Hello again and welcome to Day 2 of our Daily DevLog Week to round out this year of posting! Today, as you can probably guess form the title, we are going out be looking at the way we are approaching fighting in the game and how it’s changed throughout the design process.

            Initially when the project was in its early stages last summer the fighting in the game was going to be more similar to that of most other wrestling games. That is to say, you’d throw a punch and it would hit someone, we had even planned on using Inverse Kinematics to make the moves feel heavier. However, as we began fleshing out the concept and Ben began talking to other Devs who make fighting games, it became clear that pre animated moves is the way to go. 

            This brought us to the second version of our fighting style, where both players would have to communicate and match input style in order to pull of the move correctly. This would have played on one of the then design pillars of the game, cooperation. However this style was eventually removed from the game as we couldn’t find a way to fit it in satisfactorily with the narrative of the game. You see, as we work more and more on the game we quickly became attached to the character models that Paul had made, and the flashy pre animated moves, and wanted to make the game a little more in depth. We decided to do this by fleshing out the “Backstage” or “Locker Room” sections of the game. This only problem with this is that we decided we wanted to add some progression, to really make players feel like they were accomplishing something. But we couldn’t find a way to make that work with couch coop, at least not in the time we have for this development process.

            Of course, this brings us to iteration three of our fighting styles, player versus AI quick time events. Fun story, we had initially banned the words “quick time events” from our discord server. We genuinely did not want to have them in the game until recently. The change came as we began fleshing out how the player would communicate with the AI character, would the AI tell you what to do? Would you tell it what to do? We had no idea! Except we did, we had our banned words. Initially we wanted to make it a rhythm action, but we felt that it might take away and change the game a little too much. So we came to the decision to un-ban quick time events, and with that, our new fighting system was introduced.

            Using certain combinations of inputs to pull off certain moves felt like a fun way to go about things. It also meant we could grade fights a little bit more smoothly (something I’ll go into more detail about tomorrow). This is shown off in the gifs included in this post! 

              As always, if you have any questions let me know below and who knows, maybe you’ll get a whole post replying to you!