Pitch TFE: DBFZ CATA — 1
2021 — Graduation project at Haute École Albert Jaquard
How I feel about my pitch
Today (02/03/ 2021), we had to pitch the topic of our graduation project. I’m satisfied with the way I presented it. As I was preparing this presentation, one of my first thoughts was that this is probably confusing for most people. Since a pitch has to be short, I felt like I couldn’t spend too much time explaining the basics of fighting games or “Combos.”
Therefore I prepared an “Annex” section on this Docs that hopefully can answer some of the questions u may be having.
The pitch is over; I couldn’t get much feedback since it's hard for my teacher to understand without reading the doc mentioned above first (which they until now had no chance of reading). People not involved in FGC (Fighting Game Community) have a harder time understanding this. Even if that is the case, I ask myself if that would be a problem? It isn’t in my opinion since my users will be DBFZ players, and they acquire the knowledge by playing the game or being involved in the FGC.
One important aspect I forgot to mention during the pitch.
I forgot to mention that the player using a PC would be able to use his/her controller to use “CATA” so he/she can input his/her combos with their usual controller. This is also the way I want to make my project work first. To privilege PC since this could be very interesting to use while playing in training mode. I’ll use an API called “Gamepad” to recognize the controller's inputs.
Then in the future, somewhere after TFE, maybe? I would someday make this usable on every device (except smartwatches, probably). I thought of the virtual controller that would appear for small and medium-size screens since they usually don’t have a way to sync a controller (except if u own a phone controller).
Until now have only created this virtual controller and the character frame in Illustrator as graphical elements. But they are not definitive since it is very similar to the in-game UI elements & I have to speak to our Copyright teacher to be aware of what I m allowed. I’m already almost sure that I’ll probably have to redraw the character's profile pic for this project. I have to think if I need every char for the TFE because it would mean to redraw 42 characters, probably 43 since one is almost being released.
For the visuals in the slides, I created them on XD. For the future of the design work, I’ll be using Figma because it’s my preferred platform.
Combo notation and inspiration of the first visuals
My main source of inspiration is the platforms the DBFZ is currently using to share their combos. This being Twitter and Youtube.
Both using the “#” DBFZ or even character-specific (like in YT picture green square “DBFZ_SB2” )to try to ease the search for these combos.
My little Gamepad demo
This link takes u to my test website, where if u have a controller connected to your machine,e this will recognize your controller and show u which button u are pressing. At the moment, the Directional buttons are not working.
When I press square, my controller, the website will display “button 0”, because like in programming, the count starts at 0. (From there, the sequence goes to cross, triangle, circle, and finally to the shoulder buttons.)
Final Words
To get a better understanding of the in-game mechanics, I would suggest reading my google doc. This is mainly useful if you’d like to understand how the calculations are going to work.
However, to sum up, my project it will allow players to create and share their combos. Creating their combos only requires them to remember the sequence of buttons for the respective combo and nothing else. Since the interface will auto-fill every other field for the user, once the combo is created, you’ll be able to save it or/and share it with the community.
For this TFE, I don’t imagine my project to be 100% accurate to the game since I have to do the calculation of, for instance, the damage scaling myself. Only because the game doesn’t provide this transparency, besides, I will only provide the essential information to the combos since it sounds rather complicated. Regardless this project will provide me with some desired challenges like
- Logic and JS
- UX and ease of use
- get in touch with the Community for the test from various countries
- Design and create design elements for something related to Dragon Ball
Thanks for the read. I’ll leave you a little list of my core source.
