TGB Combat Editor

On of the major components of the game I am working on is dependent on animation specific collision like you'd find in a fighting game. So I co-opted the Animation Builder to create a new editor that allows me to edit offensive and defensive collision, (among other things), for each frame of a given animation.



The storyboard displays all of the animation frames and all of the collision attached to it. Offensive collision boxes are green, defensive collision boxes are blue.



The system is based on some of the concepts used in the first God of War's combat editor, but adapted to work with 2D animations instead of 3D. Not currently hooked into the editor are the tabs for tying actions and branches to each frame. The playback system supports a few of the planned actions, specifically sounds and hitsparks.

Here are some low-res screen shots of the playback in action:








Not really all that exciting, unless you're me and you know everything going on behind the scenes. The reaction system is hooked up and playing the appropriate reaction for the attack that is hitting it, which is a special attack triggered by specific joystick input, there are also sounds playing :)

The whole combat system still has quite a ways to go, but it has been coming together nicely and I've been hooking more pieces in every day. Initially most of the engine features are going to be geared towards making a modular fighting game system that can be adapted to a variety of different 2D fighting game styles. The tools will also be useful for creating action platformers and side-scrolling brawlers. Anything that has animation dependent collision that also needs a variety of special effects and conditional effects that need to be triggered only on specific frames of animation.

Future additions include:
Hooking up particle-based projectiles to Actions.
Onion-skin mode for collision editing.
Copy/paste of collision boxes from frame to frame.
Better collision box editing.
Character asset management.
User-defined button layouts.
Hitpauses.
Hooking up user scripts to Actions.
Camera shake.

Some fighting game support:
Character swapping/tagging.
Character assists.
Health/block/super meters.
Super attacks.