Games
Former Capcom legend Seth Killian on making the anti-fighting-game fighting game.
Seth Killian is big in the fighting game community. Following on from competing in top-tier tournaments, to commentating on them and actually working on Street Fighter itself with Capcom, it was only inevitable that the self-proclaimed SF “super fan” would strike out on his own and create his very own fighting game.
And that's where we are in 2015. After having his own likeness pop up in fighters (he was the inspiration for SFIV boss Seth, and final boss S-Kill in Divekick), he's now helming his very own beat 'em up, with developer Radiant Entertainment, including a star-studded cast of producers, including the Cannon brothers who started legendary fighting game tournament EVO. That game is Rising Thunder, a fighter that's not like anything else out at the moment, putting you at the helm of a giant robot on a 1v1 battlefield in which you can unleash special moves like Hadoukens at the touch of a single button, putting strategy to the forefront.
With Rising Thunder currently in alpha, we got some time to speak with Killian himself about the kind of fighting game he wants to make, how his input on Street Fighter IV has equipped him with the knowledge to make his own perfect fighter and why it's not necessarily a shoe-in for EVO.
While Seth says he "started as a Street Fighter super fan, tournament player, and analyst," he managed to get what most gamers would call the chance of a lifetime: to actually work on the Street Fighter franchise. Killian has been playing Capcom's series of fighters since 1991, spending summers dialling down combos in the arcade, and even eventually commentating on high-profile matches for Super Street Fighter IV at EVO. "Although I was pursuing an academic career at the time, I got a call from Capcom to join shortly after the Street Fighter IV project began, and of course couldn't resist the chance," he tells Red Bull.
In that time – "nearly seven years and some great fighting games" – Capcom not only launched the original Street Fighter IV, but also launched follow ups in the form of Super Street Fighter IV, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition and Ultra Street Fighter IV, with each successive update bringing in new characters, gameplay upgrades, new features and stages. Killian worked as a community manager – or officially ‘Strategic Marketing Director, Online and Community’ – but he was so much more: he helped represent a community, championed tournaments and helped refine Street Fighter IV for years. A dream job, you could say, for fighting aficionados. Why move on then?
"I left Capcom to go to PlayStation as design lead for the Santa Monica external studio," Killian tells us, "but continued to do play-by-play commentary for some big tournaments. I just really love fighting games, so a lot of people know me from tournaments like EVO."
Evolution Championship Series, or EVO for short, is the premier fighting-game tournament. Thousands flock to Las Vegas to be in with a chance of competing against the world's finest fighting game players, with top games like Ultra Street Fighter IV, Super Smash Bros. and Tekken headlining. EVO was founded by Tom (of fighting game supersite Shoryuken.com) and Tony Cannon in 1996 when it was originally titled Battle by the Bay and was solely dedicated to Street Fighter II. The Cannon brothers have stuck with the tournament ever since and have contributed to the fighting game community in other ways too, with Tony also helping to advance online multiplayer with GGPO, an intricate online netcode service tailor-made for fighters that makes transatlantic battles feel like you're playing right next to your opponent.
While Killian was toiling away on PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale at Santa Monica, he had the idea for Rising Thunder rolling around in the back of his head, and the Cannon brothers had started their very own small studio to work on another game; eventually, they decided that they wanted to make the game a reality. "We knew it was a little crazy, and I loved what I was doing at PlayStation, but we were excited," Killian tells us. "We put together a small team of fighting game experts, and set up shop in the Radiant office. After about a year of development with only eight people, we liked what we had enough to put it online and let everyone try it out."
“We've been growing recently, but the Alpha you’re playing now was developed by eight people, with some online engineers coming on just before we were ready to launch. We playtested the concept of cooldowns on special moves in another engine in very early days, but when we decided to move to Unreal 4, we threw out the entire existing codebase and put together [the game] in just over a year of development."
The result is a fighting game that's quite unlike any other. It sports next-gen style graphics, and huge, giant mecha robots duking it out – yep, no gi-clad fighters, huge wrestlers or half-naked luchadores here – but the key difference is that doesn't rely on complicated movesets and complex combos to bust out high-octane moves. Nope, you only have a series of buttons that correspond to certain moves, meaning you can bust out a Hadouken-style special at the simple press of a button. While you do have your light, medium and heavy basic attacks, (say, binded to J, K, and L on your keyboard), you only need to press another key to unleash a devastating special, with three different moves at your disposal (again, say, binded to U, I and O). It’s that simple. Not only does that help with newcomers, but it brings all of the mind games, spacing and footsies to the forefront, putting everyone on a level playing field.
It’s a beat’em up built for online play too: it’s built on the backend of GGPO for lag-free play, and it’s also just so happens to be free. “I think every major competitive game will follow some kind of free-to-play model in the near future, but more than that, it just makes sense,” Killian says.
“Fighting games are hard, and while Rising Thunder has specials you can do with a button press, it's no exception. New players still have a lot to learn, and can expect to take some lumps as they improve and learn the core strategies. We didn't want to ask people for money just for the chance to get beat up,” he tells us.
“We also feel that free-to-play is the best model for great competitions. Removing barriers to competition is one of the core inspirations for the game. We think there are a lot of potentially world-class players who just never got into fighters because they were put off by the idea of spending $60, then memorising and practicing moves for months just to be able to play the game – not to be good, but just to use the most basic strategies.”
Killian asks, “If the designers are building the game strategy around moves like fireballs and uppercuts, why shouldn't you be able to pull them off the first time you try, as with the rest of the normal moves in the game?”
Anyone can move a chess piece from A to B if you know its movement pattern, but turning all of those movements into a strategy and outthinking your opponent is the core of the classic board game, and that’s exactly what Killian and Radiant Entertainment are going for with their new fighter: it’s a game of wits, not twitch reflexes and rote memorisation. Is it quarter-circle forward, quarter-circle forward, light kick or heavy kick for a super? What is dragon-punch motion? How many frames do I have to punch that in? Oh never mind, I’ve lost.
“Fighters are a fantastic genre. A genre I love a lot. The special move inputs, however, are basically the least interesting thing about it,” he tells us, when we asked what inspired Rising Thunder.
“So many great mechanics that started in fighters have made their way across games – canceling moves into each other, unique characters with special abilities, super combos and special meters – those are in so many different kinds of games now. Even so, virtually no games borrowed the idea of complicated multi-directional special move inputs. You could add them to other games, but nobody does,” Killian explains.
“It would definitely change the strategy in each of them, but would it make those games better? Not that I can see. Complicated inputs are also one of the biggest obstacles to people trying to get into the genre,” he says. “Most never get to the interesting strategic game, because they just can't get down a few obscure inputs while also trying to think through everything else that's happening at lightning speed.”
“So we started there,” he says. “Taking it back to basics, trying to get at the root of what's interesting and fun about fighting. Back to the spacing, the strategy, the mind-reading.”
Part of that meta is the mecha themselves, which you’re able to customise by switching out special attacks. “The mechs all have pilots, and you'll be seeing them soon, but first and foremost, we just really love mechs and robots,” Killian says. “Those were a big part of our youth, but they are also a great fit for our Variant system that allows you to switch out special moves into customisable builds.”
With the game in Alpha, it’s currently in a testing phase, but luckily, with the team’s heritage, connections, know-how and community respect, they’ve got the perfect audience to help check the game out – and one of the harshest too.
“We've been at the centre of this [fighting game] community since before it even was a community! Even so, if anything it's taught us how incredibly tough they are as a group,” Killian concedes. “Fighting gamers will attack the tiniest flaws like it's the end of the world, even during an Alpha testing phase, so you're really under a lot of pressure to get everything right. Fighting is also just a very difficult genre to do well. We do understand the key components to great fighters, of course, but our overall commitment is to the game and its players,” he says.
“We want great online, we want it to be free, and we want players to be able to dive in to the strategy and mind-games (‘the deep end of the pool’) as fast as possible. We knew a lot of our ideas for the game would be considered crazy by the traditional FGC, so we wanted to put it online and let people play it for themselves. The initial response has been incredibly strong, and includes champion players from every fighting genre. We've recently passed our ‘millionth game played’ milestone, which is unbelievably encouraging. From here, we're committed to iterating until we get it right.”
With the game free-to-play on PC, giving simple, accessible controls to players is key – even if you’re just using a keyboard. The simple nature of the game’s controls means that it works great even if you’re mashing your cruddy work QWERTY: you don’t have to worry about shelling out for a pricey pad or arcade stick.
”We knew we were building for PC, so we wanted to make sure it felt good on a keyboard. Everyone on the team began as a stick or pad player, but we've all switched over to keyboard controls as our preferred way of playing [the game]. It really offers amazing precision, and while I wouldn't want to play most fighters on a keyboard, when you don't need to worry about circular-style motions, it's a perfect fit.”
Tony Cannon’s GGPO tech has made it possible for you to play some of your favourite fighters with players across the world with barely any lag, and as one of the guys working on the game, it’s naturally a core part of Rising Thunder too. While it’s more suited to 2D, arcade fighters, the latest version has been tweaked and tested to work with fully 3D games too, which is an impressive feat, especially when you see it in action.
“GGPO has been setting the bar for quality online play in fighting games since it was first released,” Killian tells us. “With GGPO3, [Tony] wanted to raise that bar, and show that this is a great technology even for games with fully-rendered 3D models and environments. It's more expensive and complicated to capture the complete game state at every frame, but if you value your players and build the game around that expectation from the ground up, you can achieve incredible things.”
“We were watching a stream of [famed Zangief player] Darryl ‘SnakeEyez’ Lewis playing Rising Thunder, where he was talking about how the netcode made online feel just like you were playing at home. Our engineers checked to see where his opponent was playing from when he was saying that, and it turned out they were from Tokyo,” Killian says. “He'd been playing a match from across the Pacific Ocean, without feeling the familiar online lag that kills so many games.” For a genre that’s all about one on one bouts, where every step, every frame and every millisecond of lag could make or break a round – Cannon’s tech is a lifesaver.
Of course, as a fighting game, plenty of players are used to seeing the genre on console, playing side by side with a mate: there’s a long tradition of of fighters hitting arcades first before being revamped for a home release, but Killian and co. have no plans just yet of bringing the mech brawler to anything other than your PC.
“We're using [the] Unreal 4 [engine], so it's not difficult to be able to port the code to consoles, but we have no plans like that right now,” Killian tells us. “We wanted to be on PC so we would have complete control of the experience, and be able to fine-tune as often as we wanted. More than anything else, we really want to get things right.”
That’s not to say a port is completely out of the picture, but don’t count on it just yet: as you might expect, Killian’s a perfectionist, and with the game only just in Alpha, you might be waiting a while. And with the team’s connections to EVO, you might be wondering if the game’s a complete shoe-in for the premier Vegas tournament. Not quite: Killian says that’s completely down to you.
“That's entirely up to the players. Tom and Tony founded EVO, but that's not a golden ticket to be a part of the event,” he says. “We can guarantee that everyone at Radiant loves competition, and so we plan to do a lot to support tournaments and competitions worldwide.”
Watch this space, as we’re sure Rising Thunder’s going to shake up the fighting game scene.
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