Designing Fighting Game Art

A project with Cheezopath and the one and only Tibi, to put ourselves in the shoes of 1990’s Japanese game designers. On my end, I wrestle with design problems like…

Fighting Game Stages

My “main role” in the project.

Shotokans

What could the first shoto fighters look like, in a world where shotos didn’t exist yet?

Sumos

How fun can you make a sumo fighter, without losing the sumo essence?

Non-Square Pixelart

Very important to get right, before sitting down and making final art.

Designing Fighter Characters

The Moodboard

Music

This project is a good excuse to finally be more pro-active, in something I’ve been avoiding for too long: finding and listening to music. I’ve never really done this, before now.

If you pay attention to some of the more world-famous 90’s Japanese media, you’ll notice how loaded with musical references they can be. From characters and spirits in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, to even the names of fighters in Street Fighter of King of Fighters, you can’t walk two feet without bumping into some obvious or not-so-obvious reference to a band, album, song, or lyric.

Even if due to copyright or language barriers, they might not always be spelled the same!

So that’s part of the immersion needed, to get in the headspace of a creative from that era. I could just reference the exact same bands or songs, but that would be too easy and not much fun. I’d rather see where my search, and my tastes, take me. Though I try to limit myself to songs that came out before the characters were made.

And that limit actually made it easier for a musical bottomfeeder like me, to decide how to even start. I needed websites where I could filter by eras and countries, and not just by genre. The eras should preferably be appropriate for the project, and the countries should for the most part be that of each fighter. And I barely know anything about genres, so that wouldn’t help me right now! Lastly, I also needed to sometimes limit my search for keywords that would grab me. A bit shallow, but I had to get the ball rolling somehow.

Of course I found Discogs and AllMusic, both used constantly by people who know more about music than me, with just the search tools I needed.

For another shallow trick, to get my musical taste buds growing fast, I realised that the shortest songs on an album usually were the punchiest ones, that fit the fighter mood, or that had the most bite-sized experience of the album. So I tended to look for those first, before deciding if I wanted to listen to the rest of an album.

Fast-forward through months of character design and moodboard, and I now sit proudly on a huge mess of song collections and playlists, from 22-Pistepirkko, through Phil Manzanera, to Yukoh Kusunoki.