Tips For Making A Fighting Game?

Hi! I am creating a 2d fighting game and was wondering if you guys had any pointers?

 

Not really sure what exactly you are asking. "Tips for making a fighting game" is quite generic. For design or programming or presentation, all of these, something else?

I guess general pointers would be:

• Use controls (keyboard and gamepads for PC and virtual controls for mobile) to allow players to move their fighters, attack and block. Perhaps jump and duck also.
  
• Have some kind of onscreen representation of the combatants and non-character targets. 2D high res, 2D pixel art. Could even go abstract with geometric shapes. Or super detailed if you have the art skills or the available art content available.
  
• Use sound FX to provide additional feedback for landing hits / damage. Possibly also for certain events such as low health, etc
• Consider coming up with something a little different. If humans maybe each fighter has a very different fighting style. Maybe everything takes place in some kind of steel cage and the combatants can use the cage as a weapon (throwing opponents into it head first) or climb the cage and jump off performing an attack. Alternately, give the humans a rest and do Radical Insect Fighter (or whatever) that features an ant, a spider, praying mantis, etc. Or maybe Fng Birds (Fighting Birds not sure what you were thinking of) or whatever you find interesting.
• Take out a notebook and spend some time sketching out a few screens of the layout and the action as you'd like it to be. Try to make it so on the paper the game stands out as something you think people would be interested in checking out. It should be obvious to you why they'd want to check it out. Write comments to clarify key points. Throwing sheets of paper in the trash is a lot cheaper than throwing out weeks of work on programming and art and so forth.

 

No Projectiles.

Seriously. Projectiles suck, especially in 2D fighting games.

The biggest factor is how many people do you have working for you? 2D fighters require a ridiculous amount of sprites with a ridiculous amount of frames of animation, so your art game better be strong.

Balance is going to be hard. Accept this now. Capcom has been making fighting games for over 20 years and they still routinely screw it up. You are going to need to test extensively for dominant strategies. (Not using projectiles will make your life much easier in that sense)

Other than that, you need to provide spesifics

 

Make one of the characters a capybara.

 

Man, if this kid ends up inventing the spiritual successor to Primal Rage will all ridiculous animals, I'm sold.

 

lol

 

I've thought about doing that a couple times. Animating is such a pain though.

 

I understand how you feel. And there are cases where it feels so.
But there are times, where animating is not always so hard.

But I will admit, it does require alot of patience and effort sometimes.

 

depends on the detail of the animation. I made a few character animations, jumping, running, idle, spindash, it took me 2 days and maybe a total of 6 hours. If you're animating something more complicated, it will take longer.