I'm working on a new game inspired by both melee and brawl. I can say that rewriting the whole engine is a ludicrous amount of work, but would totally be amazing for expanding the game. So much of a smash game is about feel though and you need visuals and the engine to be working together to land that feel. Other than PM, most mods I have seen just don't feel like smash. So even with a great engine, you would need an awesome team to create new characters and attacks.
I have skirted some of those challenges by choosing a pixel art style that I can do myself. This way I don't have to go back and forth with an artist to let them know why the animations won't work in context. I can implement and then make adjustments by simply opening photoshop. No need to email the artist and explain what is wrong.
However, like my past project (Super Smash Land), I am simplifying many parts of smash to be able to handle it myself. Still I am much more focused on creating a more competitive game, so I am already at a point where I am starting to branch away from smash in certain areas in order to achieve my goals on how I want combos to function and look. But unfortunately because I am one person that means things are going slower. Also I don't plan on every reaching as many features and depth as melee. I am more interested in injecting my own ideas and trying to innovate in the space rather than just recreating (which like I said would be amazing but a TON of work!)
-Dan
(This is a lot of text!)
Mind if I can jump on your project? I'm an independent programmer who has worked with code for the past eight years of my life. My most recent work was coding the Steam game 'Rush Bros.'. Over the past couple of months or so I've been wanting to do something similar to what you are wanting to do. I do not intend to drop any quality or leave something out. The mechanics of the game should be wholeheartedly inspired from Smash - This means everything you would expect in a Smash game would be there. The depth of the game
should go as far as Melee did, and possibly even
further. (Exactly what PM did!)
As for visuals, Instead of doing a Pixelated art style again, why not try a hand drawn art style? Think of Skullgirls or Street Fighter 2 HD Remix's art style. Instead of doing
everything two-dimensional, why not we experiment with 2D characters on a 3D stages? A 2.5D fighter seems like a neat idea to try.
As much as I love competitive Smash, and I want that to be the focus if we work together to put the game into motion, I want to make sure to please both the competitive crowd and the casual crowd. I want to allow both audiences to be able to enjoy the game however they want to play it. This means taking Smash's large amount of options and customizability and furthering it -
For example, one thing I intend to do is have all of the music tracks composed for the game be loaded separately from a folder inside the game's root folder opposed to having the tracks embedded in the game's main executable file. This file system organization method makes it very easy for people to replace the music of the game on platforms such as the PC, Ouya, Android, and IOS devices with a simple file manager program.
This system also allows us to cut the file size down on the initial Android/IOS files that are installed from Google Play or the App Store so we can get past the 50mb upload limit. To make sure users have the music and assets that we can't fit in the initial APK, we can ask users to download the bigger files that take up space from a different (Non-Google Play or App Store) server.)
Following my last statements, publishing on mobile devices might not be the best route, but the Ouya is something serious to look into. The Ouya is a very inexpensive console with lots of possibilities. If we publish on this system it will be easy for competitors to pick up the game for a fraction of the price one would normally spend on a third-gen console such as the Wii U.
For the past few weeks I've come up with a relatively simple (but effective) system on how to render Hitboxes and Hurtboxes - as circular bubbles for better trajectory calculation - on a two-dimensional plane frame by frame at 60 frames per second. I wrote a lot of stuff on it here:
http://thealiami.deviantart.com/journal/Active-Hitbox-Hurtbox-Rendering-450384591 (Some stuff is reiterated in this post here.)
GIF Here:
http://s18.postimg.org/4ceup6x3d/Komachi_Anigif.gif
(Komachi sprites used in this above proof of concept animation are from the PC game, Touhou Hisouten - Scarlet Weather Rhapsody. Those are not my property and are property of ZUN. They are used only to show a proof of concept.)
(Small Error in the above Image: When Komachi starts swinging her melee weapon, the multiple hit bubbles (The bunch of small ones that make a circle near the start of the animation) trajectory that faces outward should be inverted from what is shown above to better trap the opponent. Take Lucas' Project: M Neutral Aerial for comparison:
http://i1303.photobucket.com/albums/ag143/BurnsyGYAB/nair_fixe_zpse5d526d0.gif)
If you would like to discuss anything or possibly work together, please contact me.
You can find me on here all the time of you can contact me with an email at
TheAliami@Gmail.com
Ps - I loved Super Smash Land and you should make your signature picture a clickable link to the website.
