Author Archives: Marijn

Announcing Ushah Airad

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This has been coming for a while, but the time has finally come to ‘announce’ our second character. We have previously given some sneak peaks of his concept artwork and we also showed spriteless gameplay, but we’re proud to present his finished base sprite!

Here is our new guy, Ushah Airad:

Ushah_Neutral_Blogpost

Ushah is a fast-paced grappling character that employs his steam cannon to shoot short range projectiles. He also uses his metal arm to hit his opponent with powerful armored normal attacks. Ushah can be used as a fast and aggressive grappler, but also as a methodical wall of normals, keeping the opponent just where he wants them (in the corner!).

We’re currently planning out the visuals of his moves. Here’s a concept drawing of Ushah using his command grab on our first character.

POOR JULIA!

CommandThrow01

RFD 4 report

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The weekend of 3-4 October saw the fourth edition of Red Fight District, and we were there with a build of the game.

RFD was the first public showing of a build of the game with all of Julia’s animations done, and we were happy to see so many players loving the animations of Julia in her finished form.

In the weeks before RFD we have always been hard at work putting together a playable mock-up of Ushah. We got the chance to finally test out some of the concepts and ideas we have of his move set, and it was the first time a version of Ushah saw competitive play.

Ushah’s play style actually took us somewhat by surprise. While we were planning for him to be a slow strong grappler, he is a lot more mobile than we expected and has fantastic, scary pressure. We really enjoyed the way he plays, and feel that this emergent play style is the direction we want to take him.

Because the mismatch of envisioned and actual play style, his damage output is very high, and this will need some adjusting to make him less dominant. We’re very happy with the way he plays, and we received great feedback that we will incorporate as we continue working on him.

We have made some short of Ushah gameplay at RFD, which can be viewed below.

We continue to be hard at work with Ushah, and will be fleshing out his gameplay and design more and more, and hope to show you guys more in the near future.

While we did not run into game-breaking bugs, we did run into some technical problems with our controller configuration. This meant that some people were unable to use their own controller really wanted to try the game out were unable to do so. We’ve made note of this, and have already come up with some solutions to this issue.

Julia is done!

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Last time we posted, we let you guys know that Julia was almost done. Today we can finally say that she is completely done. Finishing up the animation and implementing all of it took quite a lot of time, but we’re incredibly happy with the result.

We’ve been rather quiet lately, which is not to say that we haven’t been busy. But the things that we have been working on simply do not lend themselves as well for showing off.

A new version of the engine is in the works, which will be much more performant, and will eventually allow us to manage and implement effects and cinematic animations (like the Shatter super or a throw) much more easily.

In the meantime we’re hard at work hammering out the final details of Ushah’s design and moveset. Look forward to new Ushah stuff soon!

Julia is almost done!

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It has been a while since we have last updated. This is not because we have stopped development. On the contrary, we’ve been hard at work. However, much of the development we’ve been doing has been on a deeper technical level.

For example, we have been hard at work on a new version of the engine, which will support many new features and will run significantly better. Besides that we have been hard at work on the mock-up sprites and hitboxes for our next character, Usah.

This however, does not mean we have nothing to show you! Bob Sagat has been hard at work with the animations of Julia, and we are happy to say that she is almost done.

Some time ago we already shared some new animations on Twitter, namely Julia’s throw whiff animation and crumple animation. Since then two new animations have been implemented, we have a new throw tech animation and the final crouching hitstun animation (for heavy attacks).

Bob Sagat is currently hard at work drawing up the sprites for Julia’s final, and most elaborate animation, her Shatter super, whose mockup sprites we already showcased some time ago.

Once that is done we will start on the sprites for Ushah. We’re very excited to start development on a very different kind of character, and will provide updates on his development soon.

New Year, New Animations!

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We’ve been silent for a while with the holidays coming along. Now we’ve entered 2015, and we’d like to celebrate that with a brand new update!

Bob Sagat has been hard at work drawing new animations for Julia. No longer does Julia stand statically during her idle animation, she now lives and breathes!

Besides that Julia now has a fully animated super fireball animation. Also her regular projectile has been redrawn.

Finally Julia now has a set of crouching hitstun animations. She needs only one more crouching animation and then all of those are finished.

Below is a video (@60fps in Chrome!) with all the brand new animations!

Ushah Development

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Now that Julia is mostly finished, we’ve started development on Ushah. We had already decided on most of his moveset set, had created some artwork and had written down a rudimentary background story, but now we have truly commenced to give him form both visually and gameplay-wise.

In terms of appearance the biggest obstacle we have to tackle is the mechanical arm. We have to figure out the shape of the arm, the position of the moving parts and how to convert it into a proper scale for the sprites. Here is a small part of the recent concept art.

One of the earlier development sketches of Ushah’s arm that Bob Sagat has created.

The design of the mechanical arm has gone through some revisions and developments. This more solid armor-like version of the arm, is the direction we are moving towards at the moment. The ‘wrist’ portion widens outwards like a cannon muzzle. The steam gun in Ushah’s arm can release its steam shot around the hand this way.

A study of the new arm design in motion. It looks solid from different angles.

We’ve started to make a mock-up version of Ushah. Right now it is just his standing and crouching moves, with the framedata implemented as originally designed. This way we are able to quickly see what feels off, what should be adjusted and how. We’ve made a compilation of some of his moves and move properties in the video below.

The first clip shows: cr.LK xx cr.LP xx st.LK, Julia tries to retaliate with st.HP, but Ushah presses his st.HP, and the armor on hit st.HP blocks Julia’s attack and hits her.

The next clip shows: cr.LP, cr.HP, a basic link combo, followed by cr.LK, cr.HK, showing that Ushah’s cr.HK knocks down on hit.

We are exploring some unique super mechanics for Ushah. As a grappler, Ushah tries to limit his opponent’s movement to get in and grab them. His super lays down screens of steam with his mechanical arm/steam gun. This steam will impede the movement speed of the opponent, making it easier for Ushah to get in close and really hurt his opponent.

We’d like to put a call out for any concept artists that would be interested in helping along with Shattered. Some of the characters are already fairly fleshed out, other characters still have a long way to go.

Many fighting games have rather typical anime-look. We really want to distinguish the look and feel of Shattered by giving it more of along the lines of American and European comic book style, rather than the Japanese look so many fighting games have.

Do you think your artwork would fit the style we’re aiming for and are you looking for a chance to help along with the development of the game, please contact us at djono [at] team18k.com.

The development of Shattered is currently purely a labour of love, and all development is done in our free time, extra help would be really appreciated.

New gameplay changes

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RFD was a great chance to get a lot of playtesting in. Watching the players play the game exposed several bugs and gameplay issues that we have fixed in the past weeks. We’d like to walk you through some of the changes we’ve made.

An issue that multiple testers had been commenting on for some time now, is that the position that Julia’s projectile spawned made it very difficult to jump over the projectile and punish. We have designed for Julia to be a character that can set up fireball traps, and when anticipating a jump-in, could use her anti-air normals and special to punch the opponent out of the air.

But the projectile spawned so high, and so close to Julia’s body, that in some positions, it was possible to throw a projectile, and anti-air the opponent with the next projectile if they tried to jump over.

We’ve moved the place where the arrow appears more to the front which should solve this issue. Moreover, it has some side effects we’re very happy with. Julia can now cr.HK into her projectile from much further away, make it a much better string to poke with.

For example, cr.HK xx qcf+HP now combos after two blocked light attacks.

The super suffered from the same problem as Julia’s projectile. It was a bit too easy to anti-air with, moreover, it spawned so close to Julia’s body that it was quite difficult to combo off it. By moving it forward significantly, it is now a lot easier to use st.LK to beat out a low attack and cancel into super and have it actually combo.

Also simply confirming into super off cr.LK xx cr.LK xx st.LK, is now a lot less range dependent.

With Julia’s normal projectiles, the qcf+LP gives a slow projectile and qcf+HP gives a fast projectile. Before, Julia’s super would only travel with one speed (the speed of the light projectile). We’ve now added to option to choose between the two speeds. We’re still playing around with the variables, but we like how the fast version allows for some long range reaction punishes.

Some of you who have watched the RFD grand finals may have noticed that sometimes an airborne opponent would drop out of the super fireball after one hit. We’ve tweaked this, so that this should no longer happen now.

Finally, Julia’s flying kick attacks always whiff on crouchers, but it is her most damaging special. We wanted it to be a bit easier to convert into maximum damage off a full jump-in combo, and for that we’ve made it so that Julia’s crouching hard punch now forces stand on crouching opponents, so that cr.HP into qcb+HK always hits.

As some of you may have heard, YouTube has finally added 60fps support. We’re really excited about because Shattered, and fighting games in general, look much better at 60fps. Right now it is only possible to watch 60fps videos in the Chrome web browser, but it will likely be available for other browsers soon too. From this post onwards, we’ll try to to upload 60fps footage whenever we can!

RFD Showcase report

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Last weekend was one we have been looking forward to and been working towards for quite some time. The third edition of Red Fight District, one of the European major tournaments, was held last weekend in Amsterdam and we were there to show off our game!

We had our setup close to the entrance of the venue, right next to Team Reptile, another Dutch developer who you might know from their projectile fighting game Lethal League.

LLL.MBR vs Dr. Grammar

On Saturday we ran an official RFD Shattered side tourney. 16 people signed up, and we ran a single elimination tournament. Players had about an hour to familiarize themselves with the game, which a lot of the competitors made use of.

For the participants of the tournament, as well as for generally interested people, we printed some info leaflets with a short explanation of the game system and Julia’s moveset. For anyone that is interested in the contents of this leaflet, we’ve uploaded the PDFs: Inner pages and outer pages.

In the evening Armshouse streamed the semi-finals and Grand Finals with commentary from WrathTheFurious and our own Phoenix.

The semi-finals were Fulaani vs. LLL.Emersion and LLL.MBR vs RSD.RobinRamirez. Sadly the semi-finals between LLL.MBR and RSD.RobinRamirez were lost due to technical issues.

The finals were between Fulaani and LLL.MBR and can be seen in full below.

We want to congratulate LLL.MBR for winning the first tournament, he received one of the Shattered T-shirts that we had made!

Finalists

Sunday day was dedicated solely to free play. Many people got to play the game, and many were very enthusiastic. Some people gave very useful concrete advice, while others gave us many ideas to tweak Julia indirectly. We’ve already been hard at work to tweak some hitboxes and properties of her move set.

On Sunday, RFD was also visited by the guys at Pixelcake.nl a Dutch game website. They made a really nice two-part report on Red Fight District. In the second part Phoenix was interviewed to talk about the game, which can be seen below. Sadly, for the international community, the interview is in dutch and the YouTube translation is horrible beyond comprehension (but pretty hilarious), but for all you Dutchies, go check it out!

The Preview, photos and Part 1 and Part 2 of the report by Pixelcake.

We would like to thank RCR and the rest of the Red Fight District crew, for having us at there, we had a fantastic time. WrathTheFurious for helping out with the commentating of the finals and James Bardolph for streaming them. Correzio, Traumatisch and Bounze for transport. Finally, we would like to thank Dr.Grammar, Fulaani and RSD.RobinRamirez for the many hours of play they have put into the game, giving suggestions and ideas.

Pre-RFD updates #4

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There is only one week left until Red Fight District (RFD) starts, the final countdown has begun! We are very pleased with the state of the game right now as it feels stable and balanced, there are still some minor bugs that need to be fixed, but we have locked down the code in terms of gameplay changes and feature additions until after RFD so we don’t have to fear for sudden bugs ruining the game! We still have a lot of visual and audio content to add (not to speak of additional characters), but we have made great strides when it comes to the playability and presentation of the game in these past weeks.

One of the latest additions is an updated Shatter animation which now has some visual effect and sound effects to make it clearer when you have shattered your opponent.

Saturday the 4th of November we held a final playtest session with Shoutcaster/Marvel Fanatic WrathTheFurious (who will be commentating our finals on the RFD stream!), Marvel player CorrezZio, Team18K animator Bob Sagat and coder/designer Phoenix. It was a joy to see the excitement of players and how fast they picked up Julia’s combos, blockstrings and tricks. We’re very thankful for WrathTheFurious and CorrezZio taking the time to test the game with us!

Here’s a nice snippet of hype moment where Phoenix lays down the pain on his opponent.

We recorded more than just this snippet, the following video clocks in at just under an hour of Shattered gameplay between Phoenix, WrathTheFurious and CorrezZio. Sadly, we did not really keep track of who played when, so we only know that Phoenix was p1 and Wrath was p2 for the first few games. Enjoy!

The tournament at RFD will be held on Saturday, and by the current schedule the finals will be streamed at 8pm (GMT+1), it will be streamed by the Hadoken.eu. Of course, the schedule is subject to change, so if you want to be kept up to date about the progress of the tournament and when it will go live, make sure to follow us on Twitter @Team18K.

Coal

Pre-RFD updates #3

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RFD is coming ever closer, and once again we’ve added a couple more changes to the game that are highly noticeable.

The first change is one we alluded to in the previous post already. Not only do we have a new and fully animated throw, now Julia can also throw the opponent in forward and backward.

Several testers expressed the desire to have some sound in the game. Attacks now make sounds on whiff, on hit and on block, as you can hear in the showcase video we’ve included below. None of the team are experts when it comes to audio, so these initial sound effects are only temporary. Nevertheless, we feel that it certainly makes the game feel more complete, even in this early stage.

Having sound allows for easier reactions (one’s reactions on sound cues is significantly faster than that of visual cues), and overall just gives a lot more impact to hits.

Another feature we’ve implemented that we really wanted to be in before RFD, is the combo counter. Although figuring out what combos and what doesn’t, is quite intuitive with Julia, having the game actually tell you what combos and what doesn’t helps tremendously with any game you first pick up, so we’re very happy to have it in.

Player 1 and Player 2 have had the exact same colors for a very long time now. And while for showcasing some new features, or just practicing combos, this is hardly ever confusing, it certainly can get confusing in the heat of battle. We have now implemented a new color palette for Player 2 Julia, so that now you’ll know exactly who is who when playing! If by any chance you have a variation of colorblindness that still makes the two Julias hard to distinguish please let us know, we’re more than willing to tweak the colors.