“Whoops! All grapplers” is the working title of the rust base fighting game I’ve been hammering away for a few years. You can find the source code in GitHub. It’s built with bevy, a rust based ECS game engine, uses 3D models I made and animated in blender.
The key feature is the moba-like shop system, which allows the player to control how much of the complexity they want to engage with. If everything in the shop was made constantly available like system mechanics in most fighting games are, that would be overwhelming. With the shop setup the player has some control over which mechanics they wish to interact with. If they want to learn a new character, they can focus on buying passive items. If they want to theory craft new setups for their favorite character, they can try out new active items. If they are having a problem in a specific matchup, they have a large space of options to pick from when trying to solve that. The last one is a double-edged sword, but it’s the way I like my games.
At the start of the project I knew very little rust, basically no blender, and my game design experience had been a few microprojects (game jams and drawer scribbles), so traditional wisdom would say it was outside of the scope of my abilities, which I would agree with. I also think this was the only way I’d ever stick with the project long enough to get anywhere. I frequently feel pure joy when something just works in a way I don’t in my pet projects. At the beginning I made a conscious choice. I knew this would take a while, but that was going to be fine. This acceptance allows me to keep at it, as I don’t feel like a failure for not getting it done already. The original naive plan was a year of dev time for a prototype, but that’s laughable in hindsight, especially with how the scope has shifted. This is fine. My livelihood doesn’t depend on the success of the game, which is probably for the best since there probably won’t be much of that to go around.
The most important takeaway I’ve got from this project is learning to enjoy trying. That comes with a fair amount of failing, but the learning mentality helps me get past some humps. For more usable and less wishy-washy wisdom, see the similar articles at the bottom of the page.