Mattrified Games Blog

It's been about two months since I wrote and posted this on my Patreon.  I was going to publish publicly a few weeks later, but there was some discourse over the future of offline events, so I decided to reread and wait a bit.  Unfortunately, that wait turned into forgetting; so with a few revisions from that Patreon post, here are my thoughts on how showcasing a game at EVO went back in early August of 2023. Besides Battle High and MerFight, I've worked on a several other indie fighting games.  Probably the biggest and most ambitious is Drag Her, a 2D game focused primarily on real-life drag queens and kings.  It's camp, it's stupid, and it's aiming to just be silly and fun.  It's still a fighting game though, and this year, the team was invited to showcase the game at EVO, the biggest fighting game tournament in the US -- possibly the world.  Overall, I think it went well, but I have some thoughts on EVO, its indie showcase, and more.   The Trip & Setup Th

As many game developers, especially, smaller, independent ones such as myself, are aware, Unity, has announced a new runtime fee for games.  From what I gather it implies that games made with the free Unity license (Personal) with over $200K in revenue in a calendar year AND over 200K lifetime installs will start paying a fee per install over that limit, something that sounds small on paper, like two cents, but can add up very quickly if you're game is somehow getting millions of downloads.  Suffice it to say, many are not happy about this announcement.  I do believe some fear is a bit reactionary, a bit knee jerk and exaggerated, dreaming up scenarios that 98% of devs will never have to deal with.  For example, at those values, I will never have to pay this fee for either MerFight and Battle High, but this is rather myopic -- though not as myopic as Unity's thought process behind this idea.  A LOT of questions have come up since this announcement: Does this include bundles? D

This post was original written and posted to my website in August 2021.  Despite this, I feel these are still relevant; I also added an additional section, Uphill Battle #6. So you want to make an indie fighting game? Well, first off, good luck! Indie games are already a tough, competitive market to break into, and the fighting game genre is not the easiest to target. I'm the last person to want to discourage you though. I'm making a fighting game with merfolk in it almost entirely by myself. That being said, I wanted to write about what I see as difficulties and uphill battles that I and others are most likely going to face when creating -- but more importantly, releasing -- indie games in this genre as well as some things they could do to help. Note, these thoughts are my opinion, so take them with a grain of Pink Himalayan salt . I'll upgrade my opinion from normal salt to this.  Why not? Uphill Battle 1: Big & Old Competition I mentioned competition

Originally, I wanted to launch MerFight into version 1.0 by May of 2023;  however, this is not going to happen.  I'm a bit disappointed in myself, but I also learned a few things as to why this happened.  With that being said, here is a list of what else needs to be accomplished so that I feel I can enter 1.0 for MerFight: Finish Story Mode Content I feel I could release 1.0 with some characters' story modes incomplete, but I'd rather not.  That being said, there are a lot of unlockables I have to make to finish said story mode.  The more time-consuming task will be animating the facial expression for story mode's lines. AI There's no point to story mode or any single player content mode if the AI opponents aren't good.  I'm not looking for expert-level learning, but something a bit better and something that makes the difficulty levels feel like they actually matter would help. Main Menu A smaller task, but I want to make the main menu a bit less cluttered. 

  Early this year, I had the opportunity to showcase MerFight at MagFest (Music and Games Festival) as part of the MagFest Indie Videogames Showcase (MIVS.)  MagFest is a very fun event, and being able to show the game off was a great experience.  The last time I had been to MagFest was 6 years ago to show off my other fighting game, Battle High 2 A+.  I wanted to write a few things about my experience as I had a lot of anxiety going into it originally, and had I written good notes when I did it 6 years ago, I probably wouldn't have been so stressed. Submission & Preparation Before getting to the actual show, I had to submit MerFight for approval.  This was a relatively smooth process, requiring a playable build as well as some screenshots and video, many of which I had since MerFight has been in early access for about 9 months at this point. I think the only thing that stuck out from my submission was some of the judge's feedback.  One comment particularly pointed out that