The Lucky Street Fighting Developer
When writing code and building apps, the pre-phase is crucial. Doing detailed conceptual & wireframing work upfront avoids hours/days of work and spending tons of cash afterwards on change requests, improvements and frustration. Most developers and project managers will agree. But sometimes, giving the dev squad some room to freestyle with their code, could certainly benefit your product even more. That time is usually not paid for by your client. Hell no, it’s even hard to explain, or bill, but might lead to a better product or business.
Let’s share you a story I use once in a while.
Back in the 90s when I was playing video games, fighting games were one of my favourites. Perfecting my flawless, perfect or fatality win on the Nintendo and Sega. Remember Street Fighter II? Yeah, I do remember kicking my friends’ butt on that machine, instead of doing homework. Until they found the antidote to my perfect combo attack. It’s only years later that I found out about the “road to success of SF2” and it struck me.
SFII: The Story
Although the original Street Fighter had not been very popular, Capcom began to make fighting games a priority after Final Fight was commercially successful in the United States. Yoshiki Okamoto recounted, “The basic idea at Capcom was to revive Street Fighter, a good game concept, to make it a better-playing arcade game.”
About 35 to 40 people worked on Street Fighter II. The developers did not particularly prioritise Street Fighter II’s balance; he primarily ascribes the game’s success to its appealing animation patterns. The quality of animation benefitted from the developers’ use of the CPS-1 hardware, the advantages of which included the ability for different characters to occupy different amounts of memory; for example, Ryu could take up 8Mbit and Zangief 12Mbit. The game’s development took two years.
Stop! Hammer time!
Development: 2 years.
Dev squad: 35–40 people.
So, roughly: by avrg. 220 days a year x 35 FTE x 2 years = 15.400 mandays.
Now multiply that with your average dev day rate. Get my point? A lot of work and no guarantee for success, because, as said, Street Fighter I was not a big hit. That’s a big bet, but luckily times have changed and it doesn’t have to be that way anymore.
One important part of a software project is the bug check and the fixing of things. Some people have a hard time to understand why there are bugs in software in the first place, but for dev teams it’s hard to check their own code, that’s why there’s test teams, A/B tests, monkey testing, usability testing, test panels, server load balancing tests and more to try before stuff goes live. A good chef tries every plate that goes out of its kitchen and might want to tweak his dishes once in a while. But testing & fixing is not a bad thing, it’s probably the phase where we learn the most about developing, user logic and usability. And some very small -sometimes apparently useless- tweaks might have a huge impact later on.
Keeping the bug as a ‘hidden feature’
“While I was making a bug check during the car bonus stage… I noticed something strange, curious. I taped the sequence and we saw that during the punch timing, it was possible to add a second hit and so on. I thought this was something impossible to make useful inside a game, as the timing balance was so hard to catch. So we decided to leave the feature as a hidden one.”
With all the effort put into the development of a project, it does not hurt to give some extra space for lane switches or new decisions that turn things a bit upside down. You might not always get the products shipped as designed on paper, or even within the deadline, but it might lead to better end results in the long run. Obviously, you need the right, flexible team for that, different point-of-views, and no fear to make the call.
The birth of the “combo” hit
The most interesting thing is that this -the multiple hits in one move- became the base for future titles. Later we were able to make the timing more comfortable and the combo into a real feature. In Street Fighter II we thought if you got the perfect timing you could place several hits, up to four I think. Then we managed to place eight! A bug? Maybe.
The combo hit became the key feature in fighting games. Instead of removing it, it was rolled-out intentionally as a signature feature and later on copied by many. It was a game changer and responsible for the immediate sales success of fighting games with names as Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Soul Calibur and many more.
At Panenka76 we’ve made several features and even complete demo apps that have never seen the light officially, projects that were frozen, but never-ever thrown away. I recommend you to keep your (hand)written notes too. And look into it even years later. You might find hidden gems, I know I do. In the next weeks, our customizable livescore and publishing platform, based on years of development, will be offered to clients, developers and brands into sports business, yes, even competitors can use it. We’ve taken the time, but consider this our “Rare and Unreleased Edition” in app widgets and sports services.
Interested? Feedback? Want to share something too? Drop a line at tom@panenka76.com — I’d be happy to hear your thoughts.
