Hi I'm making a fighting game. It's gonna just feature two almost-identical characters; two lady friends who are sparring on the beach at sunset :3 

I've got a WIP video up for ya folks to peep.

• light attack
• heavy attack
• crouch light/heavy
• jumping light/heavy
• special attack (projectile)
• crouch special (anti-air)

Whether the "anti-air" works as an anti-air remains to be seen. I'm sure all the current frame-data is bonkers bad. The characters are final, but I'll work on the background in the next few days. There are a few fun bugs, some of which include:

• jumping immediately upon landing causes you to jump in the "idle" stance, allowing you to perform grounded actions in the air and crouch mid-air indefinitely
• the brunette cannot run and jump toward the left if the blonde is crouching

Still to do are: splash screen, start screen, actual HP bars, a countdown timer, multiple rounds? and a finish screen. But the core of the gameplay is there so I'm happy with this :)

So I haven't fixed those two major previous bugs yet. I want to rehaul the jumping system to allow more flexibility with when you can do a jump attack. The current system is a huge mess involving an animation timed to the duration of the jump, rather than a state that your character is in when you're in the air vs when you're on the ground. I still have no idea what's causing the player 2 can't jump to the left if player 1 is crouching bug. That's sorta really shitty tbh, especially since player 2 starts on the right.

I've implemented the HP bars, countdown timer, and multiple rounds. Just need to round out the packaging with the rest of the stuff I mentioned earlier. Oh and I definitely need to update the background image, and hopefully give it a bit of animation (maybe just a shimmer on the water surface or a bit of sway in the tree). I've also decided that the characters' names will be Ashley and Mina.

I also want to implement a simple AI to fight against. It will likely be a script that checks for the player character's state, and chooses one of a few options (even maybe as simple as act/don't act) and then proceeds with a flowchart before returning to neutral. For example, if it reads the character is within X pixels distance away and begins an attack, it will crouch to block, then retaliate with its own attacks. It might open a round by jumping in, or it might throw a projectile. We'll see how far I get with this.

I'm pretty close to being ready to call my game done, since I'm going to be busy over the next two days. I absolutely can't work out what's wrong with the whole "player 2 can't jump left when player 1 is crouching" business, but I recall having a weird issue in Street Fighter IV as well where I couldn't use my keyboard arrow keys to down-diagonal kick with Chun-Li for some reason. I'm sure these aren't related at all but...I dunno. I should swap around some buttons maybe to see if that's where the issue lies. I'm also still not happy with how jumping and jumping attacks work, but I might just leave it as is. One play-tester specifically said they liked the feel of the jumping attack so maybe that's good enough after all.

Anyway, I spent most of the day working on the AI, which I'm quite happy with now. When I first implemented it as a proof-of-concept, it basically reacted to the player's actions in a frame-perfect manner and it basically destroyed me. I implemented a sort of randomness to the AI's actions to both increase its variety of actions and also to make it easier for the player to beat. What's happening under the hood is that the AI will periodically choose between one of two states, and depending on its current state, will make an action responding to the player. The states are weighted so that the option that is more passive/less optimal is more likely to occur. For example, in the neutral state when the player is far from the AI, the AI will choose to either throw a projectile, or simply move left or right. When the AI is under attack, it will either crouch and block the incoming attack...or again just move left/right which leaves it open. 

Besides that, I've touched up the presentation of the game, adding an updated background image (it still doesn't animate, unfortunately), adding a splash screen with a short story blurb, and also display the controls on-screen at the beginning of the game. I've also recorded a few lines for the usual announcer stuff. I received some feedback from a few play-testers and also implemented the following changes based on this:

• characters will be pushed away from each other when they are overlapping, to prevent the issue where characters are punching past each other
• further to this, most hitboxes have been increased in size to allow players to hit targets closer to their body (i.e. a punch hitbox now covers the entire character's arm rather than just her fist)
• fixed some more bugs like the characters being able to launch projectiles while in mid-air and "stuck" in the idle pose in mid-air