Welcome to the non-fiction ‘Warthog Blog’ section of the Warthog Report, where I write about different subjects as they interest me. If you’re a subscriber and just want other parts of the newsletter, you can adjust which segments you receive here. This segment is finally back with more talk about game development.
As of this writing the 2026 fighting game jam’s judging period is still ongoing, meaning I’m not allowed to update the itch.io page for my entry just yet. With my deep interest in fighting games I enjoyed the process of making the game and felt content with my submission, but had plenty of ideas on how to refine and expand it.
While I originally planned to shelve any additional work on the game for after judging ended, that was blown apart by the discovery that players in my game could cheat death.
One of the judges was streaming the game and while experimenting with the desperation move, which kills the user if it doesn’t end the round, found you could survive using it if you inputted a special move at the end. Naturally being able to negate the drawback of a move that does 70% of the maximum health value destroys the balance of the game. The game also still awards the point for winning a round to the other player even while letting the match continue.
I cannot properly convey the kind of fear and embarrassment I felt at the moment I learned about this. “What do you mean ‘death cancel?!’” was at least how I reacted in my head when a commenter mentioned it.
In my testing the problem revealed itself as even more extensive, you couldn’t just cancel out of dying from using your desperation, you could cancel out of dying in all cases. Which means in the version I submitted if both players are aware of the bug it comes down to who messes up their special move input first. And one character has an input that requires charging time, making which one is better clear to see.
Naturally I didn’t like that, so I went into the code to get rid of the bug. Finding the code responsible and removing it was much easier than I feared, it was one line from a failed attempt at a mechanic I had later successfully made work as intended. So I could remove it without needing to adjust anything else, and solved a related issue at the same time.
Yet I had a new problem: the people loved death canceling. Which says a lot about the scenes I run in that the reaction to this bug across several different discord servers was ‘this rocks actually.’ So now I needed to find a way to implement it in a way that gave it some constraints as a deliberate mechanic.
I won’t go into detail on the coding process, but now the death cancel mechanic functions like this: once per round when you are KOed you can use a special move to keep fighting, but your opponent still receives the point for winning the round and if they KO you again they get another and you won’t be able to cancel out of it. The desperation move completely shuts this down, death cancel cannot be used when being KOed as a consequence of using or being hit by a desperation move.
Since there’s now an intentional way to effectively win two rounds at once I also increased the round count from two to three, to ensure there will always be at least one proper reset to starting positions and health. My intent and hope is that with these restrictions desperation attacks are seen as having more reward and that some players will choose not to death cancel if they aren’t confident in being able to get a revenge kill.
And having already broken my self imposed restriction on working on the game, I then set about working on the other things that had bugged me about the game on submission. Fixing the duration of a certain attack, changing the colors of menu buttons and pause menus, adding the ability to rebind what buttons do what actions on controllers, free selection of your fighter’s color, and even having a computer player to fight against in local versus. That last bit is important to me so that there’s a way to play even without a second player.
I have even more I’d like to add to the game, but I won’t promise anything until I have it implemented. What I’ve found with this game jam is that once I have some proper momentum it’s difficult to resist the siren song of working on a game and expanding the scope. At a certain point it becomes like solving a puzzle, fiddling with things until suddenly they all start falling into place.
At this point I’m well aware my game likely isn’t going to be any judge’s number one pick, but it’d be weirder if it was since my ‘competition’ includes the creator of the framework I’ve been using and veteran indie fighting game developers. I’ve had too much fun playing the other submissions to be mad at them winning.
I am however content that I have not only shipped out a game that’s fun to play, but have been able to respond to unintended factors and work them into the game. It feels rewarding to develop skills in a new artform.