Games Wishmere – pixel 2D fighting game [out now on PC/Mac/Linux]

Just a real quick update: another background's dynamic lighting has been spruced up. This time, it's our sci-fi stage.

Old dynamic lighting​

Current dynamic lighting​

Like with the previous update, we wanted this background have it's own unique mood to it. The lighting for this one could change in future updates, as it's a work in progress.

Note: edited the first post too

 

Ooh, looks great! although the previous one still looked good, it was quite flat. this one is very atmospheric, not sure what mood its invoking in me, but its definitely making me feel more captivated. Almost seems like it could be pre-apocalypse in a sense, as if the space station is going to crash

 

Thanks QFSW! Yeah the previous one was flat so it felt like it lacked the atmospheric feel we were looking for. We're really glad you're digging the new one. We're going through each stage trying to redefine the mood and feel for each stage so that each stage is distinct in how it makes the player feel!

 

Awesome! How many stages are there?

 

Thanks man! There are 7 stages in Wishmere's Story mode, so we're working bit by bit to refine the look and feel of each stage. It's actually one of the more fun things about development, choosing a unique visual feel for the lighting for each stage.

 

Thats great, 7 should certainly be enough variety to start with. Do you think youll add extra new stages as time goes on after release as free/paid dlc?

 

At the moment there aren't any plans to add more stages. Our Story mode currently runs at about an hour or so, which we feel is a pretty decent length before getting too draggy. But who knows what's in store in the future!

 

Oh no for a story mode thats definitely good! I was thinking more of for the plain old multiplayer battling, just to keep things spruced up over time, but your call

 

I'd really like to see you give this to a couple guys who've never seen the game before and record commentary and gameplay for 10 minutes.

 

Yes, that does sound like a good idea We're planning on sending some keys out when the game inches closer to completion, which isn't too far away. We'll keep this thread updated for people's impressions and what they think!

 

Awesome, looking forward to it

 

It's been a hard couple of days: working on the dialogue system for Story Mode, dynamic lighting for all stages and the final background / stage done for our game:

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It's called the Shadow Plains and it's where the final boss hides out. Dark energy and lots of evil stuff in every corner! Hope to show off the dialogue and remaining stages soon!

 

Nothing like a little bad guy power. Love the Japanese influence.

 

Thanks Master-Frog! Being our big bad of the game, we wanted Doubt (the handsome blonde fellow) to be demonic and menacing in both powers and movesets

 

Now with all the stages done up and looking like how we want them, with the dialogue system up and running (with pixel perfect text which was a real #@$^& to get done) we jumped into actual dialogue. The game script is all done and dusted (it was completed earlier on in the dev cycle), so we clugged out some cutscenes. Here's a quick snippet:

Bullies exist everywhere, even in fictional high schools
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We've also got a 'Free Mode' that lets players play without cutscenes. We've made the game's cutscenes in Story Mode skippable, in the event some players want to get straight to the action too.

 

This entire week consisted of running through the cutscenes. We've got a system in place that helps make things easy: dialogue lines run, which trigger off animation events (which sometimes make the dialogue box minimize), then dialogue comes in again once it hits its trigger. Pauses in dialogue and speed differences also were added in to keep everyone's speech from being 'too standardized'. We've finished up Stage 1 in its entirety, including its boss:

Obvious temper issues at play here
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Stage 2 is completed (but its kind of a secret, kinda) and we're working on Stage 3 as we speak.

 

Hello all. The good news is that all of Story Mode and Free Mode is done; that includes cutscenes, all enemies, 'stage AI' and bosses. Some stages have a unique element, that involves you doing something different to aid you finishing the stage (saving students for example).

Helping people by hurting other people...
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We're adding all the unlockables and extras. Then, it's internal testing and patching, before going to QA. We're almost there!

 

Internal testing for Story Mode and Free Mode is progressing real well. It's kind of fun to see the game in it's entirety (all that hard work over 2 years laid before your eyes!).

Tweaking dynamic lighting​

Changing hitstop and hitframes to maximize impact​

We made some changes to the game system to include more defensive options for getting up off the ground. Now you'll be able to jump straight up after landing, in a recovery-tech so that you can airdash away or attack opponents immediately.

Also, we're gearing up to release a free demo of Wishmere soon. It'll probably be released within a week! Looking forward to everyone getting to try it out!

 

Looking great! It's really come a long way Dialogue system is looking sweet, how much do you reckon you have left on the game?

 

Thanks man! We're coming along well, we're finishing up testing for Story Mode and Free Mode and moving on to some other extra features and collectibles that add to the game's lore. We're planning to really test the entire game soon to ensure it has no bugs.

 

Awesome! Hope it all goes well

 

It's almost time for the free demo! It's all loaded up on the backends of Steam and awaiting approval from the overlords of Valve.

We've just realized that our moodier lighting was bugging out our distortion effects. NOTE: Moodier lighting was achieved by turning on HDR boolean on the main camera. Though this happened...

Camera becomes confuzzled​

To fix this, we edited the pixel perfect camera to allow the main camera script for transparency for distortion.

Camera is satisfied​

The demo is all loaded up on Steam and is awaiting approval of the Valve overlords. Release day for the free demo is set for June 5, so it's almost here! Hopefully some people here will get to try out the free demo and let me know what you guys think.

 

This looks awesome! I will be sure to play the demo as soon as I have time, any idea on pricing for the full game?

 

Thanks man! Looking forward to hearing your feedback on the demo. Pricing for the full game will probably be higher than our Early Access price. We haven't nailed down the exact amount, but it's looking like it'll be a little higher than our EA price.

 

Not too expensive then, should hopefully be able to pick it up once its ready

 

QFSW: Wow, thanks a lot! That means a lot to us!
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Good news: we've just released a free demo for Wishmere on Steam!

You can get it on the Steam store page (just look on the right column where it says "Download Demo"). The demo version has: 1 playable character (with all 13 colors), Versus Mode (2 stages available), Training Mode, Tutorial Mode and 2 challenge maps.

Do check it out and let us know if you've got any feedback! We'd love to hear from you!

 

Trying out now, but will give proper detailed feedback later

I think I soft locked the game though, nothings happening

 

Hey firstly thanks for trying out the Demo QSFW!

Could you let us know the scenario as to how it occurred? Do you happen to remember the previous tutorial you were doing? Did you get guard broken just before entering the Guard Crush tutorial? Or perhaps you pressed restart from the Pause Menu during the Tutorial and it never reset?

We're taking a look at it right now and can't seem to replicate it! :S But we really appreciate your report and we want to stomp out this bug scenario!

 

Not sure, sorry! I was doing the tutorials in order.
I had a short play and it's really fun! I couldn't really get used to the controls but I'm sure with my controller it will be fine
Few minor presentation things and a bug or two (when I was trying to rebind jump to L for example it wouldn't let me) but within the week I should be able to get a full detailed run of everything I think?

On a side note, if you haven't seen the new customized personal edition splash screen it looks a lot nicer, but If the update breaks anything it's probably not worth it

 

No worries QFSW! I've not yet seen the updated Unity splash screen but there have been some changes to the shaders that we rely on in future versions of Unity so upgrading unfortunately isn't an option for us

Ah yes, rebinding on keyboard is a bit more restrictive than it is on other controllers as we allow two players to play one keyboard. We initially didn't want the two players to potentially fight over notations so we restricted some of the rebinding options, though on second thought maybe we should remove these restrictions and allow the players to decide for themselves how they want to settle sharing a keyboard!

Thanks again for checking out the demo and if you end up having a more thorough playthrough of Wishmere we'd love to hear what you think!

 

Awesome, will do!
Was just a bit annoyed that I couldn't use the same button layout i use for SSBM, although granted it's not a very common one given it uses ; as one of the keys

 

Ran into another issue

I think I used the slow motion thing at the same time as getting hit and dying? music is still going but everything else has stopped. I can pause and quit so it didnt crash, just got locked in that freeze frame

 

Thanks for the heads up QSFW! We will take a look at this and see what's wrong

 

Just realised something about how the key binding on keyboard works, keep in mind people may want to do multi-player with player 1 on keyboard and player 2 on controller

 

That's true, the rebinding restrictions will probably be removed by full release and maybe even before then if we have the time to update it

 

Good stuff, will be reporting more as time goes on All in all, very happy with the game, second level was a blast

 

Thanks QFSW. Huge thanks for trying out the demo, you're the man!
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Whew, what a past couple of days... Demo launched (dev work and reworked Store page) and match video recorded. The awesome thing is that we were covered by fighting game website Shoryuken! Been going to that site for nearly 20 years, was such a great feeling to see our game on SRK.

With the demo launched, players tried all sort of fightsticks and controllers, which really put our game's support for controllers to the test. We ran into a lot of unsupported controller issues.

Inbuilt device detector​

But luckily, we launched a hotfix that included a bunch of 'controller profiles' and also had an inbuilt device detector. The device detector lists the exact name the device is recognized by in Unity and that'll give us the ability to create a profile for the device.

We're wrapping up single player content this coming week, then its rounding out character movesets and system gameplay to ensure a balanced fighting game (hopefully!).

 

That's awesome! Glad it got the coverage it deserves.
One thing I noticed btw before I forget, for typing in our nickname, why can't we just type normally if we are using keyboard? May have just been something you didn't think of, but feels backwards to have to use the on screen buttons with a keyboard when you could just use the keyboard
Great stuff though, keep up the good work!

 

Haha yes we thought that might become something someone would bring up

The decision behind that was once again because we were accounting for the possibility of two players sharing a keyboard. We wanted to allow all players to be able to choose their names at the same time, which would become difficult if keyboard players had to share keystrokes on a keyboard! That would mean a player pressing "S" for their name would register an "S" stroke for the other player sharing the keyboard. The only way to fix that would be to lock controls of all other players whenever one player chooses their name, but that wouldn't be nice

We could have it detect whether a keyboard is being shared or not and allow players to use their real keyboard in the case of a single player using the keyboard, but it might confuse some players who aren't aware of the reasons why sometimes they use the in-game keyboard and sometimes their actual keyboard, if that makes sense. We'll do some testing on that and see how it feels.

Thanks QSFW! It's always great to hear your thoughts on the game. If you have anything else you'd like to share please do!

 

Ahh that makes some sense I'll let you know if I think of any solutions to that

 

Hey! so I was trying out the demo again, this time with a controller, and it played great! one thing I was wondering; why can't we use the stick?

 

@QFSW Using the controller stick is easy! Just press the Mode button to switch from using the d-pad or the analog stick! We're going to add this to a FAQ post to be posted on our forum in case other people wonder this!
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Hey guys. First, apologies for being away from the thread. It's been a crazy couple of weeks getting Wishmere ready for final release. Been adding things and polish to the game, so it's been nuts.

First thing:

We tried to give players the freedom to combo​

One of the things we've added is 1) new moves and 2) new system mechanics. The new mechanic that will (hopefully) open up the combo possibilities is a jump cancel in air-combos / juggled. We hope this gives freedom to the player to find their favorite combos. Player freedom and cretivity is a big deal to us, so we hope this give players lots of possibilities.

http://crayder.com/wishmere/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/SSS_7-8-17_2.gif
New move: the jumping knee-downward punch in air! We made it a URL due to the gif size limit ​

We also added in new moves for the characters! We were happy to add in new moves and change up move properties (because it's fun!) Some new stuff and gifs coming soon!

 

Looks awesome! Will try the control stick when i next play it!

 

Finished up the last bits of content for the game: taunts. 49 taunts (7 per character) were animated and implemented with various 'achievements' to unlock them. We tried to bring out the personality of the characters for each taunt, so hopefully that's evident!

Salt in the wounds​

We've got some QA and some polishing to do, then we should be good to release it off into the world.

 

Taunts a perfect addition to any fighting game

 

We're in the midst of getting ready a build for the QA guys. In our preparation, we're going through our own little testing internally to check if everything works good. Since our game has a couple of game modes, there's quite a large list of thing to check. As we go, we're polishing up menus, sounds and attacks.

One of our polished moves​

Keeping everything organized as we test and polish as we go is a hard task but I think it'll well be worth it in the end.

 

I think so too Keep up the work, its going great

 

nice game!


Would you mind sharing how you setup the pixel perfect camera?

 

Thanks QFSW! We really appreciate it.

Thank you! There's a lot of ways actually. Basically it involves knowing what your sprite's Pixels Per Units (PPU) would be based on your camera's orthographic size. That involves knowing what resolution you'll natively render at, and then doing a bit of math. The math is really dependent on the size/resolution of your sprites.

Unity wrote up a great piece on a similar way (more straight forward) we used to achieve it. Check it out!

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/06/19/pixel-perfect-2d/

 

Finally, all our internal testing is done! All our internal bugs searching came up to 20 pages worth of bugs! Fun (or not fun, depending on your point of view) and a long road of fixing-- and it's all done. So many irritating bugs that would not go away and some bugs that were oversight (like the old adage says: “get up and come back to it with a fresh look”... really helped here).

Our QA is also coming to a close and Wishmere is super close to being done. We've got some last minute playthroughs, and a little bit of polishing. After that, we should be done!

Here's a gif of one of the Super moves we redid and are pretty happy with:

BEFORE:

Bite, scratch and claw


AFTER:

Amped up the savageness of this character, because she's vampire ​