We’re a few weeks along, and Red Fight District III is coming ever closer. We once again have a batch of changes to share with you!

One of the major complaints by alpha testers was our mockup grab, which consisted of mockup sprites and the inability to throw your opponent forwards, which made it useless when applying pressure on a cornered opponent, as it would throw the opponent out of the corner.

One of these problems has now been resolved! We now have a fully sprited version of the throw animation, and we are hard at work to implement the ability to throw your opponent forward.

The previous blog showed you our newly added superstop, and while this was a nice start, the pause without any effects was a bit awkward. The screen now becomes dark for the duration of the superstop, and a quick screen shake effect take place. This is however not apparent on youtube, as it cuts half the frames of animation (and thus, the shaking frames).

Of course, these superstop effects are still not final, but the superstop should be easier to read visually now.

We’ve lengthened the stage vertically and added vertical panning to the game. Vertical moves such as uppercuts will now be followed by the camera, adding an extra bit of visual oomph.

Attentive readers might notice we’ve changed the properties of the Hard punch dragon punch a bit.

Finally, we encountered this funny ‘little’ bug a few weeks ago. Why did we wait before showing it to you? We wanted to kill it dead, so you could not recreate it at RFD. Enjoy.

Lately we’ve been making great progress on the engine side of the game. While much of the system was already more or less functioning, We are now polishing up some parts of the  engine to make it work exactly as intended.

A fairly big update which -to the player- is very difficult to see, but removes a lot of headaches on the programming and scripting side, is a reworked velocity system. Control over gravity and acceleration is now less hacky, and allows us to experiment with some new things. Right now, the knockback of attacks is plotted out manually frame-by-frame. We are now experimenting to see if a formula-based knockback would give the desired effect.

More obvious system updates are the changes to crossups and the way the shatter system works. Originally, when you hit your opponent with a crossup, the opponent would move away from you, making it very difficult to combo off a crossup. Normally in fighting games, although there are exceptions, the opponent moves towards you when you do a crossup, allowing at least as many, and sometimes more combos than when hitting a normal jump attack. In Shattered, the crossups now work as expected. The video below first showcases  how the crossups used to work, and shows that comboing off it is difficult, after that it showcases the new crossup mechanics, and the same followup comboing this time around.

We’ve also made changes to the shatter system. We originally envisioned for a shattered opponent to be able to be hit with one more move before he is knocked down. For a long time, however, a shattered opponent would only take one hit before being knocked down, which in the case of moves that do multiple hits would not give the desired effect.

In the first part of the video below, you will see that the flying kicks and dragon punch, which normally hit three and two times respectively, only hit once on a shattered opponent. In the second part you can see that the opponent is hit by all hits of these moves before being knocked down.