Hacker News Reader

Comment by ido | Hacker News Reader

Not trying to be snarky, but can someone who knows more about fighting game development explain their budget?

    For comparison, Skullgirls' budget was around $1.7
    million and, since Filia was complete at the time 
    of signing, that covered production of the last 
    seven characters.

Surely producing the game was a lot more work than just making the characters? As far as you can even break down the budget in retrospect at all, surely adding another character to an existing game doesn't costs anywhere close to entire_budget_of_game/num_of_existing_chars($1.7m/7=$242k, big-band is supposedly a from scratch character with a $200k budget, the partially complete Squigly is $150k)?

EDIT: also, what is "Hit-box Contracting"?

View on HN

Definitely not. Big band would be significantly less, however, if not for crowd funding specific costs (backer rewards, payment fees), and services a publisher generally provides (QA, first party fees). Also, the 8th character counts for way less, since most of her frames were reused from other characters.

I was a designer on the game, and while it's hard to look back and tell you exactly how much time was spent on character specific stuff vs. general features since people's time was often split awkwardly, I'd say the clear majority of resources were spent on character specific stuff. Art was by far the largest team, and worked almost exclusively on character specific stuff. Design was more evenly split, but definitely leaned towards characters. Tech was unsurprisingly mostly other features, but was a small, small team (poor Ben and Rick )= )

Thanks for the insider insight!

My guess is that in a good fighting game all the characters need to be reasonably different to each other but also well balanced against all the others. The balance will require a lot of play testing and tuning, so each character you add will more expensive than the last.

And there's also the more mundane possibility that a fair chunk on the money is submission costs for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network.

The hit-box of a character is the area which a blow must land to count as a 'hit'. For various gameplay reasons, this typically isn't the same as the area the sprite takes up.

In all likelihood, it's going to be done by hand, with someone going over every frame of animation, defining the hitbox. Even if there was an automatic way to generate a hit-box, they would likely have to go through at least move by move to make sure there are no balance issues.

More importantly though, hitboxes are defining features of a character. Extending hitboxes, or shrinking them, is an absolute core fundamental when it comes to balancing fighting games.

Showing a large budget just for hitboxes communicates to the fighting game community that they know what they're doing. Yeah, hitboxes are extremely important to the feel of the game. They need to get it done right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com