Fighting Game Development Resources

Collection of resources about how to make fighting games of all types, sorted by categories.

This list was put together by Fighting Game Developer Community (FGDC) on Discord.

Legend:

⭐ Key or high quality resource

General

Engines and Libraries

Castagne Engine (Godot, has Rollback) - Game engine for fighting and action games focused on efficiency and flexibility. Uses its own custom language and editor.
Sakuga Engine (Godot, has Rollback)) - Fighting game framework written on top of Godot, using resources to specify movesets. Requires C#/.NET.
Night Sky Engine (Unreal, has Rollback) - Fighting game framework written on top of Unreal. Uses blueprints directly instead of a custom scripting layer.
IKEMEN (Standalone, has Rollback) - Open source remake of the famous MUGEN fighting game engine written in Go. Uses its own language and can be extended with LUA. Massive vault of standalone characters made over the years.

Templates

Godot Rollback Fighter Demo - Uses Godot 4, has fully deterministic rollback netcode thanks to the Delta Rollback addon.

Game Development

Technical / Programming

General Game Programming

Gamedev Class - Gameplay Programming - Talk given by the creator of the Castagne Engine, Panthavma, about of couple of important game development concepts you should know, especially if you are using Godot. Part of a longer series of classes given at the University of Bordeaux's computer science association, also available in French.
Math for Game Devs [2022] - series by Freya Holmér, who is one of the best game dev youtubers when it comes to explaining important foundational concepts well.
Specializing Godot: Castagne framework for fighting games – Panthavma – GodotCon 2024 - Talk given by the creator of the Castagne Engine, Panthavma, on how to adapt your general purpose tooling into a supercharged workflow for efficiency, which is the point of Castagne.

Game Inputs

Input Buffering, Action Canceling, and also Forbidden Knowledge

Networking

⭐ Repository of resources on game networking
⭐ Netcode - Explaining how fighting games use delay-based and rollback netcode - This is THE resource on how netcode in fighting games works. This article is really all you need to understand how to implement rollback in your own games from scratch.
⭐ Rollback Netcode Pseudocode - THE algorithm on how rollback netcode works
⭐ GekkoNet - Modern replacement/spiritual successor to GGPO.
Visual guide to how rollback network works - made by someone who worked on Rivals of Aether and Animation Versus
Choosing the right network model for your multiplayer game - shows all of the different networking models you can have in your game. Choose the best one for your game!
8 Frames in 16ms: Rollback Networking in Mortal Kombat and Injustice 2 - GDC 2018
Back to the Future! Working with Deterministic Simulation in 'For Honor' - GDC 2019 - Turns out For Honor uses peer to peer rollback for it's 3D arena combat.

An interesting thread that I found on Twitter thanks to @Rod F https://yal.cc/preparing-your-game-for-deterministic-netcode/ https://bymuno.com/post/rollback

Graphics and Sound

Art/Animation - General

Note: While this repository is meant for advice that can help fighting game developers specifically, we thought it would still be nice to offer a curated selection of art resources for those who want to learn how to get started with art in games.

Art/Animation - Real Time Action Combat

⭐ Making Fluid and Powerful Animations For 'Skullgirls' - GDC 2014 - Talk by the Lead Animator on the fighting game Skullgirls on how animators are done in that game.

3D Modeling

Create Animated Low Poly Characters in Blender (2024) - Step by step tutorial series on how to create your own stylized Blender character model and rig.

Graphics Programming - Stylized/NPR

⭐ GuiltyGearXrd's Art Style : The X Factor Between 2D and 3D - THE talk if you want to understand how Arc System Works achieves the look they've become famous for in their fighting games.
⭐ Line Rendering Deep Overview - Part 1 - Extraction - State of the art on line rendering methods for video games by Panthavma, the creator of the Castagne Engine. Based on his PhD work in high quality stylized line rendering.
From mobile to high-end PC: Achieving high quality anime style rendering on Unity - Talk given by miHoYo's lead technical developer on how they achieve the look of Honkai/Genshin Impact
From Mobile to Console: Genshin Impact's rendering technology on Console - Another talk by miHoYo about how they achieved the look of Genshin Impact. (Note: even though the video's title is in Korean, the actual talk is in English.)
Why Guilty Gear 3D Artists Don't Trust the Reference Sheet | Industry Insider Interview - Interview with someone who works in the Japanese video game industry on how to achieve that "3D Anime" look.
Panagiotis Tsiapkolis: From watercolors to mechs: Stylized rendering and asset pipelines in Godot - Talk on practical stylized rendering given by the creator of the Castagne Engine, Panthavma, based on his academic work in collaboration with Ubisoft.
Toon Shading Fundamentals - From Cel-Shading to bidirectional toon ramps - Overview of toon shading methods for video games by Panthavma, the creator of the Castagne Engine. Goes over the base concepts and useful extensions.

Design

General Game Design

⭐ Infil's Fighting Game Glossary
⭐ Game Balance Isn't Real - video by Keits, the Lead Designer of Rumbleverse and seasons 2 and up of Killer Instinct. Important to watch if you are making a fighting game or really any competitive multiplayer game.
⭐ Hayama's Fighting Game Database - Very complete list of fighting games of all sizes.
09 to '19: A Decade of Approachability in Fighting Games - GDC 2019 - Talk given by one of the Iron Galaxy developers who worked on Killer Instinct seasons 2 and 3.
Hayama's Fighting Game Database - Best known database of all fighting games that exist on the internet.
UFGTX: How to Make Fighting Games - Note: The person who gave this talk is Mike Z, the co-creator of Skullgirls. However, since they gave this talk, they have become a controversial figure for many reasons. Still, we felt as though this talk was still useful to view due to the amount of good advice it still contains.

Core-A gaming is essentially required reading for anyone trying to make a fighting game https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWIbhIYLOq-T7XwgHe2y2hBE8Zr_yeODi

Core A Gaming is pretty much essential watching at this point. I also highly recommend Novril Tataki's channel for similar reasons. Several video series, that are meant to teach new players, but are actually great for devs as well. Their older series on Guilty Gear character tutorials also helped me designing movesets. https://www.youtube.com/user/novriltataki

Also add Sugarpunch Design Works. Great for learning about animation basics and sometimes game feel. Not entirely focused on fighting games though. https://youtu.be/s4HKw7Hqqd0

(Sugarpunch definitely has some worthwhile insights, but he also spews out a lot of "hot takes" so take what he says with a grain of salt)

Once I was asked about how I implemented the AI in my game. I might share that info here again. Don't know if it counts as learning material. Feel free to move it/remove it! [Twitter thread] https://twitter.com/AndreaDProjects/status/1086641395740352513?s=20