TITLE
Game Summary
SUPERULTRAMEGA FIGHT!!!!!!!! is a 2D fighting game that emphasizes player expression and creativity. Despite
the fact that there's currently one character in the game, players can choose from one of four distinct "styles"
that give the player access to different gameplay systems. Additionally, when player's fill up their style gauge they gain
the ability to power up, which gives them temporary access to extremely powerful tools based on their style choice.
The styles are as follows: Offensive, Swift, Defensive,
and All-Rounder. The former tend to be more aggressive, where the latter two tend to be more mid-ranged or defensive.
The Offensive style has access to additional combo routes that vastly improve the player's ability to apply pressure,
but generally lacks fast movement, bulk, or vital defensive options.
The Swift style has access to blindingly fast movement and even an air dash, but suffers from being frail and having more linear
combo routes than the Offensive style. The Defensive style is incredibly bulky and has access to the extremely powerful yet risky
parry mechanic, but is also extremely slow and cannot dash forward. Last but not least, the All-Rounder style gives the player a
flat damage boost, allowing players to be flexible in their approach. However, its general lack of surprising tools can make it
quite straightforward if the player is not more creative in their gameplay.
The game currently only features 1 character, Karateman, and generally is missing other important gameplay features like a competent
computer opponent, single player content, and online functionality. However, it is still in active development and will be updated in the near
future.
My Roles and Contributions
This project was done entirely solo for my senior capstone. With the exception of the font and the title screen, every single aspect of the game was done by me.
Production and Challenges
Coming into my final semester of college, I knew that I was going to make a fighting game no matter what. I had been wanting to make one ever since
I started developing games, and it was at this point that I felt like I was ready to take on the challenge. There was, however, one major issue that
stood in my way, and that was art. I am not a visual artist and have never been trained in any way to do art, but all of the artists that were in my capstone
class were already part of a group before the class had begun. Rather than just giving up, I saw this as an opportunity to truly push myself and see what I'm
capable of when I have no one else to lean on for work. Naturally, that means the biggest challenge for me was art, especially given how
animation dependant fighting games are. I taught myself how to animate using Rubberhose,
a tool for Adobe After Effects that allows you to rig a 2D model. My first few animations were pretty terrible, but I feel like by the end of the semester I had
noticably improved. That was also one of the reasons why I chose my characters to be stick figures, as I want to keep the shapes as simple as possible. The other
reason was that I was inspired by the things my friends and I used to sketch as kids, creating these characters with crazy abilities and having them fight. And thus,
the initial concept for SUMF was born. This immediately gave me a lot of inspiriation with which to make characters, but I knew that I would not be able to make
that many given my lack of experience in animation. With this in mind, I set out to create a game that is simple to pick up but still has meaningful gameplay choices
despite its inevitably small roster size.
The systems were the first thing that I designed, and I was pretty set on having the four styles that I ended up putting in the game very early on in its design.
That presented a pretty interesting challenge regarding the designs of the characters themselves because I needed them to play well with all of the styles.
This directed my thinking towards making the characters as toolsets, with a lot of their defining characteristics coming from the systems themselves. I also wanted
to make their movesets have some pretty outstanding tools that might be considered unbalanced in other fighting games to make the individual characters shine a bit more.
The design felt kinda like a balancing act a lot of the time, trying to create interesting systems and characters without having either of them drown the other out.
I think besides art, the other thing I struggled with the most was engine stuff. Initially I was going to make the game in Godot, but having learned that my capstone would only
be one semester, I felt like developing the basic engine needs of a fighting game on my own would be out of scope for this project. That narrowed my choices a lot because I
was looking for engines that specifically are designed for fighting games. The two that I narrowed it down to was MUGEN and Universal Fighting Engine. I decided to go with the latter
because despite needing to pay for it, it suited my needs and wants very well. MUGEN is very antiquated and I'm pretty intimately familiar with Unity, which UFE is a plugin for. I
definitely struggled a bit learning the engine. It has some quirks that were hard to get used to, but luckily UFE has a pretty strong community behind it and I got a lot of assistance
in their community Discord. I'm definitely very happy with my choice in engine just for the fact that UFE is way more flexible than something like MUGEN.
By the time the end of the semester came around and I finished work on the showcase build, I was pretty satisfied with how it came out. It has some very obvious issues,
like some of the meter gain related things, some of the animations, and the fact that there's no alternate color for the character. The showcase went amazingly well, and
watching people play my fighting game with smiles on their faces meant everything in the world to me. I'm very excited to continue development on this game in the near future,
and I hope that I can continue to provide interesting developments to this title.
Links
itch.io page
