TFR Guidelines [READ]

[TheShyGuy]

At first, I was going to do a large brainstorm dump, but that ended up too long. Instead, below are just bullet points about ideas that I feel need to be further discussed.

TL;DR I need input on the bullet/bolded points

Input Buffering

• -Single long input buffer string?
  
• -buffer keys + duration, include "spaces" (game steps when no key is pressed)
  
• -When to Clear Buffer
  
• -Consuming keys
  
• -Error Tolerence

Comboing/Chaining Attacks
-We can get some unique characters with this, but it seems like the guidelines have a fixed set of moves. What if the bare minimal moves required are just those that exclude combos. So combos would be something that's depends on the character. Yeah, it requires learning characters, but I think the potential is worth it. The basic moves would remain (Idle, Crouch , Jump, Attacks mapped to single Punch or Kick Key, etc).

Collision Interaction and Masks

• Collision Types
  • Attack (offensive)
    
  • Hurt (weak points)
    
  • Defensive (like shielding)
    
  • Special? (for projectiles - reflectable?)
    
  • Grab
    
• Collision Interaction
  • Are there collision priority?
    
  • Are we even doing the "High" attacks can only hit "High"/"Mid' tagged hurt]regions?
    
  • Or just normal collision mask detection? (preferred. It makes more sense to me)
    
• Knockback?
  • Variable or constant independent on player damage (I don't play many fighters)
    

Online

• -Should this be the first thing worked on or later down the dev? Personally, I've never done multiplayer networking.
  
• -Safety of executing other's scripts?

Animation Engine?

• -simple frame-based animation? (traditional sprite animation)
  
• -Or feature-filled animation engine? (longer dev time for making the tool. Unless someone has a reccomendation for an animation tool. Prefably free for accessibility.)

-Scripting/Customization for Stages and Characters (even the Character Selection Screen, Menus, Stage Selection Screen too??)
-Characters/Stages Creation Tools
-Frame Rate? 60fps or 30 fps? Who cares?

Edit:

To further explain things, I do plan on doing a tFR attempt within a few weeks. But I'd rather discuss a few things before jumping right in totally blind.

I really need to know what kind of animation engine is good for the game. I'm leaning towards a plain and simple animation engine. I've overengineered and poorly designed a bit of animation engines overtime. They all resulted in engines that I'm not happy about that all required me to make relatively complicated tools at the times. It's getting old and annoying to keep failing lol =p. A simple animation engine + tool sounds refreshing. Something that only includes what's necessary and nothing more. Until I get more feedback on this, I'll focus my attention on other things. I'll take a pre-existing free animation tool too. The goal is get animations in game. I can support converting GIF frames to an animation which will hopefully make things alot easier. Animate in Graphics gale, gimp, MS paint and turn it into an in-place animated GIF. Import into the animation tool and save. Done. It's useable in game (sorta). Err gotta stop editting this post.

From what I researched, Input Buffering/control can break a game. That's something that can be further refined during dev with playtesting. Really, Input Buffering + unique combos + free control of scripting moves sounds like it has lots of potential to be really fun to make and play. I've thought about how I'd handle input buffering and executing combos while compensating for error tolerance. I'll go into more detail in later posts because all these edits are making this post too large......again.

Scripting is going to be the center of content creation- for stages, characters and maybe even the menus. Later, I'll need good community feedback on scripting to make sure it's user-friendly and intuitive enough to use, especially for non-programmers and artists. What kind of scripting do you guys expect (What kind of customization do you guys expect?).

Online? Like I said, I never did online networking. For an online community, it sounds pretty important. It's likely that I'll put up public prototypes of networking alone instead of a tFR with networking. The reasoning behind this is due to having part of the game engine already done thanks to working on MFGGTKO for half a year. I didn't implement the engine with Online in mind. I think it'd be simpler to get a feel for networking and see how that might affect the existing engine than to blindy start throwing networking code into it.

Edit:

I guess I'll just work out the details solo instead of getting input about how things work from the community