Welcome to Wrestling Gamers United Newsletter #436
1) Dear Diary 2) 25 Best Fighting Games EVAR! 3) Ladder Finishers
1) Dear Diary ************* Late newsletter today. I just finished a mind numbing 40 hours of adding all new effects and collision keyframes to over 600 of our animations. It's a monkey task, but still one that burns you out in a hurry. Like I'm gonna complain about it though. Making a wrestling game, baby! A lot of previously broken animations have been cleaned up thanks to a fancy new exporter our lead programmer slapped together. Still a few casualties, though, and that suplex reversal over the ropes may be too hopelessly borked to save. This weekend we'll have a new build with updated shadows and normal mapping, too. Oh and for some reason all of the piledrivers in the game have leg glitches because they all use the same defective setup animation as a base. Easily fixed. All collision bounding spheres and boxes for each body part are working perfectly. I'm rambling. Is this boring? Does anyone care about this stuff? Ah well. It's been my life for the past week so it's all I have to talk about. Oh and because of this animation work I didn't get the new stuff finished for the new PWX site. My fault. That's next though as long as I'm not needed for any more game related stuff next week. Living the dream. Giggity giggity.
2) 25 Best Fighting Games EVAR! ******************** Two wrestling games made this list. Can you guess which two they are?
3) Ladder Finishers **************** I just learned today that the new Smackdown vs. Raw game will feature about 10-15 new finishing moves from the top of the ladder. Cool huh? Pretty slick of THQ to be promoting this new "feature" that cost them maybe $500 in labor to produce. You ever get the feeling they're running out of ideas?
In the meantime and in between time, that's it, another edition of Wrestling Gamers United.
Thank you for your support, Dave Wishnowski
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#1 Glad to hear things are working towards a new build for this weekend. Just remember without you to take care of those tedious animation fixes, the game stays even FARTHER away from an eventual release.
#2 Wow.
The two included are actually my two favorites of all time.
And since I don't like FIGHTING games, I guess they have to be the top of all time for my favorite fighting games.
#3 It is official. THQ has ran out of ideas...see their All Star Wrestling title for further proof. PLEASE SPIKE SAVE ME!
Now...I dive back into Champions On-Line (Yay for a new PC that can actually let me play the Super Hero MMO.) If I had a PC that could have run the game I would have gotten in on CO from launch...Darn M$ screwed with them (Developer Cryptic) so they never got to release it on 360 as they had originally announced they would. I am also greatly looking forward to DCU Online launching this year (I think November) which is the #1 reason I finally broke down and got a PS3.
I too am suspect about THQ's recent focus. One can only assume that the number of reversable submission moves — the ones which can be applied for a variable amount of time — remains as low as in the previous game. The SvR grappling system is certainly intriguing, and I'd fathom the franchise needs only one new release to perfect it. Alas, such matters have been overlooked in favour of new "garbage" gimmicks.
How do you like CO, Monitor? I downloaded the trial on Steam a while back and have been meaning to check it out.
In THQ's defense (surely a sign of the apocalypse) submission moves are some of the most expensive assets to add to a wrestling game. Where a strike or even grapple move is usually no more than one or two simple animations a submission move consists of anywhere between 8 and 16 distinct animations depending on reversals, tap outs, etc. And they're much more complex than most moves because of literally how tangled up the two characters are. For the time and cost it took me to animate one full submission I could get at least four more grapple moves done. So we have to pick our submission very wisely until we have a multimillion dollar budget to play with.
I am really digging CO. I played CoH from it's Beta up until a couple years ago...I never really got into the game though, never having taken a character beyond lvl 28 or so. It seemed like a major grind. CO I am having a lot more fun as it seems like more of an action game. I can even use my 360 pad with it.
CoH was fun in creating characters...CO has a similar create mode...but the game allows for a lot more freedom.
The demo only allow you to go through the tutorial story (An Alien Invasion story) and you don't get your travel powers, or have access to a power trainer to level until after the tutorial..so you only get to play with the 2 starting powers in the demo. I suggest using a custom frameworks, so you can really mix and match what powers you are using. So you can take a punch or kick from the martial arts, blades, claws, or might power lines, and then some sort of ranged power like fire, ice, force, electricity or spells type thing.
After you get out of the tutorial you can always mix and match powers from the different frameworks...so it is possible to make a super strong flying character with heat vision type powers who mainly likes to punch his opponents. The have a framework called celestial that has healing powers if you target an ally, but damages when you target a foe. Neat stuff.
The 360 pad is set up directly in game, although the tutorial does NOT explain the functions for the pad...but it is pretty easy to figure out without any information.