Fearless Night - A 2D Competitive Fighting Game (2024)

Level 0

We're creating HD sprite animations much like Blazlue and Person 4 Area, but the game plays much more like Guilty Gear. We're working to combine quality game play with solid net code so that there can be a thriving online competitive scene. With most fighting game developers switching over to 3d animations, we're striving to preserve the era of fast paced hand animated 2D games. Few developers are implementing the type of net code that is needed in countries which have less than ideal network latency conditions.

The training mode includes features designed for the needs of competitive players and we've implemented "rollback" net code, the same technique used for GGPO.

As far as the current development status goes, the engine is somewhere around 90% complete, but we still have the majority of content ahead of us to create. We hope to have 8 to 10 characters by our first release. Our animator is on track to completing the animations for the first character. Many of the story elements, and details such as character names haven't been decided. We think that completing the game play takes priority over anything else, so we've made many of these details public so we could gain important feedback from the community. So please excuse us if the game is a bit ruff around the edges.

We recently opened up our alpha for public testing so that we could gain critical feedback from the fighting game community and fix rare bugs. I'm not sure how long this will last, but so far I've been pushing new releases every few days.

I keep an up to date change log for the alpha demo:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54811597/CHANGES.txt

You can follows on Twitter

Official Site:
http://shobugames.com/fearlessnight

Alpha demo:
http://goo.gl/rgO9x6

And Manual:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54811597/manual.pdf

Videos

Edit
Demo link updated to version 0.0.30
Added some game play footage.

Level 0

I put up a new release. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54811597/FearlessNightAlpha_0.0.23.zip

Added a net play menu option. There won't be many users online obviously, but if you have a friend that wants to play, the network menu gives you easy discoverability on the match making server.
Unfortunately, you'll have to forward a port if you want to host a game.

For now I'm looking into hosting solution that will let me bind a UDP socket to a public port. I need that for people who are behind a NAT device to be able to not forward ports to host games.

There are a few network options in config.lua. If you're going to host, you just care about server_port. For everyone else there is the username setting you need to change.

Level 0

Spent the last few days cleaning up the rendering pipeline and created a shader file format for loading vertex and fragment shaders. It's very similar to the way DirectX .fx files work. Since OpenGL didn't have an equivalent, I had to implement something myself.

The format is primitive but gets the job done. Our engine uses a LISP like file format.

(Fx
"slash"
"data/shaders/slash.vert"
"data/shaders/slash.frag"

(texture sampler2D tex0)
(texture sampler2D screen)
(blend premultiply)
(uniform mat4 MVP)

(uniform vec4 blendColor)
(uniform float cutoff)
)

Now I can make changes and reload shaders on the fly without the pain of waiting for C++ to compile. Fragment and Vertex shaders are still in a separate files, but the text above represents enough information for loading the weapon slash effect seen below.

Level 0

Challenging video games

Hi! I love fighting games! Any gameplay video to get the feel of the game?

I looked at the manual to see what kind of mechanics you have. I have some questions.

1. The Open cancel mechanic sounds like it will actually make the game pretty hard to balance? Are you going to control this by having it use the meter?
2. Why is the kick button above punch button?
3. What's D? Is this like the Drive button in Blazblue?

Level 0

We do not have any official recent game play videos, but others have recorded a few if you look around youtube. Here's a short combo for example:

1. Open cancels and closed cancels have a meter penalty. Once you use them your meter will build back more slowly over a fixed time period.
2. Why not? Our game is way more similar to Guilty Gear than Street Fighter.
That being said, the chain sequence is Punch > Kick > Light > Heavy > D, so the current
layout is more natural for that. But you're free to reconfigure as you like.
3. D is placeholder name for now. We haven't finalized the button layout nor names, but D is the universal overhead and sweep attack button. It's also used for Ex special moves that require meter.

Level 0

With very little effort I was able to produce a simple refraction fx using texture coordinate warping. The warping is scaled by value of each pixel in the slash image.

In this case I have a slightly different warping value for each color component to fake chromatic aberration.

Level 1

TURBOGUN |
Master Spy | Master Spy Devlog

Level 0

I just released version 0.0.26 of he Alpha with a few bug fixes and additional features.

You can get it here:
http://goo.gl/rMKZnG

Summary of changes:

* Fixed Uri's 214P not spawning a projectile when facing right.
* Reduced the startup of Poco's super.
* Fixed select not canceling when connecting to a server
+ Added more resolutions to choose from in settings menu.
+ Saving settings now applies resolution changes, but not changes from and to fullscreen mode.
+ Added Borderless Window setting that lets you disable the window border. Requires a restart.

Full change log is here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54811597/CHANGES.txt

Level 0

I just released version 0.0.27. If you have an existing build, please don't overwrite the folder. Extract the zip to a fresh folder.

You can get it here:
http://goo.gl/XJCRN0

Summary of changes:

* Reduced pushback and increased startup on Uri's j.D
* Increased pushback on Uri j.L and j.H
* Down input in one move no longer counts as part of the high jump input for the next
* Many of Uri's normals have reduced damage
* Increased proration on Uri's 2H and j.H
* Reduced untech time on Uri's j.H
* Removed Uri's 623H
+ Jump moves are now buffered during prejump frames.
+ Added more screen resolutions
+ Added crash reporting

Full change log is here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54811597/CHANGES.txt

Level 0

Our lead artist just started his sprite art stream
http://www.twitch.tv/shobugames/

Level 0

Fearless Night 0.0.28 released.
http://goo.gl/RfDR7f

Change Log:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54811597/CHANGES.txt

The net code is very stable now. I'm going to focus on improving the net play experience over the next week or so. This will mostly be reducing the amount of forced syncs to decrease slowdowns.

Level 10

Wow good for you for taking it on. I've always feared trying to make a fighting game because I feel like I would constantly paint myself into a corner in regards to balance.

The Level Design Inspiration Machine

Level 0

Thanks! In many ways the fighting game genre is very restrictive. But out of those restrictions you have a lot of room to be creative. I hoping to make something fun and make improvements on issues I've run into as competitive fighting game player myself.

Level 0

Finally got around to posting some match footage. Here's an online match session between two players that was stream earlier today.

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We recorded a sprite creation time lapse to show the process of drawing one frame of animation for the game.

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0.0.30 released.
Summary of changes here. We'll probably do more of these
http://shobugames.com/post/76555149125/fearless-night-version-0-0-30-released

Direct download:
http://goo.gl/rgO9x6

Level 0

Built a new tool for generating meshes compatible for Fearless Night, removing the dependency on libassimp. Stage loading times are shorter and one more dll can be eliminated from the distribution.

It was fine for prototyping and quickly getting mesh data into the game, but the additional overhead isn't good for the long run.

Also the next release of the game will see the introduction of counter hit effects.