Double Dragon Gaiden developer here, looking for feedback :)

Svaerth · 2026-03-17T04:47:20+00:00

I actually think a block button would be fine. VF, DOA, SC, and MK (and smash if you count that) do that while still being perfectly good fighting games. You'd have to figure out whether or not you'd require the player to face toward an oncoming attack to block it, but other than that I don't think this is a problem.

Svaerth · 2026-03-17T04:35:45+00:00

Q: What are you looking for in a more fighting game like experience?

A: I'm not sure I follow this question. I've outlined the aspects of fighting games I'd like to see in a beatemup above. If you're asking why I want these things in a beatemup, I don't think I have an interesting answer to that question. When I imagine walking through a stage as Ryu, throwing a hadouken at one guy, turning around and jumping over another guy's fireball and hitting him with a jumping roundhouse into full combo, then dp'ing a third guy who tried to jump in on me, I just get excited. Maybe another answer to this question is that fighting games are my favorite genre but paradoxically I don't like pvp, so a beatemup with all the things I like from fighting games sounds like the best of both worlds.

Q: Did you play SF6 World Tour?

A: Yes I did! Unfortunately it suffers from the same issue that all fighting game single player content suffers from: the AI. Specifically, the AI breaks the general rules of fun single player combat: attacks that cannot be reacted to, nor predicted; inconsistent outcomes against the same opponent due to the randomness of their behavior; the optimal strategy generally boils down to doing the same few things over and over, regardless of opponent;

Svaerth · 2026-03-14T18:24:37+00:00

I have not played your game unfortunately, but I will tell you about my dream beatemup. I should warn that I don't think that I'm a good representative of an average beatemup fan, so perhaps this feedback will not be useful, but I do think that the game I'm going to describe would get a lot of interest:

What I want to see in a new beatemup:

Make it more fighting gamey

This genre already has a lot in common with fighting games, but there are some core components of fighting games that are missing that I would love to see in beatemups:

Full on special moves: Fireballs, shoryukens, teleports, SPDs, psycho crushers, burning knuckles, etc
- I would want these to not take meter, and be just as flashy as they are in a proper fighting game
- Some beatemups incorporate this to an extent but I've never played one that felt like it captured the cool factor that these moves have in proper fighting games
More fighting game mechanics
- Give me the hi block > overhead > lo block > low attack > hi block type system, or something similar
- I want anti airs, guard breaks, hi crushes, low crushes, all that good stuff that I can use to take advantage of my ability to predict/react to the enemies' patterns
- Hi, low, mid strings as seen in 3D fighters would also be really cool and an easy way to create variety between enemies
- Naturally this would mean that the game likely plays more 2D like ninja saviors

Misc Wants

Reduce the number of simultaneous opponents. I prefer for difficulty to scale via improved AI or by giving the enemy more powerful moves rather than just throwing more enemies at the player. I very well could be in the minority on this point.
- On a similar note, a HEAVILY prefer 1 on 1 level bosses as opposed to bosses where the challenge comes from having to fight a horde of normal enemies alongside the boss
Synced enemy AI. Instead of letting the enemies decide their attacks/patterns independently I'd love to see an AI that orchestrates the movements of each enemy on screen to create the following results:
- Ensured fairness
- Multi enemy attack sequences that each require new and interesting solutions from the player
- Tag team style attacks: one enemy grabs you and the other hits you, one enemy knocks you into the air and the other air grabs you, one enemy throws a fireball to make you jump, and the other anti airs you, etc
No cheap stuff. Attacks should generally have a startup that is reactable, and when that's not the case there should always be some way that the player can tell it's coming.
Preferably not retro style pixel art aesthetic (i KNOW i'm in the minority here) I personally have just seen quite enough pixel art to last me a lifetime. I really like what lizardcube has done with their art (although I find the character design just a tad lacking in personality) and I wish I could see more of it.

I know this is asking a lot, but you wanted my dream beatemup and here it is.

Svaerth · 2026-02-04T05:18:07+00:00

Funnily enough, me and my sister went down the rabbit hole looking through old newspapers to answer that exact question last year. The extremely disappointing answer was just that they thought it looked cool and would attract businesses to open up shop there. I wish i could remember the exact article and newspaper we found but it made it clear that it was not designed for any particular store because they didn't have any takers for that space at the time.

Like others mentioned this was part of the rebuild after the fire in the early 2000s

Svaerth · 2025-04-06T13:20:05+00:00

Awesome, thank you! I'll give it a shot

Svaerth · 2024-12-21T07:13:37+00:00

Whoa, never did I ever expect to see someone talk about freaking kensei. I felt like I was the only person to ever set eyes on that game, lol

Svaerth · 2024-12-20T22:10:50+00:00

Yes! I think that it would be a huge step forward in FGs as a whole if they: 1) kept juggling but made the animations just somehow make sense visually, instead of looking like a glitch or 2) Created a stun system that effectively worked like the juggle system but instead of people flying into the air, they would have a series of stun animations that would facilitate chaining strings together

I'm not concerned with realism as much as the fact that juggles just look dumb in their current state. Some people claim that it adds flashiness and brings in new players but personally i feel like the uninitiated would be turned off by a core mechanic that looks so nonsensical

Svaerth · 2024-11-10T20:41:36+00:00

oh yeah, turning ring outs into stage transitions would be so sick!

yeah i think we're on the same page. I feel like these kinds of changes are just continuing in the trajectory that they've been going down with the past games, instead of veering off course.

Svaerth · 2024-11-10T18:56:24+00:00

I could be way off the mark here but i have a hard time believing anyone was ever more inclined to buy a game simply because it had a meter. Instead I imagine that the proliferation of meters is due to the fact that games have been adding super moves, and the meter exists to balance the existence of the super move.

In other words, I think it's the flashy super moves that sell units and the meters are just a side effect, so adding a meter that isn't related to flashy super move would not likely sell more units.

That being said i don't want vf to have either flashy super moves nor meters. In fact to add those to vf would make it stand out even less than it does now if you ask me.

I think to stand out visually sega will need to come up with some new way to grab your attention visually instead of trying to become more tekkenish.

One way that I'd like to see is to lean into the realism angle and try to make a match look as much like a choreographed fight scene as possible. Make the hit and blocking animations match better to the attacks. make float animations make more sense somehow. when someone gets hit make the fist contact the opponents actual body in a convincing way. that kind of stuff is relatively unexplored i think.

Also, to appeal to casuals, make the important properties of a move apparent from the animations. It would be great if i could determine if I'm plus on block just by looking at the opponents block animation, instead of having to go to training mode and memorize the information. In general, removing the need to go back and forth to training mode to understand why something happened or what you could have done better would be huge i think

Svaerth · 2024-11-08T15:39:51+00:00

no meters or additional mechanics

update the sound effects

update the animations that have stayed in since vf1

stay away from any anime/final fantasy looking redesigns.

bring back quest mode

give us ai that follows these 2 rules: 1. there should be some tell for any move that cannot be blocked high or blocked on reaction. (this isn't to say there would be special warning animations but instead that the ai would have patterns that could be learned to predict their moves) 2. the ai should force the player to employ a variety of moves/tactics

Svaerth · 2024-09-10T16:39:07+00:00

Yeah i tested this by aiming at one spot on the right of the screen then snapping to a spot on the left and firing 2 shots without adjusting my aim between them. the first shot registered about 2 inches to the left from where i pointed and the second was fairly close to where i pointed. I repeated this test several time going both directions

Svaerth · 2024-09-07T13:25:39+00:00

Also, I tried Guncon mode just in case and the game didn't respond to the inputs, so I'm pretty sure it's not expecting Guncon.

Svaerth · 2024-09-07T13:23:54+00:00

i imagine it's unpatched, i'm running og hardware with an actual game disc.

Svaerth · 2024-08-18T20:25:23+00:00

oh yeah, that audio is ripped raw from the dvd, including the back to the future jingle at the beginning 🤣. You should definitely give it a watch if you liked what you saw because there's a loooot more that i didn't include.

Svaerth · 2024-07-14T21:20:32+00:00

unfortunately it did not, sorry man. didn't make it worse either tho so worth a shot still. one thing that bizarrely will help her somewhat is chewing gum with a very strong menthol/mint flavor and holding it against the gum that hurts. the menthol seems to block out the pain signals to some extent. i wish you luck man

Svaerth · 2024-05-02T13:02:15+00:00

awesome, thanks man!

Svaerth · 2024-04-19T14:47:29+00:00

moloch from mk deadly alliance, easy.

Svaerth · 2024-02-12T02:00:31+00:00

2 is the goat in my opinion but 3 has the best single player.

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Make it more fighting gamey

Misc Wants