Suikoden Fighting Game

[Flufflez]

I am attempting to make a Suikoden themed fighting game. I will be using Macromedia Flash 8 (which uses ActionScript 2.0) to make the game. I will be working in baby steps. My first goal is to get a character selection screen and two characters with full movesets created. It will initially test as one player vs. idle computer to make sure everything is working. I will be using sprites ripped from s2 initially but hope to be able to use something better (fanart?) in the future. I've chosen to take on this project for multiple reasons, one of the most important being that I can start small and slowly develop it. Every step of the way I should have some kind of playable test version though.
A little background on myself. I am pursuing a computer science degree, so I have a mild background with some programming languages(c++, c#, and java). I have been using flash for a very long time, but haven't gotten too far into actionscripting. I am a long time suikoden fan and have been contemplating how I could combine my interest in the game into a skill building exercise for my education for quite some time now.
Anything that comes out of this project is nonprofit fanwork. Don't get excited about it, because it will probably end up as a scrapped project like 99% of the other undertakings mentioned on this forum.
I am open to any and all suggestions for what you think would be cool in a Suikoden themed flash fighting game. The more creative ideas I hear, the more I will be inspired and motivated to continue work on this project. Anyone interesting in making any actual contribution to the project, feel free to get in touch with me about that. Please keep anything you contribute to this topic within the constraints of the board rules. I want to be able to hear a lot of fun ideas without worrying about moderated posts.
If I ever make much real progress on this project I will try to edit this OP with screenshots and blueprints of the direction I'm going with it, including what I'm currently working on.

Completed:
In Progress:
Combat : Damage Calculations
Character Selection Discernability : Portraits, Sprites
Character Selection Screen : Tir, Luca, Flik (Portraits, Large Images(poor transparency))
Character Selection Screen: Stat Sheets (name, level, atk, mag, pdef, mdef, luck, [incomplete:mp, wlvl, watk, equip, runes])
Movesets : Luca (idle, walk, attack1), Tir(idle, walk, attack1)
Healthbars : p1, p2
Powerbars: p1, p2
Life Counter: only image and text atm
Support Chars: only images atm
Runes: only images atm
Hitboxes : (Luca attack1)
Background : Gregminster (basic scenery, mcdohl house, fountain)
Title Screen : (selection orb)
Future Tasks:
Sound Effects
Music
Future Ideas:
Add a ton more characters.
Don't use sprites?
Add more backgrounds (suikoworld map for level selection screen??)
2(+) Player
Computer AI
Known Bugs:
Selecting a character while their stat sheet is displayed will bug the stat sheet to visible. Work around is to add unnecessary code to reset the movieclip regardless of whether stat sheet button is held down. Fix is to find the correct code to check if stat sheet button is held down.


Edit: Completed a bunch of stuff with damage calculations and stat sheets. Did a little backtracking to make sure all sprites level out to the same ycoord when placed, making it unnecessary to have right and left sets of every move. Finally added an attack and walking animations for tir. Probably going to put a little work into hitboxes next. If I can get hitboxes to work universally it will be huge for getting the game to a testable phase.

[Flufflez]

screen capture of some really early test work i'm doing. shown is a working transparent luca sprite with idle, walk, and attack(performed in capture), non-working, non-transparent tir sprite with working healthbar for hittest with luca attack, partially completely gregminster test background, and portraits at bottom for now.

not shown, semi-working title screen, and very early stage character selection screen.


i know it doesn't look very sexy right now, but i'm going to spend some more time on the art portion of the project once i get the basics down a little more. just wanted to post a screen capture to generate some feedback and/or interest.

[Hirathien]

Not bad at all, going to keep a close eye on this one.

[veriaqa]

Any links?

[Nikisaur]

Interesting. I'm keen to see how this turns out ^.^

[Flufflez]

another screen capture for you all! some tacky looking things so far like the empty portrait slots and the black background. official character artworks used aren't perfect for transparency yet(not sure if i'll be able to fix them). photoshopped some effects onto a toran map for the bg placeholder. as far as actual coding, i set it up so that there is a glow effect on a highlighted portrait(you can kind of see it on tir). it moves with arrows (i don't like mouse commands for this type of thing) and whichever char it highlights, their picture shows up in the slot. space key selects them and next highlights make pictures show up in the p2 spot.

if anyone would like to make any contributions i'd love to hear which characters you think should be playable (atm i have 30 slots) and also if anyone knows where i can get some suikoden sound effects, i'd love to start implementing that.

@veriaqa: no links. it's still a work in progress so there wouldn't really be any point. so far it's just luca with one attack and a stationary tir. i'll be sure to update the OP if i ever manage to get it into a playable alpha.

[Antimatzist]

Yeah, keep it going, I'm interested in this.

Maybe you should try to make the Duel-System into a more action-orientated system? So every Character has maybe 3 normal attacks, can defend and has a Special move.

[Flufflez]

that's an interesting thought. defending is something i was hoping to look into already. special moves i hadn't even considered yet. i do want some kind of system for attacks that hit other attacks, whether it just parries or if one move can overpower another. the current limitation of all of this is the sprites. they are way too limited to add too much to each character, and some characters have far more available than others. possible solutions include making my own sprites to go along with the sets, or attempting to make completely original images. the former makes more sense for this stage of development, but the latter may take the same amount of time and be more rewarding down the road.

[gilgamesh31]

This looks quite exciting even in this early stage of development, might i ask if you intend to cover all the suikodens or only suikoden 2?

[Flufflez]

for right now i am limited to s1 and s2 because they are the only games with sprites (s4 has sprites on the load screens but they wouldn't be helpful since they are only a movement animation). ideally i would create my own images and use characters from all the games, but i'm not sure if i'm skilled enough of an artist for that type of task. if anyone has ideas for creating new character images, i'd be very open to hearing them. it's probably very likely there are free programs out there for creating either sprite sets or fighting game movesets.

i'd love to be able to incorporate all of the important characters from all of the games and all of the side characters that are reoccurring. of course i want to add a lot of the bad guys too!

[gilgamesh31]

Yeah sound cool, i just finished suikoden 2 but i can only think of a few humanoid antagonists such as Seed, Culgan, Neclord, Lucia, Gerudo, Jowy Blight, Rowd? (Ive always wanted to pummle this guy properly) Han Cunnigham? (If you could use his duel sprites?)

Suikoden 1 is even harder, theres Neclord the 1st and Ain Gide. You could also use Teo or Kwanda if you can use his duel sprites...

If you need any game testers give me a shout, id be happy to help. I wish good luck with this project Sir.

[Antimatzist]

You could add Special Moves like: Every attack fills a gauge, if that's full, you can perform a Special Attack.. or something like this.

But yeah, i guess you dont have enough sprites for that. Hmhm....

[Flufflez]

anything seen
http://www.spriters-resource.com/psx_ps2/suikodenii/
or
http://www.spriters-resource.com/psx_ps ... index.html
has a sprite in either of those two games. the problem is, not all of them are good enough sprite sets to realistically put in a fighting game. does odessa have sprites? sure. could i make her do more than walk and shoot an arrow in an awkward direction? probably not.

it's because of this that i know that at some point in the project i'm going to need to either improve these sprite sets by adding more sprites or start making my own images. if i make my own images (would i would actually prefer b/c it would probably be a graphical upgrade) i would have to them make my own background images too, and now it has turned into a huge art project instead of just a programming/art project.

@game testing: i really want to get it to a playable phase so that people can at least see how it plays (and i think i'll get more feedback that way too). this project will be in a really good place if i'm releasing stuff for actual testing and not just as a show of progress.

@special moves: i had thought of a special move gauge like you mentioned. that's definitely something you would find in a fighting game although it's not really the type of thing you would find in a suikoden game (rush meter in s4 i guess?). if it were a gauge, what would cause it to fill up? all attacks? by damage of attacks? do defenses or parries count to fill it up? what about magic (if i get to a point where i can implement that)? the other consideration with special moves is to eventually expand the game to be 4(or 6?) player and enable unite attacks (or maybe they would be work like single player special moves but use up the gauge for both people?). there are a lot of things to consider with this but it's also really exciting to think about the possibilities if i can get this project to that point. either way, mapping out the possibilities is great motivation to keep working.

[gilgamesh31]

Is that the only website where you can use suikoden sprites? I mean the characters are all there (and someone like sonya looks like she has enough different angles to use in a fighter) but the suikoden 1 location sprites are abit empty, wheres all the towns?

The special move gauge could act like a replica of the marvel vs capcom games: attacks and magic could fill the bar up a little, blocks and parrys could fill half of what the attack fills. And perhaps the special moves could only be useable when the bar is full. There could be say three levels that the bar can go up to and each level has its own special move that gets move powerfull with each level. you could even just have one animation for all three special moves they just deal more damage the higher the level they're on...

[Antimatzist]

The special move gauge could act like a replica of the marvel vs capcom games: attacks and magic could fill the bar up a little, blocks and parrys could fill half of what the attack fills. And perhaps the special moves could only be useable when the bar is full. There could be say three levels that the bar can go up to and each level has its own special move that gets move powerfull with each level. you could even just have one animation for all three special moves they just deal more damage the higher the level they're on...

Haha, I was also thinking Marvel vs Capcom You also could implement Support Characters like in Marvel vs Capcom, where they deal Special Effects.. iirc.