What makes a good LF2 Character?

[LutiChris]

I don't know if this has been discussed before but i was hoping it would serve as a good reference for people who are looking how to perfect their character's and make them 10/10 so everyone will absolutely love to play them over and over. Just comment bellow and list a bunch of things that you would personally like to see in a character. No specific moves or attacks. Just generalized things that would make character performance/artwork/data/sound/whatever most enjoyable for your entertainment.

[InPhiKnight]

• The char should be balanced with other lf2 chars
  
• Not too many special moves
  
• Special kind of basic actions
  
• Good sprite [may not be awesome]
  
• Good sound effects
  
• And a nice pacepic and a normal AI too
  

[Rhino.Freak]

the only thing I say is that the character should have combo's, if he's comboable, he's fun.
make basic moves that are combo's like deep's D>j etc.
sprite effects should be there, like wind moving wherever it suits etc.
also sounds are more important that you think, having awesome effect sounds will boost the fun by 10 times!!

[YinYin]

• fit into the environment and position it is designed for

(no balance or quantitative requirements really, just this one qualitative requirement)

That one point in turn leads back to this: http://www.lf-empire.de/forum/showthread.php?tid=8574 (for original LF2 being the requested environment)

And of course more general concept design depending on the position it's supposed to fill (hero, boss, support, ...).
Haven't we discussed that kind of thing before? If not I know I've been trying to explain it a thousand times.

[Rhino.Freak]

^ can you explain more? I am not able to understand properly

[LutiChris]

Haven't we discussed that kind of thing before? If not I know I've been trying to explain it a thousand times.

I was sure we discussed it but what im looking for is a whole variety of opinions for the creators to look back on for reference when they are creating their stuff, we shouldn't just stop on the art side. The thread you showed me is more geared toward "lf2 style" than it is on "game performance and likability".

Having a variety of opinions i thought would be a really quick and helpful tool for everyone, especially newcomers. Oh and let's not forget the users who haven't join, who knows maybe they are working on something too! If it was listed in the "Important Thread Section" as a Guide for everyone it would be a lot easier to access and recognize. Besides the things we do talk about will often get lost in piles of threads and a lot of users will have missed and overlook them.

What makes lf2 so great anyways? It can't just be the art, am i right?

This thread offers a lot of insight on what other people can do to make it just as enjoyable as the original lf2 game. The more people agreeing on certain aspects that would continue or enhance lf2's gaming experience, the more enjoyable the outcome would be. It's not something we can actually just slap on and say "Here ya go... here's concrete stuff that will get your character 10/10!" but it's a nice way of knowing what the creator's can do to improve their projects.

or

Do you guys think it's up to them to figure it all out?
If it's too much to offer in one big thread we could just link up a bunch of threads to those specifically engaged in that area.
It's really just an idea to help finalize user's creations.

[empirefantasy]

davis60 took almost every aspect, so i am commenting them in my opinion.

• The char should be balanced with other lf2 chars
  

No, really need to be same strong with others. i usually prefer chars who are a few more stronger.

• Not too many special moves
  

too many special moves would make him/her interesting. (even lately i have changed the opinion since too many moves are hard to remember)

• Special kind of basic actions
  

yeah that is an cool thing. i really like when a character has some new basic moves

• Good sprite [may not be awesome]

yea, even sometime sprites can be taken from original

• Good sound effects
  

this doesnt give a lot of points really

• And a nice pacepic and a normal AI too
  

yes now we have AI the biggest thing after datachanger programs. facepic isnt really important, i personally get angry when sometime fp is very different with char.


For me the most important are special moves, they must be really cool. Secondary things are other thing i said above.

But i am not a fan of characters, you can see i havent make a single char until now. i dont like becaouse chars are useless when theyre not in any mod, since they dont have any balance with other chars, dont have different things which may make them playable in stage etc.

[Alblaka]

My points are:
-Fun to play
-Not ugly
-Not bugged/flawes (as in bugs, missused coordinates/centers/wpoints)

If the character is overpowered, but fun to play, I'm fine with that. If the character has 1 or 70 moves, as long as he's fun to play I'm fine with that, too.
'Not ugly' refers to what a character I sprited would look like. I'm fine with recolors, edits, c&p or 'average' quality spriting.

Of course, the 'fun to play' is a point which may consist of everything mentioned in this thread before... :P

[YinYin]

-Fun to play

What is fun to play for you? With that one point you are skipping a 100% of what's important.

we shouldn't just stop on the art side. [...] It can't just be the art, am i right?

Let me first of all shun you for considering only the graphics to be art. Everything else you listed in the first post is art too.

so everyone will absolutely love to play them over and over. [...] generalized things that would make character performance/artwork/data/sound/whatever most enjoyable for your entertainment.

I still stand by my point that my initial answer is the first and most general thing to aim at for "most enjoyable". It applies to every field of the list. Now, the graphics of LF2 are well analysed and imitated so I will try to be more in depth about the second point, you've labeled it pretty well:

"game performance and likability"

All right, there are two concepts that are in my opinion vital for any game to be fun:

• risk and reward
• the learning curve

If you get these right and all your content has good quality you cannot go wrong.

risk and reward:
Basically every action you do in a game has a risk (of getting hit for example) and a reward (hitting the opponent in a cool way).
This needs to be balanced.
If the risk of a certain action is too low compared to the reward a player will overuse it, which in turn will get boring - not fun.
If the reward of a certain action is too low compared to the risk a player wont want to use it at all, which shortens the list of possible actions and it's on top of that sad that you can't use it properly - not fun.
That's the important balance within each action - very basic but it can still be difficult to get it right.
The balance between actions is a little easier in my opinion because all you have to do is give each a different and unique purpose - that way they won't compare and are unable to substitute each other.
All basic attacks for example already have a unique purpose each on their own because they are situational. Depending on the circumstances you can only perform one of them. (you can of course still make each one of them useless though it's much harder to do that wrong I think)
But if you have two special projectile attacks with the same damage-the-opponent purpose you risk one of them turning out weaker than the other and thus become useless.

learning curve:
This thing is the barrier that may stop people from playing with your character (or game) and also the thing that defines the point from which on players will get bored with it and never come back.
We can safely assume that the player already knows all little fighter related basics - so that's the point from which learning new things with your character begins.
If the characters basic concept is too difficult or different from conventional characters to begin with the learning curve will be very steep at the beginning - not fun if you need to read the readme and practice everything before you can actually start playing. Nobody will get into it unless you managed to make it equally exciting. (risk of being bored to death - reward of having lots of fun :p)
If everything there is to learn about your character can be experienced within the first few minutes it will become boring very quickly - not fun for the long run.
So you gotta aim for an easy start and a lot of stuff to discover while playing. (that's why so many games have some kind of upgrade/skills/items system that gets larger and larger as you play)

How to apply that to lf2?
First of all you can make the start easy by making all the basic actions look and play fabulous. At the lowest level that means just walking or standing around with the character should be awesome - so pay attention to every detail on them (graphics, sequence, speed, ...). Every lf2 player already knows how to start basic attacks and will have a lot of fun discovering new animations and combos of a character, all while getting accustomed to them during a fight. Simple. Yet many custom characters basic moves are rather boring ...
Now on top of all that are the special moves. You have to approach them differently because they are different for every character. Not only their effects but also their input.
Keep in mind that not every special move uses or has to use a 3 key input - the thunder punch is the best example (yes it makes basic attacks and a special move overlap).
The player will have to find out and remember the input for each special move and its effect. The more special moves you add the harder it will be to memorize all of them and on top of that also pick the right one depending on the situation. More moves create a steeper learning curve - not fun.
So you select a few (lf2 has exactly 4 on each hero) that fit very well with your character concept and drop all other additional special moves.
Now you may think that fewer special moves will also make the learning curve end earlier as the player learns and remembers them more quickly.
That's not true if you pay attention to how all character actions can work together. (not necessarily as combos but that's the most straight forward approach)
4 simple special moves that work very well together will amount to far more possibilities and things to discover than 7 complicated stand alone specials.
That's a steadily rising long learning curve versus a steep and short one. One is easy and has a lot of replay value - the other is difficult and has no replay value once you've seen it all.

Keep those in mind and you should be able to figure out everything else on your own.

[Dr.Death]

In My opinion it's at first true that you have to decide what kind of character you wanna do, but by just guessing the intention is to make an hero character, it will be pretty important to balance the character.
So he needs to have his advantages and his disadvantages so there is a way you can beat him. But for those who play him need something he does good with. If we look at the characters for example.
Deep is a meleefighter with awesome attack range upwards and downwards, he can hit mutiple targets in different ways, and he even has a combo implemented already (dva + ja) . His disadvantage is that he is pretty slow and doesn't have any long range ability.
Freeze though has the ability to fighter pretty many targets, he has a long range attack and he doesn't need to use his punches to fight. He has a unique ability of all heroes and that is to freeze his enemies. He is good against Mutiple enemies and medium distance, but his problem is that he has pretty low single target damage output and his punching duel is pretty bad due to kinda no range "in" and behind him.
Very good is if you can combo your attacks in different ways. I don't mean something like deep d<j. More like Woody who can use dva into flip kick into TD. Every character has some ability to combo a few attacks just by advanced skill.
I think hidden combo moves are pretty bad for the normal us of LF2 because i had so much fun for a long time just by discovering how the moves are done. And it took me quite a while to find out how you clone with Rudolf when i was starting to play. Or then seeing someone using a Flipkick Dash combo just make me think wow i can't do that, that looks awesome. You need to make sure that there is a difference between someone who can't play this game or just started, someone who is experienced, and someone who "mastered" the character.
If you just do tons of op stuff and endless damage attacks then someone who is playing this game for 5 years would be the same good as someone who plays it for one day.
The character just needs to fit to the other heroes. I mean ther eis actually imbalance in the heroes but it's fine as long as it is not too much. It's actually better like this.
If you wanna have fun playing him, you need to be able to defeat all or most of the other heroes if you paly better. And the same way around you should be able to defeat the new character with all characters the ~the same effort.
The Amount of different attacks is just fine with all the heroes and more would just make it less interesting. I already played the follower characters pretty often and that's just fun to. I actually like playing Mark sometimes or just Bandit. All characters can be fun even without any special attacks like Knight(i don't count d<a)


Also very important i love the art of LF2 so good sprites would be awesome but you don't need too good. But i think it's important that you keep the style of LF2. I have seen so many characters already who just are drawn in such a different style that i don't like them already. The hitboxes are different and everything just looks from another game.
If you make a whole game out of it like NTSD i am fine with it, i don't need to paly it but if you mix it with the normal characters it's abit stupid.

I think as well that the Sounds are very important too. If you always get ear cancer if you hear a special attack you will mute the game or just stop using the character. They don't need to be perfect but good sounds make a good game just way better.


@what makes LF2 so great anyways:
Well in my opinion you have this nice art as you mentioned, but also the good gameplay. So it's easy to handle your characters. If you press d < j your character will do the move and there is no way to fail that if you just press that after each other slowly.
I did play Streetfighter after i already played Little Fighter and the Controls are just annoying. In my opinion you can accpomplish very much if you make the game easy to laern and hard to master
It just gives you always a good feeling if you can see what good players do and you theoretically know how to do the same.

You have the option to play Multiplayer with friends (playing lf2 alone can only be fun for a shorter time), and you have this challenge to get better. I only think very few accomplished to beat all the Stages on crazy (without cheats of course) so there will always be something possible to beat but still not accomplished. Survival Stage is anotehr story because it's endless but you kinda can see where the highest reachable Stages on a certain difficulty are.
The sounds are good, the game is fluent, the AI could be better though but it's good enough for Stages.
You have many ways to do combos together and even the follower characters can do pretty much damage to you just with combined attacks because there are so many attacks which can keep you in the air.
The Amount of time you need for Little Fighter is very small as well (as long as you don't try to play Survival Stage on easy with low Speed and intend to reach Stage 80+ or sth ) so you can just play it causally.
There are those weaklish Bandits and Hunters running around and you just defeat them with ease but yet they are the one who damaged you the most.

Another advantage in LF2 is that you can actually change stuff. I mean generating a Stage is actually so easy to learn just by seeing how it's done already(of course just the basics). Pretty many will like as well that they are just able to add to the game what they want, and show what kind of art or even whole versions they accomplished alone or as a Team.

OP wall of text HUEHUE
Tip "2nd part" is only about LF2 not about creating a character