DracoFighter
Fun Facts & Easter Eggs!

December 4, 2022 - Published 

There's a lot of easter eggs I feel nobody will ever notice, and there's a lot I want to say about the game, so I'll compile them here for anyone who wants to know! Note that this will contain some spoilers for story mode, so I do recommend playing it beforehand.

• DracoFighter's original concept was actually DracoFighter 2's current concept! I had to scale it down by a lot to make it feasible for a solo developer project (and thank goodness I did, considering the amount of development time it took)

• Story Mode's visuals are meant to mimic a children's storybook, referencing Draco's love for them

  • Since he's a lab project, he's not actually fully mature so he has some child-like traits

  • Him being a lab project is also why he has an ankle bracelet and talks in a strangely formal way

• Story Mode's illustration style was also meant to be quick and easy for me to do, so that it wouldn't take forever. This worked too well, as I ended up doing most of them in a single day. Some of them may look a bit rushed as a result.

• DracoFighter was originally going to have a prototype sandbag character named Kawaii Bag-san (yeah, that was the pun) as a parody to both Smash Bros.' Sandbag and Rivals of Aether's Sandbert

  • However, during development I thought it'd be a pain to have to program and sprite a character that would never be fully implemented, so I just made Draco the starting character instead 

• The shower stage was originally going to be a bathroom, but the "training room tiles = bathroom tiles" joke was harder to convey with all the other bathroom elements covering it up

• Several character elements were only developed as I was spriting the characters. This includes: Draco's ankle bracelet, Plexie's pink chest mark, BiOS' head being a toaster

  • BiOS' head block had existed for a while, but was supposed to just be a hunk of metal based on JACK's "mohawk" from Tekken -- it was later turned into a toaster to give him a lighthearted character trait without detracting from his killer robot character

• During planning phases, Cyrus wasn't actually a character and the time machine was going to be built by a nondescript group of scientists

  • He was added as a character after I decided a 3-character cast was too small, and I'm happy to have made the decision 

• Cyrus was the most difficult character to design since he wasn't properly designed beforehand -- he took multiple phases and feedback from friends before I settled on the current version

  • Cyrus' first version was a very cold and calculating villain wielding a laser gun, but I decided it had too much overlap with BiOS and wouldn't give him appeal

  • The second version was a cowardly villain, but I eventually combined the two into a very egotistical scientist who actually hides behind his inventions to fight for him

    • This is shown in the animations where he's often shocked by his wings/tail acting for him, then sometimes hits/nudges them in anger (most obvious in his F-Attack and N-Special) -- as a result, he doesn't actually have control over any of his attacks aside from grabs/F-Special

• Since I didn't want to program Grab-Bot lingering for a grab (all other projectiles get destroyed on hit, so that would make an exception), I instead made a Bob-omb-esque robot that would "stun" the opponent

  • Unfortunately none of the playtesters understood it, so I made the current version instead, which also uses Cyrus/BiOS' grab claw, linking them all together lore-wise too!

    • Not only is the claw design the same between BiOS and Grab-Bot, but so are the colors! The yellow is also exactly the same as Cyrus' grab claw and Draco's ankle bracelet, which is just another hint that Cyrus is Draco's creator.

• BiOS' eyes flash binary when he gets hit -- since there weren't many options for a 2-frame hurt animation, the letters in binary translate to O and W, so hitting him multiple times makes him say OW OW OW OW

  • When BiOS dies, his eyes mimic the infamous Blue Screen of Death, and the white text reads "RIP the l'il dude" which isn't a reference to anything other than him being dead

• During my animation phase I was watching a lot of Youtube video essays about storytelling through fighting game animation (thanks Sugarpunch!), and this affected Cyrus' and Plexie's animation the most

  • Draco didn't go through many changes in the development process, but one problem worth mentioning was his idle stance. He originally had more of a fighting stance, but I decided that he didn't really have a fighting style and instead confidently relied on brute strength. His idle animation reflects this, as well as his moveset, to a degree.

• While I already talked about Cyrus' animation, Plexie's was meant to convey that 1) she didn't want to fight, and 2) she had to put more effort into fighting than others

  • Plexie's sprites were originally going to be very smiley and cute, but I later decided to remove it because it just didn't make sense (by comparison, Draco enjoys fighting and Cyrus loves winning, so them smiling makes sense). It was difficult for me to do because removing a smile off a character felt weird

  • Her sprites are most linked to pain -- while reusing sprites was definitely just to save on development time, I decided not to sprite anything new because it made sense for her to have more trouble doing Seerel's fighting techniques as a runt

    • The reused sprites are for her F-Special (spinning frames are used when she gets hurt) and her KO animation (half the sprites are reused when she wins, implying how close she was to failure even when she wins)

• Plexie could originally conjure her hard-light blades by herself, but once DracoFighter gained a technological theme, I needed to remove its "magical" nature with something that seemed like alien technology

  • The original solution was for her to have a subtle metal bracelet that would be implied to emit it, but in the end I decided to go with a floating orb. I'm not sure what the inspiration was for this, but my best guess is the Ixomen Sphere from Angels with Scaly Wings

• Plexie's projectile is currently animated like shooting a bow, but the original concept in my head was to have her spin a pair of circles before launching them, kind of like the big launch stars from Super Mario Galaxy. It was only after I started spriting the animation that I realized the problem with animating spinning circles.

• Plexie's name comes from Plexiglass, which is how I imagined her hard-light blades to look

• Plexie has paw beans, but these aren't fully sprited on her in-game

• The stages are named internally, but are never named in-game to save on UI real-estate. The names of the stages from left to right are:
  Lab, Training, Breach, Closet, and Field

• Lab's basic design has been around since early testing. Some friends have pointed out that the levers look like fire alarms, and this is my one regret.

• The shower stage is a joke on how training stages look, and I had to add the red marking to make it more obvious (yet still subtle). I have an extremely weird comment on Steam because of this stage, but I'm keeping it up because I want to keep up the positive score.

• I actually wanted much more weird stage elements like platforms but ditched them mainly because characters with no jumps would suffer. Breach is the only one I could keep, but it was also a constant reminder about why most fighting games don't have non-flat stages.

• Closet has a lot of easter eggs, mainly for my other OCs. On the right side from the top is: Plexie's ship crash, rocks, wires, a book on How To Be Funny, Beewee's mask, Mountain Dew and Doritos, and a coffee machine. From the left side is BiOS' old design, a computer chip, Instant Cup Ramen, and Ray's helmet. I'm also convinced that the Mountain Dew and Doritos accidentally made a pog face, but I haven't been able to convince my friends.

  • Closet's handprint detector is designed after Cyrus' claws because yay dragons

• Field uses multiple layers of parallax scrolling, and was one of the first stages I planned because I love field stages from Tekken. It's also probably my favorite stage in general.

• 95% of DracoFighter's attacks were designed to be physically impossible for the average person to do, in the attempt to avoid inspiring kids to emulate them in real life

  • This was not possible for me to extend to all the secret characters, which was one of the actual biggest reasons I kept them hidden (the other 2 reasons are to not confuse them with canon, and because they don't abide by the game's philosophies about simplicity)

I might add more when I remember more, but that should be enough writing for now! Big thank you to anyone who's keeping up on these.

• Vecderg