Hi! I'm Kas. I wasn't sure where best to put this thread, so mods, feel free to move it wherever it might fit best.
I do a little game dev as a hobby, and one of the ideas I've kicked around every now and then for trying someday is a Smashlike/platform fighter/whatever it's called nowadays that comes with engine-level tools. I figured I'd try to kick off a discussion about this idea, what I think its strengths and weaknesses are, and then open the floor for you guys to talk about whether it's worth anyone's time or not. Apologies in advance for getting rambly or long-winded or incoherent; it's late at night. Feel free to ask for clarification.
TL;DR (though I do recommend you read the post): Someday I wanna make a platform fighter like Smash, but with editors and stuff along with it. Would anyone play it, or would I be wasting my time?
So, what is the nature of this idea? The simplest comparison would be to MUGEN, which does more or less what I'm intending for the traditional fighter subgenre. If you're not familiar, MUGEN is a fighting game engine modeled (from what I can tell) vaguely off of Street Fighter. It comes with only one character and one stage, but it exposes facilities for users to create their own fighters and stages, and even put together full games if they choose.
THE MUGEN PROBLEM
The most obvious upshot with MUGEN, and the one you're probably mentally screaming at me about right now, is that there's no way to balance characters against each other. Without those kinds of checks, it's easy to put together a roster full of blatantly one-sided matchups, or even make characters like the Ultimate Chimera from Mother 3 that are completely invincible and blow each other away. "Clearly," you might say, "nothing competitively interesting can come from such a system!" Here's the thing: if you view MUGEN not as a game in its own right, but as an engine (which it is), the whole picture changes.
BALANCE PARADIGMS
The thing about engines is that, taken as full games, they are by definition not finished yet. To wit, engines lack a balance paradigm, which is my own term for the environment in which tweaks would be made to make play options (e.g. characters and stage choices, movesets, etc.) viable against one another. To illustrate what I mean: if you wanted to add a new character to Melee, or change an existing character to be more viable, you would have to take into account the fast and tactically offensive overall flow of play, the movesets of existing characters, game mechanics such as wavedashing, the selection of stages, etc. All these things are more or less external to the character you're designing - they make up the balance paradigm of Melee.
MUGEN, on the other hand, is just an engine. If all you want to do is make a general MUGEN character with no other context, you don't need to take into account any preexisting notion of balance - you can do whatever you want, and chaos ensues. This can be a weakness, but I think it can also be a great strength.
THE GAME PLAN
So, here's my proposal. I would make a platform fighter - a full game, kitted out with a roster of characters and a decent stagelist. I would also release a set of tools - probably even the same ones I used! - for creating characters and stages and such, so that people can make custom content in a fashion similar to how people are making custom content for modded Brawl.
The starting content that it comes with would make up the core game - the 'tournament-viable content' (assuming people would actually play this game competitively; take a moment to quit laughing) that comes with my promise of balance and fairness. User-generated content and modified versions of the base content would have no guarantee of fitting into the core game's balance paradigm. However, if someone wanted to make Project M-style balance modifications to the core game - or even remove all my content and make something totally new - they'd be creating a different balance paradigm, and they would be responsible for their own claims that it's actually balanced and fun.
I think this idea would have the potential to be an exciting addition to the genre's oeuvre: a tool specifically made for enterprising developers who are inspired by Smash et al. to make similar games and refine the genre. But, one last thing...
THE GAMEMAKER LAW
I have a little rule of thumb regarding development tools: The easier it is to use, the more terrible nonsense will be made with it along with the brilliant results. You can see this effect with a wide array of dev tools and engines - MUGEN, Unity, Flash, MMF2, RPGMaker, Mario Maker, SMBX, the various romhacking tools for games like Super Mario World... But I call this the GameMaker Law, after the game development tool to which I think it applies best.
I have no doubt the Law will apply to this idea just the same, and it will probably hinder people from taking the project seriously. This is the main downside that I'm worried about, and half the reason I'm making this thread at all - I want to know what you all think about this idea, and whether it would be worth the time and effort spent to make it happen.
What do you guys think? Is this type of project justifiable in any sense, or would everyone refuse to take it seriously?
(PS, something I just thought of: this engine probably wouldn't have any netplay either, unless we could devise some kind of handshake system to ensure that all involved parties are using the same content. That probably hinders the project's viability significantly as well.)
I do a little game dev as a hobby, and one of the ideas I've kicked around every now and then for trying someday is a Smashlike/platform fighter/whatever it's called nowadays that comes with engine-level tools. I figured I'd try to kick off a discussion about this idea, what I think its strengths and weaknesses are, and then open the floor for you guys to talk about whether it's worth anyone's time or not. Apologies in advance for getting rambly or long-winded or incoherent; it's late at night. Feel free to ask for clarification.
TL;DR (though I do recommend you read the post): Someday I wanna make a platform fighter like Smash, but with editors and stuff along with it. Would anyone play it, or would I be wasting my time?
So, what is the nature of this idea? The simplest comparison would be to MUGEN, which does more or less what I'm intending for the traditional fighter subgenre. If you're not familiar, MUGEN is a fighting game engine modeled (from what I can tell) vaguely off of Street Fighter. It comes with only one character and one stage, but it exposes facilities for users to create their own fighters and stages, and even put together full games if they choose.
THE MUGEN PROBLEM
The most obvious upshot with MUGEN, and the one you're probably mentally screaming at me about right now, is that there's no way to balance characters against each other. Without those kinds of checks, it's easy to put together a roster full of blatantly one-sided matchups, or even make characters like the Ultimate Chimera from Mother 3 that are completely invincible and blow each other away. "Clearly," you might say, "nothing competitively interesting can come from such a system!" Here's the thing: if you view MUGEN not as a game in its own right, but as an engine (which it is), the whole picture changes.
BALANCE PARADIGMS
The thing about engines is that, taken as full games, they are by definition not finished yet. To wit, engines lack a balance paradigm, which is my own term for the environment in which tweaks would be made to make play options (e.g. characters and stage choices, movesets, etc.) viable against one another. To illustrate what I mean: if you wanted to add a new character to Melee, or change an existing character to be more viable, you would have to take into account the fast and tactically offensive overall flow of play, the movesets of existing characters, game mechanics such as wavedashing, the selection of stages, etc. All these things are more or less external to the character you're designing - they make up the balance paradigm of Melee.
MUGEN, on the other hand, is just an engine. If all you want to do is make a general MUGEN character with no other context, you don't need to take into account any preexisting notion of balance - you can do whatever you want, and chaos ensues. This can be a weakness, but I think it can also be a great strength.
THE GAME PLAN
So, here's my proposal. I would make a platform fighter - a full game, kitted out with a roster of characters and a decent stagelist. I would also release a set of tools - probably even the same ones I used! - for creating characters and stages and such, so that people can make custom content in a fashion similar to how people are making custom content for modded Brawl.
The starting content that it comes with would make up the core game - the 'tournament-viable content' (assuming people would actually play this game competitively; take a moment to quit laughing) that comes with my promise of balance and fairness. User-generated content and modified versions of the base content would have no guarantee of fitting into the core game's balance paradigm. However, if someone wanted to make Project M-style balance modifications to the core game - or even remove all my content and make something totally new - they'd be creating a different balance paradigm, and they would be responsible for their own claims that it's actually balanced and fun.
I think this idea would have the potential to be an exciting addition to the genre's oeuvre: a tool specifically made for enterprising developers who are inspired by Smash et al. to make similar games and refine the genre. But, one last thing...
THE GAMEMAKER LAW
I have a little rule of thumb regarding development tools: The easier it is to use, the more terrible nonsense will be made with it along with the brilliant results. You can see this effect with a wide array of dev tools and engines - MUGEN, Unity, Flash, MMF2, RPGMaker, Mario Maker, SMBX, the various romhacking tools for games like Super Mario World... But I call this the GameMaker Law, after the game development tool to which I think it applies best.
I have no doubt the Law will apply to this idea just the same, and it will probably hinder people from taking the project seriously. This is the main downside that I'm worried about, and half the reason I'm making this thread at all - I want to know what you all think about this idea, and whether it would be worth the time and effort spent to make it happen.
What do you guys think? Is this type of project justifiable in any sense, or would everyone refuse to take it seriously?
(PS, something I just thought of: this engine probably wouldn't have any netplay either, unless we could devise some kind of handshake system to ensure that all involved parties are using the same content. That probably hinders the project's viability significantly as well.)