So You Want To / Write a Fighting Game

aka: Fighting Game

Fighting Games. A genre of video games that distills the Fight Scene down to its purest form: Two characters locked in a fierce one-on-one fight.

Round One - Necessary Tropes

• First and foremost, you'll need a large cast. Start with a main character, most likely a Shotoclone, to set the design style that will be carried on for the rest of the characters, and go bananas making up new ones.
• For gameplay, you'll need Combos, a Combo Breaker mechanic, dashing and air-dashing, a Launcher Move, special moves, EX Special Attacks, Limit Breaks, and more importantly, a control scheme and combo system. To elaborate on those last two:
  • A control scheme is the choice between a three-button system (Light, Medium, Heavy Attack), four-button system (Light and Heavy Punch and Kick), six-button system (Light, Medium and Heavy Punch and Kick), or something else.
  • A combo system is how the combos are made. Examples include the "Hunter chain" popularized by Darkstalkers that goes Light-Medium-Heavy-Special-EX or Super and the "Reverse Beat" system of Melty Blood and Under Night In-Birth, where you can chain any normal move with any other normal move besides itself.

Round Two - Choices, Choices

• Choose Your Subgenre:
  • The traditional 2D fighter - the one that started it all, popularized by Street Fighter II. Command-based special moves, combos, guards, taunts, and Limit Breaks are this genre's bread and butter.
    • A subgenre of this is the airdasher, which emerged with the Guilty Gear series. These games allow multiple jumps and dashes in the air, and tend to be faster-paced and allow for some absolutely buck-wild combos.
  • The 3D fighter - starting with Virtua Fighter, these games are more grounded (if not always realistic), with large movesets involving many chains of attacks, rather than distinguishing between normal and special moves as 2D fighters do. The style truly came of age with the addition of sidestepping, a mechanic codified in Tekken 3 that let players bob and weave around incoming attacks, opening up all sorts of new strategies and movement techniques only possible here.
  • The Platform Fighter - a blend of fighting and 2D platforming pioneered by Super Smash Bros.. While it has its own fandom, it tends to get looked down on by hardcore fighting game fans for mainly relying on a simplified control scheme. Nonetheless, the genre has plenty of its own quirks and nuances if you're willing to dig deep for them.
  • The arena fighter - the No-Respect Guy of the fighting game genre. Unlike normal fighters, the camera is either isometric (as in Power Stone) or directly behind the player (as in Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi), and characters can move freely in all directions without facing each other. While appealing to casual players, thanks to their pick-up-and-play nature, the subgenre has yet to produce a widely-known game with enough depth to inspire a strong competitive scene. As such, these games have been mostly written off by hardcore players as poorly-balanced cashgrabs for whatever license they're based on.
• Select Your Story Genre: Whether you set your Fighting Game in a Standard Fantasy Setting, a Wuxia world, a Standard Sci Fi Setting, After the End, a Punk Punk setting, a Standard Superhero Setting, in The Wild West, the days of Wooden Ships and Iron Men, or just in the good old present day, remember that the setting (and the genre, be it Urban Fantasy, Super Robot, or just a Martial Arts Movie) will affect what the characters wear, whether or not they're human, and how they'll fight.

Round Three - Pitfalls

• Moveset Clones. Making all new characters a copy of an existing one is just a sign of cheapness and a lack of creativity. To a certain degree, it is acceptable (for example, two Shotoclones are a good way to get players accustomed to your game, and some games have put their own spins on the concept), but for the most part no two fighters should have exactly the same moveset—that's why we have Mirror Matches. Even your two Shotoclones should have subtle differences in their moves to make them distinctive.
• Characters should have some personality and backstory that prevents them from being a Flat Character.
• An Excuse Plot is fine for this type of game, but having no plot can be confusing for many. Likewise, don't bother making your story too detailed for the same reason.

Round Four - Potential Subversions

• The genre is cluttered with Shotoclones. There are alternatives to this, such as Mortal Kombat's Scorpion clones and Jotaro and Dio from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future.
• The grappler character is almost always a Mighty Glacier who deals heavy damage with every Grapple Move. Why not make your character inflict Damage Over Time with submission holds, like in Brazilian Jiu-Jutsu?
  • On the opposite end of the spectrum, you could avert Character Roster Global Warming by making more than one Mighty Glacier type character, though they don't all have to be grapplers—one could be a full on Long Range Combatant (like a huge and tough bruiser who specializes in pestering his opponents with jabs and weak long range shots, before striking with a powerful knockout attack), the exact opposite of what a typical Mighty Glacier would be, and another could specialize in counterattacks after blocking.

Round Five - Extra Credit

First Attack - The Greats

• From Capcom:
  • Street Fighter II started it all, and its various sequels made many improvements to the formula.
  • Darkstalkers improved upon the formula set by Street Fighter by codifying the "Hunter chain" combo system, and adding Videogame Dashing and the EX Special Attack. Marvel vs. Capcom would in turn perfect this style of gameplay.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future created the Puppet Fighter style of fighting game character.
• From Arc System Works:
  • Guilty Gear
  • BlazBlue
  • Persona 4: Arena
  • Dragon Ball Fighter Z
• From Namco (later Bandai Namco):
  • Tekken is, by a mile, the most popular 3D fighting series on the planet. As mentioned earlier, Tekken 3 brought us the sidestep as we know it, and the game has a devoted worldwide competitive following that went absolutely supernova with Tekken 7.
  • Soulcalibur is the king of weapons-based 3D fighters, and arguably the only one to truly get it right. It's also by far the biggest fighting franchise where you can create custom characters, allowing for all sorts of unofficial crossovers to take place on the stage of history.
• From NetherRealm Studios (FKA Midway Games):
  • Mortal Kombat is, by far, the biggest and most imitated Western fighting game series of all time. Debuting a year after Street Fighter II, its innovative digitized sprites and gory Fatalities enthralled millions of kids across America, and terrified just as many parents. After its initial cool factor wore off, the series spent the late '90's and 2000's wandering, going through a number of gameplay and presentation shifts. But just when the series seemed like it might be dead, the 2011 reboot brought it roaring back to life, bringing both the best single-player story mode in any fighting game up to that point and the deepest, most competitive gameplay in franchise history. Since then, the series has kept building on those elements, all while continuing to push its ultraviolence to absurd new extremes.
  • Injustice
• Killer Instinct was the first fighting game designed to allow for and encourage the long, insane combos that have since become a staple of the genre. Its 2013 reboot modernized those mechanics to add significant depth and open up all sorts of mind games, and is also notable as both the first successful free-to-play fighter and as composer Mick Gordon's big breakout, leading to his acclaimed work on the Doom and Wolfenstein revivals.
• The Super Smash Bros. series introduced platform fighters to the world in 1999, and still defines and reigns over that niche to this day. The obvious appeal of seeing everyone's favorite video game characters from Nintendo and beyond has made it one of the highest-selling series of all times, while the surprising complexity for those willing to dig for it has helped cultivate a massive tournament scene. In particular, Super Smash Bros. Melee has seen an unheard-of 20+ years of big-time competition, coexisting with its followups thanks to a host of unique mechanics that make its gameplay impossible to replicate.

Two-Hit Combo - The Honorable Mentions

• Samurai Shodown is a cult classic for a very good reason: it eschewed combos in favor of making single hit attacks powerful enough on their own that the focus was changed entirely to a new hit-and-run experience than the regular Attack! Attack! Attack! mentality that normal fighting games breed.

Three-Hit Combo - The Epic Fails

• Most, if not all, of the Mortal Kombat clones are this, putting more effort into copying the aesthetics and over-the-top violence of Mortal Kombat rather than the gameplay.
• Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite is widely considered to be a poor attempt at continuing the Marvel vs. Capcom series' legacy, and with good reason.