Fighting Game Engine
Fighting Game Engine is an untitled fighting game I started working on technically at the very end of December 2022. My friends were getting me into Guilty Gear Strive and I had just heard about rollback netcode and thought that it sounded like a fun programming challenge to try and tackle. I read like one or two articles, watched a great 2018 GDC talk by Michael Stallone, figured I'd got the gist of how it achieves what it's trying to achieve, and then jumped right into designing my dream fighting game and implementing it. It's going to be a long project.
The main mechanical quirk of this game is inspired by multi-phase boss fights. I feel like it would be an interesting negative feedback loop to have more player strength and abilities unlock with each successive "boss phase" they enter upon reaching different health thresholds. Each character has 3 phases that each make them stronger.
The second mechanical quirk is that each character has a 2 stances they can switch between which changes how they're played. They might not have very many attacks per stance, but managing your stance switching resource to create or extend combos and react to your opponent's current phase is the main goal of the mechanic.
On the narrative side, the game is all about being hot gay monsters to go on dates with each other in the form of duels in the park. This was born of the brain genius understanding that fighting with swords is hot and sexy and if some fucked up nightmare demon babe asked me out to fight in the park, I'd ask them out on a second date no matter how it went. It's also a means of exploring romance, polyamoury, boundary negotiations and aftercare, relationships to "dating" and "The Apps", and emotional growth both internally and through other people.
You play through text conversations as either character in an interaction and help each of them decide the course of their relationship and see how they'd navigate it and how it might interact or overlap with their relationships with other characters.
Again, this is going to be a very long project lmao.