Designing DracoFighter

June 9, 2022 - Published

In the age of a potential second fighting game revival, what is the identity of DracoFighter? This is a question I've never fully ironed out an answer to, and it's a little funny to ask while literally in the process of releasing the game, but I think it's a good question to ask when figuring out a game's design.

The reason why it's so hard to answer for DracoFighter specifically is because of how long it took to be created. While I've sometimes said the development of the game took about 2 years, I had already thought about making the game even longer before, around 2014-2016, though it was more of a pipe dream than anything. I didn't write many of my ideas down, keeping it all in my head, so a lot of the information I have about my ideas are just based on memory, and even at the time they tended to mix together and change frequently.

However, there are 3 main ideas I remember specifically: a rough idea for a pixel art dinosaur fighting game, a mobile fighting game, and a fighting game with the most simple control scheme possible. The first idea was only through aesthetics where the dinosaurs would be animated with different resolutions (e.g. 16x16, 64x64, etc.) and fight to decide which resolution was the best, but I eventually tossed the idea because it seemed too silly and I wasn't very good at pixel art. The second idea was because I would sometimes be bored during car rides and feel an urge to play fighting games, while the third idea may have been connected to the idea of a mobile app, but I don't remember it clearly. Either way, I eventually realized these ideas could all connect together, and it became DracoFighter.

While struggling with the dinosaur idea, I realized rather bluntly, "Wait a minute, this is my dream game and I can make it WHATEVER I want, so what would it be? What would they be fighting for?" This resulted in me making a clash between dragons and dinosaurs, which I thought would be absolutely sick. From there, I would think up of character designs and movesets during school, with the earliest documentation I can find being a drawing of Draco back in 2017. I eventually decided to make a cut-down version of the game to make it more feasible to create, with half the characters and half the story, set before the fight against the dinosaurs. 

However, I'm getting ahead of myself. I could write multiple articles on all this stuff, so let's get back to that first question: What is DracoFighter's identity? Well, first and foremost, DracoFighter is my dream game. It has almost all of my ideals for a game -- an all-dragon cast, a story with humor, expressive hand-animated characters, and simple gameplay that gets surprisingly deep. 

During development, that last part became more and more important. While a simplified control scheme was necessary for a mobile game, it was accessibility that would make DracoFighter unique. Over the time I took studying fighting games and creating tutorials, it became very clear to me how often people would be turned off of fighting games due to the brutal difficulty and inaccessibility. Even the best in-game tutorials would be extremely long and detailed, with complicated systems built over years to appease the hardcore playerbase.

As someone in the position to create a new fighting game from scratch, and as someone who had made frequent efforts to appeal the inner workings of fighting game theory to larger audiences in the past, it all seemed to click together. I wanted to make a fighting game that would not only make the genre appealing to newcomers again, but also teach them how to play fighting games while playing them. I attempted this by taking my favorite parts of fighting games I played (Smash's control scheme, Street Fighter's neutral, Tekken's frame data, etc.) and theorycrafting many things on my own in order to make a fighting game that made accessibility simpler without dumbing down the gameplay.

Whether any of this was actually successful will be up for debate, but I'm happy with the results! I am curious about what people think about some of my specific design choices, especially compared to other games that released / I found out about during development. 

I also kept a mental list of goals while working on the game, which I'll write down mostly for my own curiosity below. Most of these goals were meant to address the primary complaints I've heard about fighting games:

Either way, thank you for reading! I have a lot more to say about DracoFighter's development, and may continue talking about the control scheme in my next article.

• Vecderg

Play DracoFighter here! https://vecderg.itch.io/dracofighter