Fighting Game Feasibility For A New Game Dev?

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TreeSwallow8683

Guest
Hi!
I just downloaded the 30-day trial of Game Maker Studio 2 so I can investigate its features. Before I go any further, I thought I would ask: are there any good tutorials for this software that are specific to fighting game development? I have some cool ideas and am willing to put in the work, I just need to know how to begin, so any guidance on where to go to learn the skills necessary would be much appreciated! The game will be in somewhat-minimalist pixel art, so nothing too fancy, but I still want crisp animations and a bevy of simple moves for each of the characters for players to master. Everything else is under wraps. ;)
I'm COMPLETELY new to game development, so go easy on me when it comes to heavy, technical tutorials. I want to start off simple and build my knowledge from there.
 

woods

Member
first thing that comes to mind... streetfighter!
definitely doable with GMS..

second thing that comes to mind.. since you said you are COMPLETELY new
(welcome to the club btw...)
start off small... learn the BASIC basics first

youll save yourself alot of headache.. learn how to do simple parts of games that apply to the end result that you are trying to create.. one would be suprised how much is involved in a simple pong or asteroids clone..


a few fundamentals to learn about first..
simple player movement
drawing values of variables to screen
reading/changing values from one instance to another
arrays and other data structures
state machine



most of all.. dont give up
there is alot of people here that are willing to go that extra mile to help you learn.. just gotta show a lil effort on your part.
 
Do not try to jump in a complicated game from zero or will you get so frustrated from failing to progress quickly that you give up.

Watch some tutorials on the basics and start with smaller experiments and minigames you can work up from. My first functional game was literally just a dice gambling simulator based on Blackjack rules to learn the basics of handling variables, math, and coding event flags to progress in a scripted environment like a turn-based game. It taught me a lot about the basics of GML that made me comfortable enough to start doing more complex things.
 
Definitely possible. I'd even say it's one of the best engine for 2D fight game, since the new update.
If you have 0.0f knowledge of game dev and programming, you'll probably NOT going to be able to pull it off in a month, unless you go all-in and full-time, and listen to the right people (lol).
Fight game are relatively easy in themselves once you get the concepts needed for them (hurtbox, hitbox, state machine, etc.). But the step from 0 to Pac-Man is bigger than most of us thought it'd be when we start, because it requires a bunch of little things to know and understand to make even something as simple as Pong.
The reason I say GM has recently became one of the best tool for that, is they implemented something they call Broadcast Messages. You can use them to trigger stuff on a specific frame of an animation, which is as you might expect, the basic principle of fight games. Not long ago, tho, it was a mess to set something like that up (tho very much possible, now it's just SUPER easy).
If you really want to skip the basics "arkanoid", "breakout" and "asteroids" tutorials, it's up to you (be aware they contain reusable knowledge that you will need anyway for any type of game, tho), but be prepared for much more frustration if you go that route instead of if you spent 28 days learning GM basics like camera, movement, functions, etc, and then 2 of them making a fight game prototype.

But all in all, in a word, YES! Possible, and an awesome tool for it!
This was made in less than an afternoon (about an hour, hour and a half, really) as I wanted to try the said Broadcast Messages new feature (and it does hurtbox and hitboxes, even tho we dont see it!), so if you put some love into it and work hard, you can come up with something quite nice, I'd say, even as a beginner!
There's always some help around here, but I would avoid tutorials that are too "genre-specific" in the beginning, just so you don't pick up bad habits.
 
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