Video game research
What am I looking for?
Since my Fighting game Battle Arena is grounded in realism, I try to look up on many real martial arts techniques and moves to try and base my animation on as I do not want to heavily fictionalise the character’s move list too much like other fighting games are doing today e.g. Ryu’s Hadouken (from Street Fighter), Mishima’s Dragon uppercut (from Tekken), so it was a great way to do it since my character I will be using for the trailer (Kai Senshiro) would be using Wing Chun and Wushu techniques as one of his demonstrations. I also found some videos of Wing Chun st dem- onstration and other martial artists on YouTube and sites like FlashMavi (where it demonstrates martial arts moves with ash animation) for some movements for my character model to be loosely based off.
This is how I used of what I found?
Now that I gathered my resources, while trying to animate my character frame by frame, I use the Wing Chun demonstration of a man doing fist movements as a reference for my character’s movements.
The only difference was that the demonstration that was depicted in the video was a minute longer than my character’s almost 30 second demonstration along with
shot taken in different angles (The Wing Chun practitioner depicted in the left screenshot is taken only front angle while my game trailer depicted on the right was taken at all different angles e.g. front, back and sides). What is also a difference in comparison is that my character performs a one-legged front ip at the end of the trailer (which was loosely inspired by one of the martial artists of YouTube).
What is also an inspiration is the style of the texts and especially the slogan “A new reality awaits” was from the Tekken 6 e3 trailer back in 2005, that my game trailer was inspired from (due to character’s heavy breathing while doing demonstration and cinematic background music).
I came up with the idea of my game about 9 years ago when I thought of a spin-off called “Tekken: Battle Arena” based of my favourite fighting game series, Tekken with new characters appearing in it. In 2012, I scraped the idea of a spin-off Tekken game because I thought the new character were so unique, they’d be given their own plot so I came up with my own Sony exclusive game called “Battle Arena” with a interesting protagonist and antagonist plot. In 2013 there were more characters I thought of, but this time they were more realistic so I made the game’s genre more toned down in realism (since many fighting games these days carry out a fantasy look, I thought I would make it a realistic theme to it so that it would stand out better although there are realistic games like UFC and Fight Night, my game however has an actual plot instead and more darker in nature) along with the characters (if any characters are more supernatural looking, a drug that causes hallucinations the players character which is apart of the gameplay). The same year I also thought of two versions, the free-to-play version available digitally on PSN, which has a shorter story and character roster with a few customisations and X-edition available on disc for PS3, PS4 and PS Vita, which has a full roster and in-depth story (which reveals the true antagonist of the game). In 2014 I started to finalise my characters rosters to be more realistic, detailed and to present it in a professional manner along with making promo images and trailer. How I made it in a realistic approach was the plot and setting, the antagonist was a businessman, scientist and former boxer that hosts an underground tournament on a militaristic boat that invites fighters all around the world by text messages along with sending his chosen agents to fight the opponents at each country, the winner will eventually have a jet plane fight to the boat to fight other chosen competitors to fight the antagonist and winner of the company, which is also the antagonist’s scheme to research on fighters the ultimate weapon he currently works on. The timeline of the game is not mentioned much, but it’s possible that it’s set in the same year as the Brazilian Olympics. The gameplay will be somewhat similar to UFC but more stylistic and violent as it’s set in non-limit- ed places, it allows you to use environmental attacks which lead to damage or fatal death e.g. a sequence which allows the players to fight on fast moving traffic and each character is limited on attacking and grappling due to the size of the character e.g. smaller opponents can move faster but are weaker and bigger opponents can give heavy damage but are much slower. Also had an idea were each character carries a weapon (which contradicts to the plot of registered weapons used in a special match), it will be limited due to a special gauge to play fairly and equally to non- weapon users and also each character has different types of gear that protects them from attacks e.g. Kevlar vest, helmet etc which also effects on there attributes e.g. more health yet more slower, also each character can be customised with upgrad- able gear.
My updated hand drawn concepts of Battle Arena fighters from 2014
My finalised character art via photoshop
My final rendered character via 3DS Max
Conclusion
The good side about this assignment is that I really enjoyed animating the trailer, coming up with ideas for the game and drawing some concepts, though the down- side of it was doing a business plan (which was harder to research as there are many different audience that has a different view on the fighting game genre), rigging the model (some parts of the model was out of place, though I fixed this error by hiding it from a different angle when rendering) and researching (which seemed the least interesting of this task). Overall this task was really good and look forward for a task like this in the future, maybe more simpler with using the software e.g. rigging the model on 3DS Max. As for my game, I think the plot and trailer was presented really good but the only thing that was weaker was the animation as some scenes didn’t flow through easily.