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Truth is, that this engine is still reasonably popular, and the Japanese doujin community keeps on making use of it. You might be excused for having thought this wasn’t possible. Notice that the window bar is the only way to edit the game’s options, something sadly very common when dealing with this engine. A sequel to Axel City actually managed to hit the arcades in Japan. Sadly, the animations are definitely not on par with sprite quality. There was a predecessor, called 2D Fighter Maker 95, which is quite infamous for being the engine used to build the even more infamous Arm Joe, an utterly broken doujin fighting game based on “ Les Misérables” - yes, the musical, and no, I’m not joking.īy browsing the net, one can find doujin games like Axel City, that sport an impressive amount of characters in an incredible ’90s aesthetic. In Japan, however, another engine stole M.U.G.E.N.’s spot, a program published in 2001 by a company that is mostly known for creating RPG Maker: ladies and gentlemen, say welcome to 2D Fighter Maker 2002, published by Enterbrain! Not the first, not the lastĢD Fighter Maker 2002 (2DFM02, link to MyAbandonware) wasn’t the first attempt of Enterbrain to enter the market of fighting game engines. games tend to converge to the fan-game or random-character-collection side. Truth be told, there have been some original IPs that started in M.U.G.E.N., such as Fatal Art, Knockout!, and The Black Heart, which has been recently published on Steam after having been ported to M.U.G.E.N.’s spiritual, open source and copyright-friendly successor, I.K.E.M.E.N., but for the most part M.U.G.E.N. characters and let them fight in AI vs AI matches non-stop on stream, while the logged in viewers bet virtual money (not real dollars!) on them for fun. scene: to describe it in a few words, put together n-thousand M.U.G.E.N. Salty Bet is a popular byproduct of the M.U.G.E.N. games cannot legally be sold, which means that they are relegated to non-commercial projects, handily crafted fan games or broken messes with several hundreds characters. Being an old engine, made by a company which disappeared from the radar and with no clear copyright holder, is a recipe for disaster: M.U.G.E.N.
If we remove the requirement for a modern engine, most people familiar with fighting games know of one that is still pretty popular, despite being relatively dated: the one and only M.U.G.E.N., originally developed by the now defunct company Elecbyte. Then, there is an Unreal Engine template for 2D fighting games in the works, another Unreal Engine template for anime fighting games, and maybe a platform fighter engine or two. You have UFE2, a fairly complete fighting game engine that works with Unity and supports rollback netcode (but uses Photon as a middleware to connect players).
(Un)suprisingly, there aren’t many modern engines that cover this particular niche. So, it’s natural that we would all be grateful if there existed some engines that could ease the pain and allow for starting development with the smallest overhead possible. Making a fighting game is not easy, for a variety of reasons that range from making them completely deterministic, to underestimating their complexity, to the amount of graphical assets needed, to the balancing and fine tuning required to produce something worth playing.
This article is part of my ongoing “Indie Fighting Game Thursday” review/retrospective series, now on supercombo.gg! Today we talk about an engine, 2D Fighter Maker 2002, which is still being used as of 2022 despite being old enough to drive! This article was originally published on my Medium blog and has been ported to Supercombo.gg for preservation and sharing it with more people in the fighting game community.