Weekly report June-1, 2024

Hello everyone! Thank you as always for your support. Let's take a look at this week's progress.

## Refining Hitboxes for Projectiles

The hitboxes we re-implemented last week have now been applied to projectiles. The work progressed smoothly, and we successfully re-implemented all existing projectiles. There was also an issue with the animation of projectiles differing from that of the characters, causing discrepancies when paused. This has now been resolved.

## Organizing the Flow of Attacks, Including Projectiles

What I thought would be a supplementary task turned out to be much more extensive. Organizing the hit processing of attacks involves many elements, making it challenging just to compile the information. I couldn’t complete this task this week, so it will be carried over to next week.

## Online Functionality

When starting this project, there were three anticipated technical challenges. The first was palette color changes, which were surprisingly easy to implement. The second was the performance drop due to a large number of sprites, solved with the introduction of a texture packer and a custom Photoshop script.

The remaining third challenge is the implementation of online battles, which is the most difficult. Limiting the game to local battles would shorten development time, but it’s unthinkable for a modern fighting game to lack online play. Who would find it enjoyable to only fight against the CPU?

Due to the technical difficulty, I have postponed it as long as possible, but now that the basic elements are in place, it’s time to start. Other game systems can be implemented later, but the online functionality will almost certainly require rewriting most of the code, and the later we start, the more work we’ll have to redo. I've always been haunted by the fear of this rewrite, so it’s somewhat reassuring to finally confront it.

The problem is that I have no knowledge of network programming. Therefore, I started by learning the name of the service central to the implementation. It turns out GGPO is available for free and has been adopted by various fighting games. Learning GGPO seems like the right approach.

I plan to start next week. Even if this attempt concludes that complete implementation is impossible, that itself is a significant step forward. In that case, I can focus entirely on developing a version for release and presentation without any hesitation. After the preliminary release, I could hire a dedicated programmer or switch to an existing fighting game engine. I haven't done this so far because many things turned out to be achievable once I tried. If I can implement it myself, that would be ideal. The true goal of this challenge is to determine if I can implement online functionality.

## Next Week's Plans

- Work on July's comic

- Start on online functionality

- Complete the unfinished tasks from this week

## Other Topic: Street Fighter 6 (SF6)

I finally purchased SF6, which I’ve been curious about, as it’s half off on Steam until the 18th of this month. Hellversus is mainly developed with GGST as a reference, but compared to that, SF6 feels very difficult.

- Fewer routes for standard combos

- Not all normal attacks can cancel into special moves

- Short input buffer window

- Follow-up attacks after a knockback can only be done with specific actions

- The time for hit confirmation is short, requiring high concentration and reflexes

This is just my impression compared to GGST, so perhaps GGST is designed to be easier to control. Since half of Hellversus's users probably haven't played fighting games before, I plan to make it as user-friendly as possible.

Conversely, what I found remarkable is the Drive Gauge system. If Super Arts are the trump card for offense, the Drive Gauge is entirely specialized for movement. In GGST, both consume the tension gauge, often depleting resources and making counterattacks difficult. Separating the gauges should allow for more dynamic matches. Basic actions are almost all implemented, but I still need to consider common or unique special actions for each character.

That's all for this week. Thanks to everyone's support, we can continue development! Much appreciation.
Have a great weekend!