On this, the day of The King of Fighters XIV’s official release in the West, Famitsu has shared a new interview with the development team behind the game. While the interview itself is in Japanese, our friends over at the MadMan’s Café have posted some translated notes from it.
The development team, composed primarily of veterans (such as producer Yasuyuki Oda and art director Noboyuki Kuroki) who have been working on fighting games since the genre’s golden age in the 1990s, talk about various topics–including the moving the game into 3D, as the difficulty of having to work on a game with 50 characters.
On moving to 3D, one thing that made it tough to work on the game was the fact that they couldn’t use any old assets from the King of Fighters XIII. One difficulty was having to do facial expressions for all the characters, as such producer Oda states that there are actually 3 characters without facial expressions, hiding their faces through various means such as being behind a mask.
Another challenge was preparing the hitboxes for the characters. Being in 3D, they had to work with the fact that the animations were tweened and as such, the hitboxes were no longer tied to individual frames. If the hitboxes moved smoothly like the animations, then there would have been issues, such as where certain moves miss certain characters.
The 50 character cast also put a lot of strain on the team, especially with only 3 to 4 designers working on it at any given time. “It’s so wrong” states art director Noboyuki Kuroki on Oda’s desire for this large cast. Considering that they didn’t have the development environment to do 3D at the time, Kuroki is still surprised that they pulled it off.
As for the characters, they divided the cast into who they thought would appeal to different groups. Additionally, they had to cut certain characters because they didn’t want the game to lean too heavily towards certain series (e.g. Blue Mary and Yamazaki being Fatal Fury characters).
Another interesting issue they had is that of showing the game off to the public: with most other genres, developers can simply create vertical slices of gameplay, sectioning off a stage or two, to show off. For fighting games however, Oda states that doing vertical slices takes up more development time. As such, whenever they showed something off, it was just whatever the development team had completed at the time. This was most evident at PSX 2015 where they first showed off the game, resulting in the team receiving a lot of feedback, because the game was barely even ready for show.
The main focus of the feedback throughout the King of Fighters XIV’s development has been on the graphics, something that the team at SNK has been slowly improving with each trailer and playable build. Each update was actually the result of substantial trial and error on the development team’s part. Oda states that they decided to prioritize getting the game to run at a constant 60fps over making the graphics flashier. Additionally, he stated that online play was one of the reasons for prioritizing this–if they implemented a variable framerate, this would result in having to use frameskips, which create a bottleneck in terms of network communication. This is important, as KOFXIV allows for up 12 players to be in a lobby.
Regarding online, Oda stated that it’s something that “we can’t be completely sure of until the game launches.” That said, as far as they’ve tested “it’s better than KOFXIII on Steam.”
In addition to all the King of Fighters XIV related talk, Oda also talks about other SNK fighting franchises such as Art of Fighting or Samurai Shodown. He states that rather than making sequels, he’d rather restart them from scratch.
Of course, that’s just some of the things that they talk about in the interview. Head over to Famitsu, or the MadMan’s Café to read more.
Source: Famitsu via the MadMan’s Café
