In the last weeks, we have made great progress in terms of finishing up Julia, and we’re currently in the homestretch to having her done (for now). This mean we are spending a lot of time on polishing and tweaking the framedata, hitboxes and animations. Once we are done with these final tweaks, we will finally start working on our second character, Ushah, and we couldn’t be more excited!

On the programming side, all the goals for the engine we had for this ‘Julia-phase’ are done, and our programmer is already gearing up for the next phase, where we will finally get rid of our rather dated and heavy engine.

The scripting for Julia is still being tweaked every day. Many pixels and lines of code are examined to make sure that all the moves have the proper spacing, as to not create extremely strong combos or braindead hitconfirms and to make sure that the jumps and hops jumps are perfectly spaced to set up that one awesome ambiguous cross-up.

On the artwork side, our animator has delivered a piece of Julia which portrays her in the style we like to see her in, a mixture between western comic style and a Disney-esque vibe.

Sadly, as much as this is a gorgeous drawing, having him as our main artwork guy as well as animator/spriter will spread him too thin, so we are in dire need of some new blood. Are you a talented artist in need of some portfolio work or just experience, drop an email at djono [at] team18k [dot] com. Do note, at the moment we are without funds, we hope that this is a temporary predicament, but at the moment we can’t offer any financial compensation.

Attentive followers may have noticed that Julia’s Break* uses the animation of Julia’s jumping HK as a grounded attack, we want to eventually create a completely new animation for this move. We’ve been brainstorming some different concepts, and Bob Sagat has drawn up some quick sketches for this move.

Julia now finally has fully drawn wakeup animation and flip animation. We have also tweaked here jump arcs and added a quickstand mechanic, all are shown in this video below.

In the coming weeks we will showcase some hitboxes and insights on why moves have certain properties, all explained by our framedata master Phoenix.

– Coal

*As we ourselves got confused by all those ‘shatters’ in the Shatter System we have chosen to rename the ‘Shatter Attack’ to Break.