The first games I ever played were retro-styled fighting games like Street Fighter, and I fell in love with the genre and set my sights on one day creating a fighting game of my own.

At the start of 2021, I started brainstorming by creating character concept sketches, map concept art, and I started building the world.

As I started, I realized what a daunting task it was to create a fighting game with AAA features. As I pushed forward with the project, I began to understand why it takes teams of hundreds of people to accomplish something great. Although I am just starting, this is what I have on the front end.

This game was my first introduction to coding; my most recent development allows the player to create custom controls for the moves they want and save them for the next time they load up the game. Here is a brief snapshot of the code.

As I pushed through the backend of the game with the many features that I wanted to implement, the first thing that came to my mind, and what I wanted to do was create the move-sets. I decided to make a node-based tree-like data structure generated on a start-up that makes the pre-designated moves/combos with their specified frame windows between, etc.

After completing the move-set system for each character, I started focusing on character design and game design. Through this, I decided to set up the animations I had found online. There was just one minor issue, Unity’s mecinam animation system did not have enough control or precision for the job. I took my time researching the best possible way to proceed, and I stumbled upon the Unity Playables API. From what I have seen, only one other person has successfully done what I hope to achieve. I have started developing my custom animation system, which I hope to get working in the next week or two.

If you would like more information on what I am talking about, head to Unity’s Playables API Documentation. If you are interested in the other product I mentioned, it is here.

Development for my custom animation system is almost done. Currently, there are still a few bugs, but here is a working example of what it looks like:

I will be working on fixing all of the bugs and getting better, and smoother animations, check back for the next update!