[Fighting Game] Kinetic Damage

Hi guys I'm still working my ass off on the last finishing touches before submitting to Apple.

(Another reason it takes longer than estimated is that I ran out of budget 2 monthes ago, so I had to take a dayjob again to pay the bills. Now I'm using 100% of my spare time to properly finish Kinetic Damage. Evenings, Nights, vacations, week ends, etc.)

I'll release an extensive post in a matter of days to explain what I had to go through for multiplayer, if any of you is interested.

Hint : I've beaten lag, and this was not an easy task.

 

lol
Actually I'm not sure it would be better than SFxTK, as I'm using the same networking model (they're using a variation of the rollback model, if I read correctly).

By "beating lag", I mean "no delay". As no magic on earth could really suppress lag, what happens in Kinetic Damage is that any lag is traduced by fighter movement correction, instead of action delay. With higher pings (more than 500 ms), the action could look "teleporting", but the Delay model version would be as unplayable anyway. This is a tradeof, basically.
Meanwhile, at reasonable pings (20-80 ms), the Rollback model really shines over Delay, as it's 100% synchronized.

I've carefully read several forums (including shoryuken.com), and it seems that a vast majority of hardcore fighting gamers do really prefer Rollback over Delay, as it doesn't destroy your reflexes. Rollback emphasizes on your instincts, while Delay emphasizes on anticipation.
So in the end I do prefer a network gameplay that respects the combat pace.

Hope I was clear enough

If you want further description about Rollback model, may I link toward one cool blog written by Skullgirl's Reverge Labs team.

 

I see
Logically (and practically in KD), you shouldn't have to sync to lag, as everything is happening instantly on your device. The way I coded it, the only visible lag effect (here with rollback, the "repositionning" effect) is happening on distant device, pushing a button won't never rollback on your device.

That brings an interesting technical subject here : if I only rollback on distant device when a button is pressed, and if every command is performed instantly on your device, that means you could sometimes perform an action on something you have "seen but that didn't happen" (on high pings only). And which would be corrected a few frames behind.
(in fact this would be the exact situation that is described in Reverge Labs's blog, in the link I put a few posts above).

The occasion would be quite rare, only happening when your opponent is not action locked (idle or moving), but I could understand how hardcore players could be annoyed by it.

I could correct that problem by coding a way for the player to chose some kind of "local delay amount" before his command is performed on his device : basically a way to chose how much tolerance you would have against the way your reactions are corrected.

Practically :
On one side of a slider in the options, you would have zero delay on your device, but you would risk seeing some of your actions being corrected (like a combo that you'd thought would connect, which would be corrected to a blocked state a few frames behind).
On the other side of the slider, your command will be delayed by the amount of current lag, making sure none of your reactions would be based on a false representation of the opponent.
Playing with that slider would create a median algorithm between those two behaviours. (I take no credits for that, it was already implemented in older games)

For now this shouldn't occur in Wifi, but I'll think about implementing it when Online play will come, based on player feedback.

 

Absolutely, and even more than that. I have a ton of new ideas to expand the game.
If the game meets success, I will present it to bigger boys, trying to push all those ideas to their full potential.

About levels, there is already some leveling system, for the AI -aka, your partner-, but I got some much deeper level mechanics in my hat Wanted to put them for release but didn't have the time.

For this next release, I wanted to focus essentially on fight mechanics (the bases). I designed it to give tools for min-maxers and hardcore players to really go deeper into their fight strategy, the way they want to build the action, and how they can express their fighting personality with their fighter. This is the main purpose of Kinetic Damage actually And most of the expanding ideas I mentionned earlier are revolving around that very mechanics personalization philosophy.
The hard part was to keep it visually and mechanically simple, so that gamers who don't really want to dig deeper wouldn't be burdened. The good old adage : "Easy to handle, hard to master."

 

When it's ready (© Blizzard)

Still working on some inevitable last bits of Quality Assurance (debug, optimizing, packing up stuff, etc).

I've dumped any kind of estimated release date, because I don't want to play with people's patience anymore. So now I'm using a more precise and realistic format : a progress ratio.
Actually Kinetic Damage is 99.96% complete (99.97% in a few days).

You can see this number like a progress bar on your device I will post every new progress step on the Facebook page. And believe me, I'm as impatient as everybody to play this with friends ^^
If my days could just be 48 hours long, I'd be happy !