to a previously finished feature every time they add a character seems like a terrible thing to start on with new game with a small team.

Again, I'm sure they've thought it through, but needing to go back to old stages to modify/add new music every time a character is added just seems like a weird/poor allocation of budget. Even if it's a small amount of work, it's an amount of work that will continuously get bigger and bigger as the game grows.

And yes, I know the crowdfund hasn't even started yet. It's still a feature that can be discussed!
 
Cellsai said:
needing to go back to old stages to modify/add new music every time a character is added just seems like a weird/poor allocation of budget. Even if it's a small amount of work, it's an amount of work that will continuously get bigger and bigger as the game grows.
True, but then on the other hand "I wonder how will stage theme variants of character X sound like" would be a non-negligible incentive for me to pay for DLCs chars down the way. Just in theory and forgetting the immense costs of it for a second, if each Skullgirls DLC character came with slightly modified and personalised themes of existing stages, that would be nothing less than an auditory orgasm.
 
Muro said:
auditory orgasm.
Yeah but the music in SG is still really good, we just get more of a visual orgasm due to the animations.

(oh wow saying visual orgasm sounds really dirty, i'm so sorry.)
 
Ninja said:
we just get more of a visual orgasm due to the animations

"Mmm, victory looks good on me!"
 
Cellsai said:
Even if it's not a major amount of work anything that requires them to go back and add content to a previously finished feature every time they add a character seems like a terrible thing to start on with new game with a small team.

I'm going to assume that they've designed this system to be quite modular in that it allows for them to swap the character music by passing a parameter. Also it didn't sound like they were remixing each stage with for every character, but every character would have they own well known jingle or two. Although I would agree that this feature is ambitious, but this is an ambitious group. It all makes me excited. I hope this project goes well for them.
 
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