Essentially the dodge movement was designed so that you could reposition yourself and try to get behind opponents. Rather than making a singular, timed dodge, I thought it would be more fun to have two dodges: horizontal and vertical, so you would have to read incoming attacks, and the attacking player could read your dodge and adjust their strikes to catch you. This meant being able to hold the dodge input, and as a consequence, you could use it to skid and cover more ground. This ended up being a lot of fun, as you could also use it in place of a dash to quickly reposition yourself, and players always responded really well to all the dashing and sliding, so it stayed in.
I guess what I really want to ask was the process of how it was coded into the game. I want to make a fighting game where one of the key aspects to it is the movement and the idea I had with my brother was to have forward and backwards combined with square would create a dash movement, similar to how you have the dodge mechanic. The game is pretty much still just a thought of a concept, but it's something that I really want to work on as soon and as much as I can lol. Also did you use a well known game development engine, or was it mostly done on your own?
It was made in GameMaker Studio 1.4. The game uses a state-system. The normal state is 'idle', allowing for basic movements and raising/lower the guard. The dodge input gives a burst of speed in whatever direction you're holding, and puts you in the 'dodge' state. You can't move in the dodge state, but the friction is lowered so that whatever speed you're moving at will last longer, and holding a direction will affect that friction, so if you hold the opposite direction you'll skid to a stop quicker.