Cleod9: Programming Lead, McLeodGaming Owner
Ramsey: Art and Animation Lead
Max: Game Design Lead
Mass: Art and Animation
Sirto: Game and Web Programming
Cleod9: We can't guarantee ranked online will be available at launch. We'll see what we can do, though – we plan to do our best to at least have basic matchmaking (bare minimum) from day one.
Cleod9: Basic programming skills will help you create more advanced custom content for Fraymakers, but one of our goals is to make sure it's accessible to anyone! We plan to create tutorials to help guide you along the way.
Ramsey: We'll definitely give you the ability to choose specific tracks you'd like to listen to while playing! We're also looking into functionality to let you adjust song frequency.
Ramsey: Sure! We plan to make the camera as flexible as possible for our purposes internally, and also so your possibilities with regard to UGC stages are practically limitless. We have the default zoom of the camera set to pixel perfection, but if two characters separate from each other within the pixel perfect bounds the camera will zoom out to accommodate. Similar to smash of course you could possibly get to a point where the camera is so zoomed out that you can't see anything lol, but that's more of a design concern with the stage itself and less so the camera.
Cleod9: We gave an overview of the main functionalities of the program in our 7th Kickstarter update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mcleodgaming/fraymakers-the-infinitely-replayable-indie-platform-fighter/posts/3028934 We'll be able to go more in depth when we get closer to releasing. In terms of skillset, we currently use a Haxe-like programming language for scripting in Fraymakers (though this may be subject to change). If you want to make your own content from the ground up, you'll also want to make sure you have a sprite/image editing software in your toolbelt (Aseprite, Photoshop, etc.), as FrayTools is designed to organize your image assets onto a timeline.
Max: We'll be working directly with Alpharad to build out his announcer pack. That process will begin a bit later on (since we don't have everything he'll need to record locked in quite yet) but our plan is to do what we can to make sure his announcer pack includes a lot of his personality!
Ramsey: The idea came about when we were building out our gameplay systems. We were experimenting with airdashes, and wanted you to have a unique way to punish shield outside of grabbing or general pressure – the idea of crossing up a shield using airdash came up, we tried it in game and it worked extremely well. It inspires aggressive gameplay and intelligent usage of shield.
Ramsey: Hard to say for sure, but from our perspective, any! We're open to any and all indie inclusion, from the little guys to the industry giants.
Cleod9: Our UGC ecosystem is designed to allow you to create just about anything we would be able to create officially (because we're using it ourselves!). That means if you want to create your own boss mode, minigames, and AI behavior you can. As for how this customization will apply to the game's built-in stages, this is something we are still fleshing out.
Ramsey: Thanks! We'll do our best!
Ramsey: We haven't made a formal decision about this yet, but it's definitely something we're thinking about. There are design challenges to overcome which make the feature a little more complex than you'd expect – either way, it's something we're loosely considering.
Ramsey: Yes!! To what degree is hard to sus out this far in advance of course, but we're absolutely interested in expanding Fraymakers passed the promised Kickstarter offerings if there's fan demand for it. We'll start to have more discussions about this sort of thing once we hit 1.0 and begin development on the first DLC character and AAAAA NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Max: We don't have an exact date for its release yet (before March 2022 of course!). We'll be implementing the planned content over the course of the tester period, so it's all ready for early access. That means over time, you'll test 4 Characters, 5 Stages, 20 Assists, Rollback Online, and FrayTools.
Max: This is super tough, but Airdashing has proooooobably been my favorite mechanic to play around with so far. We spent a lot of time iterating on how it'd function and I think we ended up with something that's super fun to use.
Max: We're not gonna go into too much detail about the specifics of our negotiations with different developers, but suffice to say every single one of the dev teams we've worked with has been super accommodating and supportive! Make sure to go tell them thanks if you haven't already.
Max: Generally speaking, we don't have a list of archetypes that we try to find characters for. However, roster diversity is important to us, and we want to make sure people who are fans of a specific type of gameplay can find something to enjoy. We maintain diversity by choosing characters we think will bring something fresh to the table!
Ramsey: What a good question LOL. Sirto, Max and myself love purple and Cleod is a fan of blue. As for Mass, I have a direct quote: "Lime green, like that H&R Block green, that's nice." Also, thanks for grabbing the multi-copy tier! It's a good question, but nope. Backers receive one backer role per account, not per amount of copies of the game backed for.
Sirto: The Fraytools suite will be available on PC as a separate program included with a game purchase. When we announced Fraymakers on switch, we stated we'd do our best to support as many features as possible while within the limits of the switch hardware. We'll do whatever we can to support UGC to whatever extent we can on Switch, but we can't promise it for now.
Cleod9: Getting fully custom art into the game may depend on your art skill, but with some basic photo editing skills and utilizing free art assets it wouldn't be too difficult to get your pets to show up into the game! To get them to work as a duo would certainly be trickier to code, but very possible!
Cleod9: The rewards for Fraymakers for Two applies only to the backer specifically. However if you purchased extra copies as an add-on, each add-on copy will be entitled to the DLC stretch goals.
Cleod9: FrayTools isn't designed for standalone sprite creation, but instead geared towards working with your existing art assets from other programs such as Aseprite or Photoshop to be bundled for game use.
Max: We didn't have anything specifically in mind for these 6 – we use the same general concepts for our entire roster. We want to make sure that each character brings something unique to the roster while being fun to play and true to their source material.
Ramsey: Absolutely!
Cleod9: CommanderVideo was the first! (Shout out to Choice Provisions for working with us!)
Max: We're currently experimenting with different solutions for this! It'll likely take a bit of testing before we decide on a concrete answer, but we'll keep you guys in the loop as things develop.
Cleod9: We don't plan to release the full results, however we may disclose some tidbits of data over time as we reveal more confirmed content!
Cleod9: FrayTools is not an image editing tool itself, so you will need to source your sprites from other software. There are some great tools out there like Aseprite that we felt are best for that job, while FrayTools is focused on arranging those assets into animations suited for games.
Ramsey: If there's demand for more content after the release of 1.0 and the additional DLC character, absolutely! If we're able to based on the game's reception, we'd love to continue to make Fraymakers content.
Cleod9: Users coming from Adobe Flash/Animate will feel right at home, and having basic knowledge with a coding language such as JavaScript or Haxe will be beneficial for creating more advanced custom content. And the animation interface won't require a skill you couldn't pick up in a matter of days.
Max: This is pretty hard to say! I think that by including mechanics we like from other games and introducing some of our own, we've ended up with something pretty unique and cool. It's hard to say exactly which we're closest to. If I had to name one it'd probably be SSF2, but there are pretty significant differences across the board – speaking as someone who's played an absurd amount of SSF2 (among tons of other platform fighters), it definitely feels like its own thing.
Max: This isn't top of our priority list, but it's definitely something we'd like to implement down the line. Doubles is siiiiick
Max: Yes, we'll have an (optional) dedicated short hop button! Accessibility is important to us, so we'll be doing what we can to make sure we provide options for everyone to customize the way they control Fraymakers to suit their needs.
Max: Answered above, but we're not gonna be able to go into too much detail on the specifics here. Every dev we're working with for Fraymakers has been super cool and approachable, though!
Cleod9: We're still planning on how we want to handle things like this, but we'll definitely be utilizing Steam's achievements system at the very least for accomplishing certain feats in-game.
Max: Slay the Spire is an interesting case! We feel like of the Slay the Spire cast, the Watcher brings the most to the table for a platform fighter. Her stance mechanics are totally unique in our cast and were super fun in practice, and her staff is a cool weapon type that lends itself to lots of distinctive attacks. Basically, she fits perfectly and accomplishes pretty much everything we're looking for in a playable character. Of the remaining characters, the Silent was our choice for assist because we liked the idea of her poison mechanic! Of our offensive assists, she's unique in that her initial attack isn't all that potent, but if you're able to follow up with more hits the reward can be massive.
Max: Great question! Airdashing was something we were interested in early on, but it took a lot of iteration and testing to end up with something both balanced and fun. Since it sends you into freefall if you don't manage to land the followup attack, it's a somewhat high risk option, but the ability to quickly cross your opponent up with an attack (combined with our shield system) has resulted in some pretty unique pressure interactions that we weren't initially anticipating. As far as combos go, it took a bit of mental adjustment at first, but the ability to quickly adjust your character position can be super powerful if for following trajectories/DI that might allow the opponent to escape otherwise. I'm personally looking forward to getting airdashes in your guys' hands, since I'm sure you'll be able to use them to pull off some absurd stuff!
Cleod9: FrayTools is a standalone software separate from Fraymakers itself, so this allows us to do things that normally wouldn't be possible in a game environment. It's also the very software we're using to develop the game content ourselves, so you'll be able to create content that is essentially as in-depth as the game's official content.
Ramsey: It's difficult to compare to larger AAA crossover fighting games like Smash (especially since their operations aren't exactly transparent), but we approach each indie developer with the expectation that they're going to let us know what their terms of use for their IP are and go from there. We can't go into the specific details of those terms, but this project would not have been possible without the indie developers overwhelming support. Our goal for this project is to be a love letter to fans of indies, and it's extremely heartwarming to be supported by such an incredible community of hard working developers.
Ramsey: To a certain degree if the game is successful enough to justify it and there's a demand for additional content after all of the offerings we've completed for Kickstarter, we'd love to deliver on that front!
Max: Currently, you cannot switch sides with your shield. However, this is something we have on our list to test later on – if we find that it improves things, we're open to adjusting this in the future.
Cleod9: We plan to crowd-source the majority of the vetting process by making certain it's possible to report malicious or illegal content, with the addition of some automated checks as well.
Max: With FrayTools, anything is possible.
Max: I ate too many fruit snacks so my tummy hurts but otherwise it's going pretty great!
Cleod9: We actually briefly mentioned in one of our Kickstarter updates that FrayTools utilizes a plugin system of sorts. This system allows its features to be enhanced, and we'll be showcasing more of what's possible at a later date.
Sirto: Gladly! Fraymakers is made of our custom platform fighting engine coded in Haxe (https://haxe.org/). We're also using the Heaps Game Engine (https://heaps.io/), which is a Haxe library for rendering graphics, sound, etc. on screen. We currently compile the game to Hashlink (https://hashlink.haxe.org/), which is a cross platform runtime. I know, it's a lot of H's and I still mix them up in conversation. Fraytools is our UCG editor (https://www.typescriptlang.org/) written in typescript and wrapped in electron (https://www.electronjs.org/).
Ramsey: Multiple people can definitely choose the same assist! As for palette swaps for assists, it's something we're considering. Palette swaps take a considerable amount of time to develop, and doing that for 50 assists is quite the time investment – that being said, it's not off of the table by any means.
Ramsey: We're open character archetypes of any kind if it fits the character we acquired the rights to use for the game! I'm interested in more examples from you guys for characters that fit the Ice Climbers sort of partner playstyle.
Ramsey: Not quite a bug, but something I always forget about that recurs and it's SUPER funny (and also very cursed) is our default functionality for assists before any code is added to their file is their standing sprite spawns in the middle of the stage and hovers there menacingly for like 45 seconds. It's amazing LOL
Ramsey: It happens very quickly in our kickstarter trailer, but if you look closely toward the end you'll see we actually confirmed a "target test" like mode! We haven't given any specifics on the mode yet outside of the very short clip, but we're super stoked to share more details down the line.
Ramsey: We take pride in having indie representatives from all the way up and down the indie spectrum!
Cleod9: Yes, in order to play matches against people who have custom content there will be a system in place to automatically synchronize the content between devices.
Ramsey: good u? uwu
Max: We don't have plans for this currently (it presents some engineering challenges for sure) but it's definitely not off the table for the future!
Max: We haven't really nailed down the specifics of our post-release content – right now, our focus is on the early access/1.0 content we've laid out for the base game. Things like unlockable and/or original characters are possible for sure, though!
Ramsey: Hoping I get the meaning of the question, but throws are relatively straight-forward, input grab either by pressing the grab button or shield+attack, grabs bypass shield and then you can throw in any of the cardinal directions.
Max: This is definitely something that I think has been on many devs' minds lately. Our strategy is similar to what we've seen other games that have maintained interest long term do: community support, communication, and regular updates (big and small – characters take a long time to make, after all!). Our hope is that by involving the community during Early Access, we're able to build a great relationship that'll have you wanting to stay involved long into the future. Though this does depend to some degree on its success, we'd like to be able to continue supporting Fraymakers long after its 1.0 release!
Ramsey: We'd love to release art tutorials in some form! What form that takes is definitely up in the air, but we're super excited by the concept. We'd love to hear some of your ideas for what you think the shape of that should be – feel free to @ me in fraybackers with what you'd like to see
Sirto: Yes! We plan on releasing tutorials and documentation on creating your own content. I'm not exactly sure what form it will take yet, but I'm thinking at least a public website or wiki with UGC API documentation and examples. We may produce video tutorials as time goes on. I'm also sure that our community will come together and also produce a ton of UGC tutorials and helpful guides.
Max: Not related to Fraymakers, but I dreamed a game design once, woke up in the middle of the night, and scribbled it down nearly illegibly on a few pages of scratch paper. You can look forward to me actually making it someday maybe? lol
Max: I like systems like that too! We're not currently planning on having different ways to spend meter in the base game, but it's something we're looking to experiment with in some fashion – maybe through Match Modifiers! There's a lot of potential there that we're looking forward to experimenting with.
Max: Shields generally block the area suggested by the visual: the front of the player down to the floor, and almost up to their head. If you're above the shielding player and manage to hit the back part of their head that's not covered by the shield, the hit will land. As mentioned above, you currently cannot switch the direction of your block, but that's something we'll be looking to experiment with later on.
Cleod9: We can't confirm what specific features will be supported in the Switch version just yet, but we will do our best to port everything the platform will allow us to. The Switch version carries its own set of challenges, so it's hard to be sure about specific features like this for the time being. We'll be transparent with you guys as we find out more over the course of the game's development so you can make an informed decision on which version you'd prefer
Max: This is a pretty big question! It's hard to make a comprehensive list past what we've gone over in Kickstarter at this time, but I can tell you that we're definitely looking to have mode offerings that cater to both competitive and casual players.
Max: If the game does well enough to justify it, we'd love to continue to make content for Fraymakers long into the future!
Max: We don't have any specific timelines for future content reveals at this juncture – right now, we're all working as hard as we can toward early access release! That said, we'll look into revealing some more content/updates along the way. 🙂
Max: We're not currently planning on posting the full results from the backer survey, though we'll do what we can to reveal smaller bits of info about specific content as we reveal it!
Ramsey: Hang in there baby!
Cleod9: Not a bad idea! We'll take that into consideration once we've implemented the new voice packs.
Cleod9: We don't have plans for a strict content reveal schedule at this time. As we get closer to beta testing we will start to lay out a loose timeline for the game's lead up to Early Access. As far as reveals go, we'll probably generally announce when we're going to reveal something shortly beforehand, both because it's a bit unpredictable when those will be ready super far in advance and because we like them to be a surprise!
Cleod9: Our entire team uses FrayTools and we're not all programmers! 🙂 Naturally the more knowledge you have about coding, the more advanced content you can make. But keep in mind that the Fraymakers game engine is doing most of the heavy lifting in terms of gameplay mechanics, so much of the base functionality for a character just requires tweaking some predefined values around. Also nowadays there is a never ending sea of freely available art assets out there that you can use to practice with, so that's one less thing to be concerned about.
Ramsey: I can't speak for the other guys, but the feeling of contributing to the indie community by representing its beloved characters, and having a community of people who look forward to the game and are so excited to play it is just so… ;0;
Max: Thank you!! We're generally happy to accommodate whatever level of involvement the creator of each character prefers. Some devs prefer to be more hands on, while others would rather mostly let us do our thing!
Ramsey: Can't quite speak to that lol, but I hope whoever your favorite is gets in!
Max: Supers are something later on down the roadmap that we're still experimenting with, functionality-wise. One of our goals is to make sure they're balanced, though!
Ramsey: Each stage is currently confirmed to have three songs, one from each of the following artists: Soul Bros, OC Remix, and FamilyJules! There's no concrete plans for home stage music playing on a different stage one way or the other, but it's an interesting idea for sure.
Cleod9: Yes, we plan to have music customization options available! As long as it's not something that'll impact the gameplay, we generally want to make sure you have as many customization options available to you as possible.
Cleod9: We actually have a unit test server for our engine that runs tests for the game directly in Linux 🙂 But the answer is yes, Fraymakers does currently run on Linux, and FrayTools is built on a cross-platform program called Electron that is also compatible with Linux.
Max: Yes! If Fraymakers does well enough to support continued content development, we'd love to keep working on all aspects of the game, including assists and stages!
Cleod9: If you've purchased an extra Tester Build as an add-on, you will soon be able to use our backer bot on Discord to grant access to this extra person. Please stay tuned!
Max: For the first question that's not finalized yet, so I won't get on your case for squeezing in two questions lol We're definitely open to making adjustments to character balance post-launch if necessary. However, our goal is to use our early access period to tune balance, so hopefully major changes won't be necessary later down the line.
Max: Each character presents their own unique challenges! In general though, we try to pick characters that suggest unique/interesting playstyles in a platform fighter somewhat naturally. Our goal is to avoid situations where we're trying to force a character into a specific niche that doesn't naturally suit them – that usually results in characters that feel poorly represented! We try to choose characters that bring something new while also feeling like themselves.
Cleod9: Audio files that come with the game are bundled into packaged files specific to Fraymakers. Generally speaking though, we like to work with OGGs as a base format, and plan to support WAV and MP3s.
Cleod9: The base cost for Fraymakers at Early Access release is planned to be $19.99 USD. The exact final price of the game post-Early Access isn't set in stone yet, but once all of the game's content is added there may be a slight price increase.
Ramsey: This does sound super fun! We're definitely looking to have a wealth of fun and exciting casual modes – super excited to dive further into it down the line. In the meantime, feel free to keep suggesting modes you think would be fun!
Max: Our ledge mechanics currently feature ledge hogging with limited invincibility frames for ledge actions/ledge drop to prevent stalling tactics. With how our character recoveries are balanced, this has created the best/most interesting results in edgeguarding scenarios so far. If things change significantly in the future, this is something that we'd be open to tweaking!
Cleod9: That's a very clever scenario! I don't see why you wouldn't be able to do something like this in general (you'll have programmatic access to whether or not a button is held), though I can't say for certain yet whether or not any official content will work this way.
Ramsey: We don't have any concrete plans for this right now. There are some engineering and design concerns, but know we're definitely aware of the fan demand for this type of feature!
Ramsey: Like I mentioned above, we definitely see the fan demand for this type of feature LOL. No news on it currently, and we haven't decided whether or not we'll move forward with implementing that type of feature. Stay tuned!
Ramsey: Yes in fact, we do! I'll show you an example
below, but for all of our sprites we color separate the base in advance to allow for all of the fun and
varied palettes you've seen throughout the Kickstarter campaign. Here's what Welltaro's
currently looks like:
Cleod9: Yep, it'll totally be possible to create variations of your custom stages with FrayTools!
Max: Great question – this depends on the assist! We want each assist to feel both intuitive and functional no matter where you use it, which means different assists have different requirements. For example, an assist like Aine doesn't fall down through the air since she needs to keep moving forward to land her combo, while someone like Diogenes has gravity built into his jumping functionality so he'll fall as you'd expect.
Ramsey: We're EXTREMELY interested in implementing robust accessibility solutions for the game like the ones you mentioned. We don't have any explicit features to share on that front – just know we absolutely want to include features like that in order to allow as many people as possible to enjoy Fraymakers!
Ramsey: We unfortunately have to be hush-hush when it comes to this subject, I hope you understand!
Max: Yes, we'll have an (optional) dedicated short hop button! Accessibility is important to us, so we'll be doing what we can to make sure we provide options for everyone to customize the way they control Fraymakers to suit their needs.
Max: Yes! You can use airdashes to wavedash.
Ramsey: There's currently three songs confirmed per stage! One from Soul Bros (an incredible jazz band), one from OC Remix (an extremely talented and varied electronic remix group) and a third from FamilyJules (an amazing metal guitarist!)
Max: We haven't implemented it yet, but in all likelihood we'll be including Turbo as one of our Match Modifiers!
Max: At the moment yes – we could end up changing this later on after further testing, though.
Max: Not at the moment, though this is a possibility later on for sure!
Max: We're absolutely interested in having an in-depth tutorial system! This kind of thing would likely come a bit later down the line, though – we'll generally want to focus on ironing out the content itself before creating tutorials for it.
Cleod9: We don't have a set date yet, but it will be some time closer to the Early Access release (so before March 2022 at the latest)
Max: Not as of yet! One of the benefits of building a project from the ground up (and planning out our core features beforehand) is that we can usually be pretty sure that we'll be able to accommodate our design goals.
Max: might be too much of a hint, but at least one of the next fighters will be from an indie game
Ramsey: This is going to sound like a cop-out, but we've been playing Smash Bros our whole lives! Our approach to designing Fraymakers utilizes our comprehensive knowledge of not only Smash, but of the wealth of other fighting games to create a fresh take on the platform fighting genre we know you'll love!
Max: This is a request not a question smh LOL THAT SAID: we'll look into posting more extensive gameplay footage later on, but for now we're pretty heads down in content development/polish.
Ramsey: We welcome all prospective indie characters with open arms!
Max: Our goal is to use our tester and early access periods to balance the core content of the game through regular updates. By the time 1.0 rolls around, we'd like to have things in a fairly stable state. That said, we'd still be open to making more sporadic adjustments later on if the situation warrants!
Max: Sure will!
Max: My tummy has started to hurt less than it did when I reported in earlier, so things are going pretty great
Cleod9: We've always been interested in the idea of additional cosmetics. While we're not certain of when they might be added, they would likely be introduced as additional content separate from the base game (whether paid or free).
Max: As mentioned above: we're still working on Fishbunjin's mechanics! It's a bit tricky adapting him into a different environment with different controls, but we'll do what we can to make him feel good.
Cleod9: Rollback online takes the cake on that one so far. We made it an explicit goal before launching our Kickstarter that we would get the foundation up and running for rollback before announcing it. It required an extensive amount of research and helped us make informed decisions early on about our code architecture so we could be fully confident it would not be an issue.
Cleod9: Yes, we currently do have an input buffer system in place that we're still fine tuning. (rest assured it won't be a hold buffer, don't worry!)
Max: Of those choices, the answer would definitely be "something original" or a hybrid. Talked about this a bit earlier, but I'd say that while SSF2 is probably the closest, it really feels like its own thing considering all of the different/new mechanics we've implemented.
Max: Generally, we only consider an assist in the first place if we think it'll bring something unique! While there are some mildly similar ones, we think all of the assists in our lineup present interesting quirks and decisions to be made on the part of the player.
Max: Our current plan is to allow you to put in functionally as many alternate colors for your custom characters as you'd like. There miiiight need to be some extremely high upper limit for technical reasons, but we don't plan to limit this manually.
Ramsey: Cleod just loves the color blue so much 🙂
Cleod9: Of course! We're aiming to support as many devices as we can.
Max: Depends on the situation! It's still a little bit up in the air at the moment, but we'll probably do what we can to make things exciting, especially for our playable characters.
Cleod9: That depends on its success of course! If the game does well it shows us that you all want to see more, and that will certainly let us keep going with content for as long as we can feasibly do so.
Cleod9: Sorry but we can't answer questions like this for the Q&A! You'll have to wait and see.
Cleod9: We'd love to introduce some co-op modes for online! While we're not certain yet if the base game will contain this capability, there will be nothing stopping custom content from being cooperative.
Max: I'm originally a keyboard player myself! (though these days I try to mix it up between different controller styles) While there may be some specific differences between keyboard and controllers (like analog inputs), we're going to do what we can to make sure keyboard feels as good as it possibly can. Some of the keyboard-specific considerations that you now see in other platform fighters that support keyboard (like the dash button, for example) were originally from SSF2, and we're looking to continue supporting and expanding keyboard functionality with Fraymakers.
Cleod9: We're planning to have a combination of in-game browsing capability for custom community content in addition to the ability to load custom content locally. The mechanisms for where online content will be stored is still something we're hashing out.
Ramsey: We're definitely open to japanese indie representation in Fraymakers! Of course the language barrier is definitely an issue, particularly because being self-funded before kickstarter made paying for an official translator somewhat out of our scope. Max is brushing up on his japanese, but he's not quite at the level of business negotiation translation LOL
Ramsey: We don't have a specific amount, but we're playing around with innovative ways to integrate a fresh take on the announcer
Ramsey: I'm actually having a blast LOL, love interacting with the community so much
Ramsey: We haven't ruled out the possibility, but we're making an effort to prioritize indie worlds generally speaking – that extends to all forms of content for the game!
Ramsey: In due time! We're going to be focusing on getting Early Access ready so that's the priority for now, but you should definitely be excited for the unannounced character reveals – they're gonna be so hype
Cleod9: Much of FrayTools' design inspiration comes from Adobe Flash/Animate, which we grew accustomed to from working on Super Smash Flash 2! We took a lot of the concepts from what made our development workflow smooth and applied it to our own tool dedicated specifically to games rather than solely animation.
Max: We'd love and hope to see Fraymakers develop a healthy competitive scene! The game is designed to be suitable for competitive and casual players alike, so we'd hope that people looking for competition will find a thriving scene in Fraymakers.
Ramsey: We would love to have horror indie game representation! We'd love to hear some of your favorites!
Ramsey: Yeah!! Hope it satisfies all of your expectations!
Max: I think one of the benefits of our character design is that we can do both! Characters like Welltaro thrive in the air, while someone like CommanderVideo will often like to start his combos from the ground.
Ramsey: You'll just have to wait and see! Welltaro canonically loves animals, he'd be a pretty strong contender for petting a dog in Fraymakers, don't you think?
Cleod9: You'll be able to bake your own music into your custom content, though we are still fleshing out how a core music customization system will work for both in-game and custom content.
Cleod9: While we can't confirm whether or not official "minigames" will be made, they would fall under the umbrella of custom modes which will be possible for anyone to make through FrayTools.
Max: Goku.
Ramsey: It genuinely depends on how well Fraymakers does, combined with fan demand to some degree. We'd love to continue to support Fraymakers if it makes sense for us to do so!
Max: We're probably gonna have some system to prune characters that end up in Fraybets. That said, I wouldn't expect overpowered stuff to be excluded completely – ridiculous matchups are just part of the fun!
Cleod9: Currently for console releases we're only planning on Nintendo Switch. Once the game is done and out on all the other supported platforms, we may consider releasing on PS5/XB, but no promises on that for now!
Ramsey: We very briefly considered creating original characters for a platform fighter, but the idea didn't really stick for long. Our passion comes from applying an already existing character to the platform fighting environment. Considering their range of abilities, throwing in neat little touches to make it feel truly like you're playing as the character! Assists came shortly after we decided on indies, and they've been a blast to implement too! They're a separate design challenge with a whole lot of freedom compared to designing a more traditional character, and allow us to include a ton more indie representation than our playable roster alone.
Ramsey: That's such a neat idea!! There are some logistical issues we'd have to overcome, but we'll definitely consider it.
Max: Great question, and there're a lot of factors that go into this! There's no hard and fast formula that determines our content additions, but the main factors for our main cast are generally speaking gameplay potential, identity, diversity, and recognizably. We'll typically map out a lot of a character's moveset before approaching IP holders so we can make sure we'll be able to deliver on a fun character that's true to their source material while bringing something unique to the roster. As far as assists go, we can be a lot more flexible – if you think a character would bring something distinctive to the assist roster, they have a great shot!
Ramsey: Very tough question… I mained Filia and Painwheel (changed around the third character quite a bit). I have a soft spot for Peacock too, since her animation is incredibleeeeee. If she wasn't more of a zoner I probably would have mained her (I prefer rushdown types lol)
Max: We don't have a specific date for something like this! Generally speaking, our goal is to get the game into your hands in the form of a tester build/early access ASAP. Once everything is polished enough, we'd prefer to just let our testers play it rather than showing it via video.
Max: Can't comment about the specifics of negotiations and stuff, but for each character on our roster, we're looking for characters that we think will bring something unique to Fraymakers and fit well into a platform fighter environment while representing their source material.
Ramsey: All indies get all of my love!! [heart] (nice try but no hints LOL)
Cleod9: Native support is something we're still looking into, but we already have support for the Mayflash GC adapter, as well as the official Gamecube Adapter through vJoy. There are technical difficulties with native support since there's no official Windows drivers for it.
Max: Like many features in Fraymakers, this is customizable, so yes! I'd recommend giving them a try, though – the game is designed with them in mind. 🙂
Cleod9: 1. Rollback netcode (it's very involved!) 2. FrayTools development (we're developing a tool and game at the same time!) 3. Art and animation (it's extremely time consuming!)
Ramsey: The only information we've given out so far about the Tester Build is that it'll definitely release before Early Access! As soon as we have more concrete information the Tester Build squad will be the first to know.
Max: We're not revealing anything about target stuff yet! You'll have to wait and see. 🙂
Max: This could potentially happen in the future, but it's not in our plans right now.
Max: You'll have to hang tight on this one! New character announcements will likely be a bit down the line.
Max: This is one that'll be ironed out a bit later on – our priority is to get netcode and unranked matchmaking running smoothly. We're definitely going to be looking to create a ranked system later on, though!
Cleod9: We're still working on the menu design, capabilities, and layout, we'll share more when it's all ready!
Ramsey: We have quite a few ideas lined up for fun casual modes that I can't quite go into right here, but Match Modifiers is already slated to be a huge source of chaotic casual play!
Cleod9: My first system was a Sega Genesis, and I eventually graduated to a PS One, followed by the Nintendo 64 (stuck with Nintendo from that point forward!). I mainly grew up with classics like Sonic the Hedgehog, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, Mario Kart, Smash Bros. 64 etc.
Sirto: No, we're not planning on Fraymakers supporting SVGs. You'll need to rasterize the vectors into bitmap frames before loading them in the game
Cleod9: We're not yet certain how feasible custom content will be on console for technical reasons, but we plan to find out more later on when Switch development is further along.
Ramsey: Premium costumes are a very very large art undertaking – we aren't ruling them out by any means, but we'll have to seriously consider whether they're worth doing at all and at what point. For now though Early Access and likely through 1.0 as well, the art resources will be directed toward completing our promised content from the Kickstarter campaign.
Cleod9: Absolutely! The entire custom content pipeline is designed around being able to create experiences that fill the void of whatever we don't manage to make into official content ourselves.
Max: Turbo mode is something we're planning to look into! Chances are we'll implement it as a match modifier down the line.
Ramsey: We've got Ape from Ape out! For any more monke related content you'll have to wait to find out 🙂
Ramsey: We likely won't dive super deeply into the structure of FrayTools ahead of its Early Access release, but when we get closer we can begin to dive into some more specifics to give your UGC project the headstart it deserves. For now, the base sprites for our 6 revealed characters can be found in the pins for (I believe?) the Fraymakers-Art chat – that'll get you started on the base.
Max: Early Access is slated to come out in early 2022!
Max: Yes, they will be viewable in training mode.
Max: Yes, you'll be allowed to stream everything from the tester build onward!
Ramsey: It's a little hard to say because Fraymakers is very much its own unique thing, but it'd probably be SSF2 if we had to choose. All of the new gameplay systems and new engine makes this a bit of an impossible question though haha, you'll have to feel it out for yourself when Fraymakers releases!
Max: We don't have an exact date for this locked in yet, but our goal is to have it come out with enough time to adequately test stuff prior to the early access release in early 2022. We'll keep you in the loop as we nail things down.
Ramsey: We're still nailing down all of Fishbun's mechanics and design, but our goal is to make him feel super fun in this new environment!
Max: Our directional shields create some really cool interactions! Since they don't decay, they feel pretty sturdy from the front, but if your opponent predicts that you're going to hold shield and crosses you up, you're left super open. I feel like they emphasize outplaying your opponent and predicting their action, since options by both players have pretty strong counterplay.
Ramsey: I will say that we've prioritized injecting as much personality as we can into each of these characters, and representing their home games to the best of our ability. This results in small little touches that each character receives that may go unnoticed to those unfamiliar with their respective series. I'm excited for you guys to dive into the characters and find all of those small details!
Ramsey: Yeah! I like the super flashy graphics and slick pixel art.
Ramsey: We're going to do our best to carry over as many features as we can to the Switch version. When it gets closer to Switch time we'll be sure to be transparent about the differences so you can make an informed choice.
Ramsey: Not quite, outside of "before Early Access". Trust us, your group will be the first to know when we have more concrete information!
Max: Our DI is fairly similar to the Smash games where it's more powerful. We think that higher DI values tend to create more interactivity and creativity in combos
Ramsey: Yes! To what degree remains to be hashed out, but we'd love to be able to promote the hard work the community pours into their UGC projects.
Cleod9: Introducing more ways to incorporate source material sounds fun, we'll definitely consider it later down the line!
Cleod9: A dedicated space for FrayTools creators sounds pretty cool. We've discussed in the past wanting to facilitate interactions in the creator community, so we'll be considering something like this.
Max: Satisfying movement is super important to us! Aside from stuff we've done over already (airdashing, wavedashing, etc) a lot of our characters have their own movement tools that give them their own distinct flavor. For example, I'm a huge fan of CommanderVideo's Slide – sometimes I just go into game by myself and use it to zip around the level for fun lol
Max: We have plenty of ideas, especially after seeing the backer content survey results! No announcements to make as of yet, though. 🙂
Ramsey: Not currently planned for Fraymakers due to some of the challenges that come along with it, but it's possible!
Mass: Definitely Infinite Assists, it's pretty crazy. It'll show up in the final game along with the rest of the Match Modifiers.
Cleod9: Zadig+vJoy are actually the current methods we use for official GC Adapter support due to the lack of native drivers for the device. We'll be looking into if native support will be possible in the future.
Max: Fraymakers features a lot of your favorite movement techniques from Smash, including wavedashing and associated techniques (wavelanding, etc). Generally, we want our mechanics to be less difficult as far as inputs (our wavedashes are somewhat easier to perform than Melee's, for example). I'd say we prefer difficulty to come from the decision making – for movement-heavy characters especially, your options are going to be virtually limitless, so it'll be a challenge to consistently pick the best one.
Ramsey: Yup! We've confirmed Rollback online, and we're looking to implement different types of online play (such as Ranked mode)
Mass: Gameplay-wise, the main draw for us is the Assist mechanic, in addition to the playable Indie fighters. These characters can help cover your fighter's weaknesses; can start, continue or finish combos; and even provide useful stage control. There's a lot of them; and we think choosing the ones that work best for you and your character's gameplan will lead to a lot of complexity and match variance. Additionally, we also have airdashes, which provides a quick burst of movement in any analog direction, which you can cancel out of with an attack. Successfully landing an attack continues the combo, but failure to do so'll leave you helpless and vulnerable to counter attack. It's useful for platform movement, closing the distance between your opponent, and even Wavedashing. Of course, there's also UGC lol
Max: Good question! Airdashes can be massively rewarding if you cancel them into an attack that connects with an opponent, but if your attack misses (or you don't cancel it at all) you end up in freefall with a ton of landing lag, leaving you open to a punish. This might take some tuning as time goes on, but our goal is to keep airdashes powerful but punishable if you get too predictable.
Cleod9: FrayTools will be as powerful as you allow it to be! We're using it ourselves to implement all of the game's official content (including some menus), so you'll be able to do just about anything we can do. FrayTools itself isn't quite an engine so much as it is a multi-purpose tool for designing and combining your animations, code, and audio assets into a shippable package.
Ramsey: It entirely depends on how well the game does! If the means for us to create the content and deliver it to you all is there, we'd love for Fraymakers to have a healthy lifespan!
Cleod9: We aren't able to disclose the specifics of items just yet, but for now we can say they will function differently from Smash/SSF2. You'll have to wait and see for future details!
Ramsey: I cannot understate how exciting the prospect of seeing the community build UGC is! Even without FrayTools out there's already such an outpour of art, design and general excitement for UGC and it's so infectious.
Ramsey: We'll leave that to your imagination for now – items are a bit of a ways off and i'd like for you to be able to see them in action rather than in an explanation.
Max: We haven't nailed this down quite yet, but we'll definitely want to include control options for all types of players. Unless we come up with an alternate solution we like better, I'd say this is fairly likely.
Cleod9: It's certainly not off the table! We owe it to our players to prioritize our official content first for full release, but there could be a future where something custom impresses us so much that it became official content in some capacity.
Max: There's no rigid formula for this, but generally we heavily consider moveset potential when we're deciding which characters we'd like to include in the first place. If we don't think a character will bring something unique and fun to the table, we might not include them in the first place. Once we're getting into specifics, we try to create a cohesive moveset that represents the character's source material well!
Ramsey: We don't have any plans to open up Tester access to people who didn't get the chance to back at that tier during the Kickstarter at the moment.
Ramsey: It's such an honor to have Kira back on the team!! It really sort of feels like a full circle moment. Kira was immediately on board and is such a pleasure to work with!!
Ramsey: We haven't committed too much time to hashing out what the details of something like this would mean yet (gotta have a game before it can have a competitive community!), but we're very interested in doing what we can to stoke the flame so to speak.
Ramsey: Cool characters. Very cool characters.
Ramsey: We aren't sure if more than 5 player support will be a thing at all for Fraymakers on Switch at this point – we still have a bit of research and development to do on that front before we can say whether or not it's a possibility.
Ramsey: We're going to do our best to satisfy as many people as we can with our content choices. Can't confirm anything specifically, though!
Cleod9: Sleepy😂
Max: It could be included, but we can't comment much on potential future content at the moment!
Max: Our pitches pre-Kickstarter were all done through our own outreach (for obvious reasons – the game wasn't announced yet!). For future content, we're generally not commenting on this at least for now, though we can say the Rhythm Doctor devs reached out to us once the Kickstarter launched! See: https://twitter.com/7thbeat/status/1338037809341321217
Cleod9: We don't currently have plans for dedicated ladder climbing for official content, though it's possible to implement something like this in custom content.
Mass: Thank you, you as well!
Ramsey: Yup! There will be a high degree of control over controls and your ability to customize them in the way you prefer!
Ramsey: We will likely not be doing something along the lines of a smash dojo (the overhead…whew) but you can absolutely expect updates on social media!
Cleod9: We will do everything we can to support the competitive scene, especially since competitive viability is important to us. We'll be able to paint a better picture of what that support will look like later down the road!
Ramsey: So far each of the artists choose different songs to make a cover of. It's not out of the realm of possibility for two artists to do the same song, or for us to have an artist do a cover of a song that belongs to an assist.
Max: Yes, that's our plan!
Cleod9: We'll be working hard to make FrayTools as beginner friendly as possible. As a base example, if you can drag images into a window you will be capable of getting something on-screen in Fraymakers. If you know how to edit some numbers, you'll be able to make characters' physics feel differently. As you learn more about the tools available, you'll be able to do more complex things with your custom content (especially when it comes to scripting).
Ramsey: The plan is for the game to sync the UGC between players to make your online UGC experience as seamless as possible.
Mass: There's no strict rules for choosing characters to be in Fraymakers, but we've made sure to pick from a variety of Indie tiles from old to new that bring both unique gameplay while also representing their source material.
Ramsey: We're just a group of people with a strong passion for this type of game design! When we got to talking about what was next, it was only natural that we'd be led in this direction.
Cleod9: Shaders are one of the harder aspects of development that were somewhat unexpected since we didn't initially plan for them (i wrote my first custom shader code only 2 years ago!) In case you don't know what shaders are, they are special bits of code designed to run on your graphics card to create special effects. Some examples of this for us are palette swaps, shadow, hue/saturation/brightness filters, CommanderVideo's rainbow trail, and things like those. So we've learned a lot since starting this project!
Ramsey: Yes!
Ramsey: It's on the table, but we need to evaluate whether or not it's worth it. It's a very tall order in terms of how much art time it requires, and our immediate priorities are on the content for 1.0.
Max: We're open to including a wide range of games! We're going to be looking at games specifically in the indie space, though.
Max: Assuming I'm understanding the question correctly – we don't generally expect stages to be limited by music. All of our musicians are super talented and some of the most experienced people out there at video game music covers, so we're confident they'd be able to create some amazing stuff regardless of the source material.
Ramsey: It's definitely possible, just depends on how well the game does and if there's demand. 50 assists is already quite a lot LOL so it's something we'd have to seriously consider before moving forward on.
Ramsey: Similar to the above question, it's not out of the realm of possibility. Just something we'll have to think about considering how high the amount of assists currently is.
Cleod9: I'd say one of the hardest parts of making a game is fixing bugs. Some bugs can be extremely difficult to diagnose and take hours to fix yet only require a simple one line change of code. Luckily the debugging tools provided by Haxe (our coding language of choice) are pretty versatile and help us pinpoint most issues rather quickly.
Cleod9: Yes, we'll be adding the ability to host matches with your own settings that people can join.
Cleod9: The sky's the limit! We don't plan to enforce any maximum limit on custom content gimmicks.
Ramsey: We're going to keep our exact plans on the down low for now, but we're looking at doing reveals of some sort leading up to the Tester Build and Early Access!
Max: Assuming you mean the tester build – that's still something we're working on! It'll be before Early Access comes out, though, which is slated for early 2022.
Ramsey: The answer is a bit of both! All of our characters so far bring something unique to the table, while still being very well loved indie favorites!
Max: It's hard to say for now, but if the game does well enough and there's demand for more content, we'd love to continue working on Fraymakers post-release!
Ramsey: We'll be hand choosing depending on which character is the most appropriate based on some behind the scenes factors!
Ramsey: Thank you for not expecting specifics haha. Simply put the answer is…we're talking about the possibility! We're really excited to be able to dive into additional modes when the time comes – for now we're focusing on our Early Access offerings
Ramsey: We'll have a few different ways to interact with UGC online that we'll get into when we get closer to delivering (including Fraybets!) – and we'll save that pastebin and sort through it! Thanks for delivering your concerns, we'll be sure to take them into consideration.
Ramsey: Our goal with them all to have unique functionality, and for balance we want all of the assists to be viable choices depending on the scenario/matchup.
Max: We're not planning on posting the full results of the content survey, but we might be revealing more data for specific pieces of content if/when we reveal it later on!
Mass: You can have any character of your choice for the Custom Character Suite and Custom Assist rewards.
Ramsey: If the game does very well we'd love to expand the character roster to some degree! Assists are a possibility, there's just already so many that we'd have to be a little more careful (and see if that's even something people would be interested in).
Cleod9: No solid plans on this at this time but it's not off the table!
Ramsey: We aren't going to be confirming any individual indie's chance of inclusion – but we see all of the fans' requests and are taking it into account!
Max: We're not gonna comment on stuff like that, at least for the time being. 🙂
Ramsey: There were a few surprises, but I can't go into specifics about it right now, sorry! ):
Cleod9: Yes, there will be a music track customization system in place for choosing what tracks play on each stage. The details aren't completely fleshed out yet, but we are planning on it.
Cleod9: Perhaps someday we'll add more tracks, we'll see! Either way we'll make sure you're able to mix things up with customization settings.
Cleod9: To start we're planning on 3 tracks per stage, each one being covers that are created separately by Super Soul Bros, FamilyJules, and OCRemix (and thank you for being a fan!)
Cleod9: We're not finished yet with the design for how custom content will be presented, but you'll be able to see when it's ready!
Max: We don't have any plans for this at the moment, but we're certainly not ruling out the possibility for future stages!
Max: We don't have an estimate as of yet (we'll let you know more as we nail things down!) but yes, you'll be able to stream the tester build!
Max: Our soundtrack will have a small component of original stuff (the obvious example being the Fraymakers theme), but will largely consist of covers of indie game music by 3 different artists in different styles. We're not planning on using direct rips of any music at the moment.
Cleod9: Yes! Custom content can contain code for custom game modes in addition to music.
Cleod9: Definitely, we'd love to return to Super Smash Con and other conventions in the future to showcase the game and have official tournament brackets if possible.
Max: We can't commit to something like this for now – we're focusing on finishing the game first! If the game does well enough and there's enough demand, we'd love to continue developing content for Fraymakers post-release.
Max: Our plan is for early access to feature the following content (at minimum) at launch: – 4 Characters – 5 Stages – 20 Assists – Rollback Online – FrayTools
Max: Can't go into specifics for potential future content like this – sorry!
Ramsey: Thanks to you all funding the Kickstarter to the level it hit, we're guaranteeing at least one post 1.0 DLC character! Passed that, it depends on how well the game does and the demand for more content.
Mass: Both the SSF2 Team and Team Fray are separate developing teams, with past SSF2 developers working solely on Fraymakers. There's a couple of us working on both SSF2 and Fraymakers as well.
Ramsey: I will say there weren't many anomalies 🤔 can't really get into the results for now!
Cleod9: Generally, removal of content for copyright reasons will be handled at the discretion of copyright owners. I'd hope this wouldn't happen too often, but if it's requested that content be removed by copyright owners, we're obligated to comply.
Sirto: Yes it is! We'll need to order Max some hand braces after all this!
Mass: Skullgirls was a big influence for me animation-wise. There's a ton of impact and character packed into their animations, and they're very conservative with their sketched frame counts. Smears, multiples and breaking the body to achieve impact can also be found in their work. Over the course of my time working on Fraymakers and looking at Mariel Cartwright's GDC talks, I've learned to improve my keyframing, and to only add as many frames as I need to to convey the impact and fluidity of an attack.
Cleod9: We're not certain yet, but we'll be looking into the requirements when we're further along in Switch development.
Cleod9: We haven't confirmed yet if testers will get their own dedicated tags but we'll consider it! And since my first answer wasn't too exciting I'll reply to the rest: FrayTools will be free software with no catch! We'd love to see you use the tool for other engines.
Cleod9: We plan to support as many gamepads as possible! Currently we support most major brands, although note that in some cases special drivers may be needed (such is the case with the official GameCube adapter right now which we are looking into)
Cleod9: We plan to have matchmaking capabilities in addition to a system that allows you to host games others can join with custom match settings.
Ramsey: We're definitely interested in building out our single player mode offerings – we won't know the exact form that will take while we're doing our best to focus on Early Access content though.
Ramsey: Yes, absolutely!
Ramsey: Surely there will be some upper limit, but for the most part it'll be designed to be flexible in that way!
Ramsey: Choose one from soon to be 50 unique assist characters on the character select screen. Then, you charge a meter based on how much damage you deal to the opponent, and once the bar is full your assist is fully charged! Press the assist button to unleash the assist and wreak havoc on your enemy! Every assist functions uniquely.
Cleod9: We'll definitely be adding music customization capabilities that let you determine what songs you want to hear, though we're not sure yet how we'll be handling custom tracks on official stages.
Ramsey: We can't answer any specifics about the roster, sorry!
Ramsey: I'd definitely say the last part is the most accurate! Fraymakers somehow manages to feel both familiar and fresh. I can't wait for you guys to get it into your hands!
Ramsey: It's a surprisingly complicated feature, so we're not 100% sure yet whether or not we'll have the ability to make custom colors. You'll absolutely be able to make your own custom colors for your UGC characters!
Max: We will have items in some form! We're not revealing details past that, though.
Max: Super well! We're still feeling confident about hitting our established goals.
Sirto: The Fraytools program will be available at the same time we launch Fraymakers. It will be included free with your copy of the game.
Sirto: At this time, we're investigating supporting the official Nintendo GC adapter. Since it doesn't have official windows drivers I cannot promise it will be supported yet. However, we do support the Mayflash GC adapter!
Mass: Both! Generally we look to the characters' abilities for moveset inspiration. We also look for any gameplay mechanics that both translate well into this type of environment and best represents their source material. For some of the more original moves, we tend to base it on their personalities and what feels natural for them to be doing, along with what makes sense in the context of their moveset.
Ramsey: Remind me to get this for you closer to Early Access coming out – we're still working on formalizing things like that. I don't want to say anything too early and misdirect the art community.
Ramsey: Something to consider for the future! We're going to be prioritizing Early Access promises first and foremost.
Max: We're pretty flexible with our definition of indie – I'd say even more popular/mainstream indie characters would still count! As long as they're made by an independent company, they're fair game.
Max: For characters and assists, we used an algorithm to group different wording for the same character, then passed over them by hand to correct for any errors and ensure accurate results. Extra comments are read individually – we're still taking our time to go through them since the response to the survey was so incredible, but we're making sure to read them all! Some cool ideas have already come up that we've made note of for the future.
Cleod9: Yes, modifying the AI for custom characters will be possible through scripting. We'll go into more detail about how this works as we get closer to release!
Ramsey: It's always very scary to be honest, because you just want more than anything for it to go well. And you want to impress the devs! Fortunately every developer in the indie community is a big sweety pie. They're so approachable and easy to work with 🙂
Max: Luckily, we were able to communicate with the indie devs who owned content featured in our Kickstarter in English! Can't comment on future content specifically, but we'd be contracting translators as needed.
Max: We don't want to go into too many details about private stuff generally, but since they've talked about it a bit publicly, I'd like to shout out the Rhythm Doctor devs again for being super cool to work with! They were someone we'd probably have reached out to anyway, so having them reach out during the Kickstarter and working with them on the assist design was amazing.
Mass: Experiment a lot with different techniques, and just have fun with it. I learned a lot from trying out a technique I heard of before or something I was thinking of, like maybe doing a smear or a multiple or sculpting a sprite's form before doing outlines, and seeing how it works. You learn a lot about what's working about it and what's not. And it gets pretty fun that way. Trying out new things and getting the hang of them has basically been my practice lol You should also look at what things you like about your favorite pieces of art. What about it that works so well (like the colors chosen, or their poses, or the composition) and how are they using it to great effect (like they like to use complimentary colors to draw attention to the most important part of the pixel art, or they frame their characters in a way that gives off a really cool mood/effect). And just take it as a journey. Pixel art and animation's been my passion for years and I've just been having fun with it all and trying new stuff along the way.
Sirto: Yeah, we plan on having a public wiki / website with Fraytools documentation and tutorials available. It's hard to promise details, but we're definitely very interested in finding ways to help you learn how to use Fraytools. We'll make sure the community is able to learn and create awesome content. I'm sure some of our community members will be producing their own tutorials as well.
Cleod9: Yes, this is actually an important feature so that's very insightful of you to ask! You'll be able to control the base scale of the character so that they render at the size you want relative to other characters. This way you don't have to worry about manually resizing sprites directly in FrayTools itself.
Cleod9: We plan to build out documentation with sample materials that beginners can follow along to be able to create custom content in FrayTools with no experience. If you can follow step by step instructions you'll be fine creating your first project, and can gradually pick up new skills as you go to make your content more advanced.
Max: All indie games are fair game to join the roster in some capacity! For our main roster, we wanna make sure that we have a good concept for a fun, unique moveset.
Max: You will NOT make me play favorites!!!! If a game is features in Fraymakers you can be pretty sure that we like it a lot though LOL
Cleod9: Thank you so much! We're glad you like what you see so far 🙂
Mass: Personally, it's character polishing. I love adding little details, touches and references to the characters once they're almost all completed. It all helps to make the characters feel closer to their source material, like they've just jumped out of their games.
Ramsey: Truthfully they've all been extremely fun to develop, but a standout for me personally has been Welltaro. When Max proposed the initial concept of a projectile heavy fighter with an ammo meter and a vertical inclination I wasn't sure if it would work to be honest. However when concepts started getting drawn up and we began implementing the attacks and movements in the engine it came together so beautifully – the end result is a character that is extremely unique and intuitive to play. Can't wait for you guys to try him out~
Cleod9: So far so good! We're all staying healthy and safe, and firing on all cylinders since 2021 rolled around!
Cleod9: FrayTools is a standalone program that will be freely downloadable and accessed separately from Fraymakers. We went over a bit of how it's used in one of our Kickstarter updates: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mcleodgaming/fraymakers-the-infinitely-replayable-indie-platform-fighter/posts/3028934 We'll share more info as we get closer to releasing it!
Max: Our goal for the cast to be as balanced as possible – especially considering our roster size, we want to make sure that all of our characters are viable. To some degree, certain characters being a little better than others is fairly likely, but we don't want any character choice to feel like it's massively inhibiting your chances to win.
Cleod9: We're not sure yet! I'm certain the community will be able to hash out the standards, but we may come up with some default settings that work as a starting point to what we anticipate being commonly used in competitive matches.
Cleod9: Of course! We're actually very excited to see what our players create and share online.
Sirto: To be honest, I didn't think it would be this much. At this point we've gotten this far, so yeah, I think we'll make it 🙂
Ramsey: We haven't decided one way or the other on this quite yet, as there are some engineering and design challenges to consider and overcome. It's definitely on our minds though!
Sirto: Up to 4 players can play together at once in a match. We can't commit to anything past that at this time.
Cleod9: Frays will be made.
Max: While Octodad is definitely easier to control in Fraymakers than he is in the original games, one of our main goals in his visual and moveset design has been to represent the unique motions possible through his original control scheme. Octodad's movements and attacks take full advantage of his flailing stretchy limbs, giving him a distinctive feel that we think is properly reminiscent of his source material.
Mass: Our lips are sealed. 🙂
Ramsey: If the design of the character calls for it, it isn't out of the realm of possibility! Fishbunjin's down special is the really insane universe destroying wind-up punch, if you haven't tried it out in Slap City give it a go, it truly is something to behold LOL
Cleod9: It's too soon to share details, but we're regularly working towards locking down what future characters and assists will be added to the game.
Sirto: You can use sprites generated in your tool of choice. Fraytools will allow you to import these frames, then you'll be able to animate and script a character
Sirto: We haven't officially announced if we'll be supporting cross play at this time
Cleod9: We'd welcome a competitive scene with open arms, and user-created content is something very central to Fraymakers (it's even ingrained in the name itself!)
Mass: There was a lot of card art to go off of to help fill out Watcher's moveset and basic motions, so we could just translate those poses to what makes the most sense contextually. We also focused on representing Watcher's unique mechanic in the form of her Divine Stances.
Ramsey: Without going into too much detail… both 😉
Cleod9: Time dilation and slow-mo at an individual object level is something we're still experimenting with to see how it affects custom content. We'll see!
Cleod9: We've had quite a few discussions internally about these kinds of things! We're not sure the extent to which we'll take it, but there will definitely be features geared towards competitive players that custom content can also benefit from.
Max: Bearing in mind that this is all subject to change: – edgecancelling: yes – DACUS: no – Moonwalking: not at the moment, but this is being considered – Other techniques: you'll have to wait and see! Lots of these are character specific, though.
Cleod9: Fraymakers is written in the Haxe programming language, while FrayTools is written in TypeScript.
Ramsey: To greatly oversimplify – we look for three things. Will they bring something unique to the table in terms of gameplay and visuals, is it a character that fans will be interested in, and is the character something that we ourselves as developers are interested in developing!
Ramsey: It's a possibility for the future! For now we're focusing on our promised offerings for Early Access and 1.0!
Ramsey: Characters that fulfill the hopes and dreams of our community!
Cleod9: We're not certain yet how far we'll allow access and modifications to official menus through custom content, but you'll certainly have the ability to programmatically use some existing menus to coordinate your custom content (such as the character select screen if you wanted to make a custom mode that needs it)
Cleod9: We can't go into details on if other Flash character representation will be added for certain, but we are definitely considering Flash content overall as indie game representation suitable for Fraymakers.
Ramsey: Yeah I have, I never would have considered a 1 v 1 bullet hell battler. It's so stylish too!
Ramsey: We're definitely open to the possibility – can't say much more than that about it!
Cleod9: As you could probably tell we could not LOL
Cleod9: Right now we don't plan to use the original master recordings from the games represented since our OST is geared towards covers, but we'll see!
Cleod9: Currently we're using a scripting language called hscript to code custom content (a subset of the Haxe language), but this may be subject to change in the future.
Ramsey: That's correct! The shield currently does not shrink or break at all. Your main options to combat it are grabbing or crossing them up by getting to the unprotected side and attacking.
Ramsey: Can't comment on the chances for any one specific character, sorry!
Ramsey: Has just about as much of a chance as anything else! We're going to spend some time hashing out what the specific responsibilities of our three announcers are before thinking about including more, but open to the possibility.
Cleod9: We're still working on determining the best distribution method for content created in FrayTools, so we'll see!
Cleod9: Our goal is to allow the Golden skins to carry over to each copy of the game you own, but we're still in the process of determining if we can do this on Switch.
Ramsey: This question is hurting my brain a bit… LOL. If I understand correctly, we're not going to be demoting any playable characters to assist-only ever. You'll be able to pick any playable character as an assist though! And there is the possibility for an assist character to be promoted to playable, but we don't have any plans for that either
Max: Our goal is to use our tester and early access periods to get the game's balance into a fairly stable state through regular updates (don't have an exact frequency right now, but we plan to do them pretty often). Past that, we'd still be open to making adjustments as needed, but with less frequency than during early access.
Max: While it's not gonna be 1 to 1 or anything, one of our main design goals is for each character to feel very representative of their source material. Obviously some adjustments need to be made as a character moves into a different genre, but making them feel like themselves is among our top priorities.
Ramsey: We definitely have open spots that we're considering (as of the kickstarter, 4 character and 30 assist spots opened up!). As for if any of them have been filled yet, gonna be tight-lipped about that. I will say exciting stuff is happening that we can't wait to share with you!
Ramsey: We haven't decided yet – since it's a backer reward it might feel a little bad for those who backed specifically for that reward to find out that we opened that up to the public, but we'll see.
Cleod9: I never would have guessed that from your username lol. But lots of characters have tails, so I imagine at least one more will appear in some form when you consider we have 30+ more assists to reveal in addition to the other playable characters!
Cleod9: Lots, and it's quite fulfilling! It's nice not having to hold back on our dream project, and it's all thanks to the support from you all! ❤️
Ramsey: None of them were particularly difficult due to the flexible nature of our sprite style, though I will note that the Watcher being the most detail dense is a bit of a time sink. It's worth it for that stunning end result though!
Ramsey: Yes! We don't currently have any plans for that, but we aren't opposed to the consideration.
Cleod9: Yes! We plan to provide documentation and sample materials that you will be able to use to hit the ground running.
Ramsey: Thanks! The well wishes from the community are a huge driving force behind our motivation to deliver the best game possible for you all, so we really appreciate it!
Ramsey: It will be in his moveset in some capacity! You'll learn more about his specific implementation when we get closer to revealing the full character.
Cleod9: A little over two years (initial design/production started in late 2018)
Cleod9: We don't have plans to publicly release official game content sprites at this time.
Cleod9: We're basically going to port every feature that we can, though note that rollback poses a big technical challenge for the hardware that will require more testing before we can say for sure.
Cleod9: Since Fraymakers is a platform fighter, there are going to be some similarities by nature, but we've taken a few steps to differentiate ourselves already such as our assist mechanic, cancellable air dashes, and directional shield (among many other changes) that already change up the formula quite a bit.
Ramsey: We don't currently have any plans for an interconnected story mode exactly. And we'll consider the possibility for robust photo mode tools 🙂
Cleod9: Yes we're planning to create documentation and sample materials that you'll be able to use to learn how FrayTools works.
Ramsey: Really that it's an indie lover's dream! It's not only a huge crossover of so many beloved indie characters, but filled to the brim with fast paced fighting game action! Not to mention the extremely powerful sister program FrayTools – this game checks a lot of boxes!
Ramsey: We don't have plans for footstools at this juncture.
Cleod9: We started the initial concept in late 2018, so a little over two years!
Cleod9: We aren't able to disclose every detail just yet, but if we're talking technical terms here Fraymakers exposes an API that your custom code will be able to use to interact with the engine directly.
Ramsey: Our current concrete plan for the release of Early Access is March 2022. Beyond that, no concrete details have been shared at this point.
Max: The most obvious answers would be some of our bigger features, like the assist system and the distribution of robust UGC tools. On top of those, we also have a unique blend of mechanics (some new, some familiar), and we think the interplay of those mechanics has made something truly unique. Fraymakers feels very satisfying and deep to play while focusing on being approachable for players of all levels.
Ramsey: It's not likely, but we're going to do everything we can to try and make the Fraymakers experience as rich as possible on the Switch version. When we get closer to the Switch release we'll be sure to be transparent regarding any differences.
Ramsey: Can't speak to the possibility of those acquisitions – only that we're very open to any indie's inclusion!
Cleod9: FrayTools is written in TypeScript.
Ramsey: We don't have plans for a story mode comparable to something like Subspace at this time.
Max: Our goal is to keep the characters mostly in-line with each other balance-wise while preserving what makes each of them unique. Considering our roster size, it's important to us that every character both brings something new to the table and is a viable pick for players of all levels. We design our characters from the ground up with both strengths and (crucially) weaknesses in mind, which we think ensures that the interactions between them will stay interesting and prevents the cast from becoming homogenized.
Cleod9: Perhaps! We haven't decided yet what else we want to do with the Insiders newsletter besides big MG announcements. But we've also set up a secondary newsletter specifically for Fraymakers that may be used from time to time at this page: https://next.mcleodgaming.com/
Cleod9: We've focused on speeding up the process of things that would normally be tedious with other tools (such as our automatic hurtbox generation, bulk sprite importing, multi-frame editing, etc.). When it comes to getting content into Fraymakers and tweaking basic physics, it will not require a lot of technical knowledge.
Cleod9: Not a bad idea, we'll look into it!
Cleod9: I'd say "time" is the biggest obstacle, simply because when you have as many indie contacts as we do at this point and the time it takes to get everything together, it really puts a lot of strain on our resources having a small team. Fortunately every studio we've worked with so far has been an absolute pleasure in our interactions with them, so all the effort we put towards acquisitions has been worth it.
Ramsey: What a good question!! Honestly, every step of the way has been a perfect mix of exciting and soooo scary! Especially before we went public, there's this feeling of… like, is it good enough? Will people like it? It's interesting to have this very deep visceral belief in your project but not knowing if when it's public, people will share the sentiment. So when the Kickstarter came out after 2 straight years of hard work, ups and downs, for the public to give us such an explosive reception meant the world to the team. Thank you so much for supporting us through the project – all we want is to create the best indie crossover platfighter experience possible!
Ramsey: Can't speak to any specifics about items right now, but we love seeing everyone's suggestions for ideas!
Ramsey: Such a kind comment! We ensure all of our contractors (including animators!) are paid what they deserve, they're all so talented and the project wouldn't be where it is without them.
Ramsey: Open to the possibility!
Ramsey: If they're an indie, they all have a chance of showing up!
Cleod9: Yes, we've confirmed hazards will be a thing and will be toggleable.
Ramsey: Goku
Cleod9: Yes, so far we've only confirmed a target breaking mode but we may consider more.
Ramsey: Assists will be togglable for sure! Though just because they're togglable doesn't mean they aren't a part of core gameplay – we just believe you should be able to play Fraymakers how you want!
Cleod9: We've estimated it will take about 2 years after Early Access is released to finish the full game, though this is subject to change.
Ramsey: There isn't any one singular reason – we have to believe the character brings something unique to the table in terms of gameplay first and foremost, so if a company would like their character in or we actively seek out a character we consider the first point before moving forward 🙂
Ramsey: We plan to include a full suite of features for training mode – we don't have specifics for you yet but please look forward to it! If you guys have any specific ideas feel free to let us know as well
Max: We can't really go into non-confirmed content questions, so I can't answer this – sorry!
Cleod9: Nintendo Switch is confirmed! We're not certain about other consoles yet but may consider more after everything else is shipped.
Cleod9: We don't have a specific date yet for testers (before Early Access of course), but don't worry, there won't be any restrictions on your ability to show footage.
Ramsey: Don't want to get into any of the business dealings for privacy reasons, but all of the indie devs we've interfaced with have been truly incredible!
Max: Our goal with our first characters was pretty much the same as our full cast: a cast full of characters that we think present unique playstyles while faithfully representing their source material! You can expect that same philosophy to be applied to future character additions as well.
Max: Basically, it's an in-game system that allows everyone to wager points on CPU battles (featuring user generated content) that the game generates! If you're looking for something like it so you can get an idea, check out https://www.saltybet.com/ – it has a pretty similar system using MUGEN.
Cleod9: Nothing set in stone – we had some ideas, but generally wanted to have the resources for an extra slot so by the time we did the backer content survey we'd be able to fulfill more of your requests 🙂
Ramsey: It starts by interfacing with the dev who owns the character and seeing if they're into making the idea into a reality! From there we find out what their expectations are for the terms of use of their IP.
Cleod9: You'll be able to map any input to any button on your controller that you'd like.
Cleod9: Not sure about DLC sales specifically, but generally speaking if we're doing well monetarily we'd definitely consider doing more trailers.
Ramsey: We hope to be able to represent indies all across the board!
Ramsey: Not opposed, but we would have to carefully consider beforehand depending on the character.
Cleod9: We're all huge fans of platform fighters as well as indie games, so of course it was inevitable for us to want to put the two ideas together!
Ramsey: Currently shields don't crack or break, but we aren't afraid of making large design updates to our mechanisms if we think it improves the gameplay. This is something we'll be looking into further during the Tester Build phase of development!
Cleod9: We don't have the ability to go in-depth just yet, single player content is something we're still in the process of planning. One thing for certain though is that anybody can create their own single player content with FrayTools, so we're hoping that over time a never ending sea of single player modes are added by the community.
Ramsey: Those were the last stretch goals we had planned, believe it or not! We were so blown away that we got that far!
Ramsey: That all depends on how successful the game is, and if there is enough fan demand!
Ramsey: Assuming you're talking about UGC – ultimately to some degree it's up to the community. We aren't planning to do a ton of balance policing of UGC content officially, but if there's a fan initiative to organize something like that when the time comes we'd love to signal boost it!
Max: Great question! We're still tuning the specifics here, including whether we want target balanced matches in some way. I can say we're definitely going to have some sort of way for content to be filtered before it can show up in Fraybets.
Ramsey: It's sooooo so hard to choose, but I think Aine is one of my favorites. It's the most frame heavy assist so far (I think?) and it leads into such fun combos.
Cleod9: It's more like a continuation of the same fun! Platform fighters are our element, so it feels right at home developing one.
Max: Our plan is to heavily iterate on character balance during the tester and early access periods, with the goal of getting balance in a stable state through data and player feedback. We aim to reach a point where balance updates don't need to be as frequent, though we'd still be willing to step in if the situation requires it.
Cleod9: We plan to do a couple more during development at different times so it's more convenient for other time zones!
Ramsey: Can't make me choose between Rivals and Slap City, man! Absa and Goddess of Explosions mains here!
Ramsey: Definitely interested in the idea of updating the game with extra palettes. As far as premium costumes go, it's something we're considering, but very carefully. It's a tall order as far as art resources go, and we're doing our best to focus all of our art initiatives into delivering the promised playable content first and foremost.
Max: A few reasons! We thought her stance mechanic would translate extremely well to a platform fighter and bring something totally new but still reasonably intuitive. We also liked her staff as a weapon type, and there were a lot of cards in her lineup that we felt translated very nicely into her moveset.
Max: We haven't locked this in quite yet – you'll have to wait and see!
Cleod9: It took quite a while to find something we found felt so natural to us, but it just came down to what we felt best represented what the game was all about in its name!
Cleod9: Early Access is currently estimated to span about 2 years before the full game is implemented, though this might change down the line.
Cleod9: If you mean communication updates, we'll generally try to post something regularly, such as how we did our Backer Content Survey last month and now this Q&A. Though if you're talking about updates for the game itself after Early Access is out we don't have a set schedule planned yet.
Ramsey: If it's a character we feel has the chance for unique gameplay, and it's something the fans (and ourselves as devs) are interested in, we consider it! And we're definitely interested in adding new modes for you all to enjoy, can't get into the details at this point yet.
Ramsey: We're definitely open to the consideration!
Cleod9: At least 2 will be revealed through animated trailer announcements since we hit some of our trailer stretch goals thanks to you all! As for the rest, we'll see!
Cleod9: As gamers ourselves we understand that all too well. For us, development of Fraymakers simply would not be possible on a reasonable timeline without the generous support from you all (thank you so much!). It's a shame when a rushed or unfinished title is released, and this can happen for many reasons. But that's part of why we chose to go for an Early Access model designed to fund the full product through Kickstarter. This way we can release the game sooner than we could otherwise with funds to last the full development, and also have access to valuable feedback from our community early on.
Ramsey: We'll get into more specifics about the way we're implementing Fishbun from Slap City to Fraymakers at a later date.
Cleod9: Yes you can create both playable characters and assists with FrayTools!
Cleod9: As much as we can! Templates, samples, and documentation to get you off the ground quickly are things we are planning for the FrayTools ecosystem.
Ramsey: As we work on the already announced modes and content for Early Access through 1.0, we're constantly brainstorming new content and modes for your enjoyment! If you guys have any ideas be sure to post them (and remember, you'll be able to make modes through FrayTools as well!).
Ramsey: You'll just have to wait and find out :3
Cleod9: We're not certain yet, but we're planning to look into what delivery methods for custom content on Switch would be feasible while also still complying with policies. A QR code is a neat idea, although I'm not sure it'd be able to hold enough data to represent a character or stage. We can certainly look into utilizing QR codes in other ways, though!
Cleod9: We're planning to make sure it's plenty beginner friendly by providing documentation and samples that you can follow to make your first custom content by following basic instructions.
Ramsey: We can't confirm the specifics on this quite yet, but we definitely plan to implement robust tools which will greatly expand the training mode possibilities! If you have any ideas feel free to let us know.
Max: This is a pretty tough question because really, each member of our cast so far has presented unique challenges! It's pretty hard to directly compare something like adapting cards for the Watchers moveset and coming up with new motions based on Octodad's unique physique. That said, I can tell you that Orcane and Fishbunjin were easier for obvious reasons lol
Ramsey: They're all my children!!! You couldn't possibly make me choose ;-;
Ramsey: I think in most cases it starts with a character that we feel has the possibility for some type of unique functionality, and hashing out the specifics of what the character would do as an assist. Then concepting and trying it out in game with sketches, then if we like the direction we refine and finalize!
Cleod9: Yes! CPUs will have a variety of customizable behaviors you can toggle on and off such as the ones you listed. We'll be able to go into more detail at a later date!
Sirto: https://www.bluebunny.com/flavor/chocopolitan
Ramsey: We'd love to, but it depends on how well the game does and if there's enough fan demand for it!
Cleod9: Of course! Custom content is a major aspect of the Fraymakers ecosystem, so it would be a shame to not allow you to share that content online!
Cleod9: Custom characters will be available to play with and against online, however we can't confirm at this time whether or not this will be supported on Switch.
Cleod9: No way, we'd love for you to spread the word about Fraymakers and support us that way, but any content you make in FrayTools will not cost you a dime in royalties.
Ramsey: Can't go into depth about any potential character acquisitions in the works!
Ramsey: Not at this point! Maybe sometime in the future if it correlates with a new character 🙂
Max: Generally speaking not really, though we would want to make sure we have a way to adapt the character faithfully while still fitting into Fraymakers.
Cleod9: With how much we raised, without a doubt! We're also very meticulous about managing our budget, and we've got the financials planned out all the way through the rest of development.
Cleod9: Stages will vary in size for sure – you'll have to wait and see!
Cleod9: At this time we haven't confirmed whether or not certain characters will have new or existing voice clips introduced from, but we'll see!
Cleod9: The first tester build will have something close to what the Early Access release will contain (online mode, up to 4 characters / 5 stages / 20 assists, FrayTools support). There may be some placeholder content in place but the goal is to have nearly everything planned for Early Access ready to go by the time we open up testing.
Cleod9: No date set in stone yet! But it will start some time in the months leading up to our March 2022 Early Access for sure.
Ramsey: Our only revealed casual mode so far is Match Modifiers, but trust me when I say we definitely intend to populate the game with fun modes! It's more of a matter of when – right now we're doing our best to prioritize the promises for Early Access.
Cleod9: We've already talked about the others a bunch, so I'll go with your latter question – if you want to make a platform fighter, get your feet wet with FrayTools! Creating content for Fraymakers will be a great way to learn the basics of platform fighting game development without having to invest as much time into the nitty gritty stuff like how to implement a physics system and how to compile all of your art assets into a playable fighter. Using the documentation and samples we put out will help familiarize you with concepts that translate to game development as a whole, and hopefully one day you can take those skills with you to your own projects!
Ramsey: We've only really confirmed that there will be single player modes, but we haven't gotten into the nitty gritty publicly yet. We've confirmed a "target test" style mode, but beyond that you'll have to wait and see!
Ramsey: The better question is, how will you?? We don't plan on policing the balance of UGC, though we plan to have ways for the community to tag specific UGC (and we may do a bit of dev-seal-of-approval types of stuff), but I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves here.
Ramsey: We don't plan on having a story mode at this point. Most other single player modes are up for discussion, but we're primarily focusing on our promises for Early Access before we get too far into pre-planning more single player content.
Ramsey: Can't go into any of the behind closed doors business dealings unfortunately – hope you understand!
Max: Can't go into too much detail, but for our Kickstarter characters we reached out to devs directly with some info about the game and our plans and went from there!
Max: Similar criteria for both: we're looking for characters that will let us bring something unique to the roster while faithfully representing their source material!
Ramsey: Like anything else, if you'd like to get better at art you have to put in the effort! 🙂 There are a ton of resources online to help get you jump started with your pixel art creation adventure. It's like a muscle, doing your best to make pixel art here and there will naturally make you improve! Going from 0 art experience to Fraymakers style art assets within a year is a tall order, but I believe if you dedicate yourself to improvement you'll get there!
Ramsey: We're interested in providing future content updates, but it depends on the success of the game and if there's fan demand. It's hard to forsee how new project would impact Fraymakers dlc, we'll have to cross that bridge when we get there.
Ramsey: Who hasn't played Goat Simulator by this point?? And any indie is fair game!
Cleod9: I certainly wouldn't hold it back!
Max: I wouldn't say a better or worse chance than others, but they're definitely in the running!
Ramsey: Yes! Super floofy, and they're also lil sweeties.
Ramsey: Reaching out through the McLeodGaming twitter is your best bet!
Cleod9: Bugs are unfortunately something that come along with any type of software development, and with every bug that gets fixed another bug gets left behind or introduced. We're hoping to have a more stable game this time since we're starting fresh from a new engine, but over the long term we plan to come up with more transparent processes for bug management so that we can prioritize issues that players run into.
Cleod9: We have to limit questions to one per person, sorry! But to answer the first, if the game is successful enough we'd love to continue rolling out updates after the game is done.
Max: This varies a lot depending on the source game! We value iconic environments and stage diversity within our own lineup, and we try to pick stages that check both of those boxes. Past that, our stages are designed to have options for hazards on and hazards off, so we'll want to make sure we can end up with something fun for both options.
Max: This is a pretty huge question! Loosely speaking, we mapped out our core concepts for the project, prototyped them, created a more polished playable slice of the game, then built everything out to show during the Kickstarter campaign. Throughout the entire process, we were also working on building out our roster of characters and assists!
Cleod9: You know it 😎
Ramsey: At the forefront and to greatly oversimplify – we want the character to bring something unique to the table, and have it be someone who fans and ourselves are interested in bringing to life in Fraymakers!
Cleod9: Translations aren't a short term priority for us but it's something we'll be looking into for the long term!
Ramsey: We're open to unreleased characters if it makes sense!
Cleod9: That's something we may look into later down the road!
Cleod9: Good question(s)! (I'll stick with one here) There's no hard and fast formula with this, and I think ultimately almost any assist could be playable and vice-versa. But our main goal with assists in general was to allow us to represent more characters that we wouldn't be able to otherwise if we stuck with having solely playable characters in Fraymakers, with the added bonus of adding a unique element to our gameplay.
Ramsey: Nope! Maybe… real life people? Idk if John Cena knocks on MGs front door and demands to be in Fraymakers idk if we have much choice in the matter.
Cleod9: Sure, that's one of the best part about having a customizable game, it's up to you both online and offline how you want to play!
Ramsey: Have you ever heard about Updog?
Mass: It's a very beautiful and atmospheric game.
Sirto: I know it can look pretty daunting, but the simple answer is to just "try it out". Look up basic tutorials in a game engine that's on the easier side to get started in, like Unity (https://learn.unity.com/). Once you understand the basics of the tools, come up with a basic idea of a game and try and implement it. Your first few ideas and games may seem bad to you, but we've all started in a similar position. Personally I've got an archive of old programs and games I've made over the years. The old ones are really really bad. However, they show how far I've come, up to working on Fraymakers.
Ramsey: If the game does well enough, we know we would like to support post launch content, but the form it would take is still up in the air
Cleod9: When it comes to custom community content, we'll have systems in place to allow you to explore the content creator by other players. More details will be revealed closer to release!
Cleod9: We'll be supporting anything the community puts together, though while the game is under Early Access development we'll be putting our priorities on completing the full game and may be limited in what we organize ourselves.
Ramsey: Too far out to say for sure.
Max: We don't have any plans for assists to become playable characters at the moment, but we're not ruling out the possibility either!
Cleod9: For Switch there will certainly be some controller customization options, though as to what extent we can't say for sure just yet! We'll be iterating on that when the time comes to make sure what we come up with is suitable for console.
Cleod9: Sure, we'll think about showcasing more technical aspects about the game at some point!
Max: We don't have a system quite like the Rushdown Revolt's. I'm guessing you're referring to the ability to cancel out of airdashes with any aerial in Fraymakers. While this can be massively rewarding, if your aerial fails to hit an opponent, you'll be sent into freefall and suffer a lot of landing lag. Using this mechanic thus has a high level or risk built in, which should prevent it from overuse. That said, we're still open to iterating on mechanics like this through our tester/early access periods if they still turn out to be too centralizing.
Cleod9: No plans for rewards or bounties right now, but incentives like that are something we can consider.
Cleod9: Trying to make me play favorites huh? Every fighter was fun to implement in their own unique way!
Max: Aside from being one of the most recognizable characters in Rivals, we felt like Orcane's mechanics translated really well into Fraymakers and his character design worked great for our artstyle! We also had some cool ideas for new moves he didn't have in Rivals (grabs/throws, etc). Plus he's cute!
Ramsey: Yakuza fan!!! What great taste. Can't speak to possible inclusions though!
Cleod9: We're open to the idea but don't have any plans locked in.
Cleod9: Right now we can confirm 3 tracks per stage performed by each of our three OST musicians. So that's at least 40 tracks minimum if you count the main theme.
Cleod9: We think it will be precisely how the game was envisioned, and change for the better of course! One of Fraymakers core design goals was that it needed to be a solid standalone game on its own, in addition to the ultimate customizable platform fighting experience. We hope meshing those worlds together makes the game more appealing to players of all types!
Ramsey: We're definitely making those considerations, but we're primarily focusing on our promised content for Early Access first.
Ramsey: We love Bugsnax! And yes there will be items, but we aren't going to be more specific than that for now.
Max: One of the main things we'd like out of our early access period is to develop a working relationship with the community that lets us improve and update the game over time! We hope that the steady support throughout this window will keep the community going strong. Post-1.0, we'd still love to continue to support the game as much as we're able to! (though to some degree this depends a bit on the demand and the game's reception)
Max: This is a pretty big topic! In super general terms, though, we want all of our content in Fraymakers to bring unique functionality/gameplay opportunities to the roster (we want your choices to feel meaningful!) while also representing their source material well.
Cleod9: We haven't confirmed much yet outside of targets and training, but we're definitely considering additional single player modes. We'll share more info when we're ready!
Cleod9: Prior to Kickstarter we did the reaching out ourselves (since the game was secret). But we do hear from other developers first sometimes now that we're known!
Ramsey: It was sort of this emergent type of gameplay that came about with the implementation of airdashes and one way shields, and it felt so right in game!
Max: Potentially, though I can't go into too much detail about potential future content. We try to pick characters we think would be good fits for the environment.
Max: Fraymakers has combos for sure, though we think that we have a system that allows combos to stay interactive and diverse. Our goal is to keep decisions interesting throughout as much of a combo as possible, rather than having too many automatic followups. This is something that will likely require adjustment and improvement over time, but we think we're aiming toward something pretty cool!
Max: We can't confirm/deconfirm future content for our roster quite yet, sorry!!
Cleod9: Absolutely! We'll create guides and samples that you can follow along step by step to be able to get content into the game without any coding experience.
Cleod9: We don't have all the online mode details drawn out yet, but basically we'll eventually have both match-making and game hosting abilities which will support custom content.
Cleod9: Not everything is planned out yet but we do plan on having multiple modes, including some geared for competitive players.
Ramsey: The intent more than anything is to promote indies from all parts of the popularity spectrum! From the smaller companies to the larger guys, all indies have a home with Fraymakers!
Ramsey: Cleod likes blue, Mass likes lime green, and Sirto, Max and I like purple!
Ramsey: Gonna answer that first one – we had a pool of characters we were loosely considering, but didn't want to do lock anything in before we had the means to develop any of them, or before we heard any of your feedback through the backer survey
Cleod9: Theoretically yes, custom content could be used competitively. But what is considered legal in the competitive world will be up to the community and isn't really in our control.
Cleod9: There's no hard rule on this, but generally we want to do what we can to represent the character as holistically as possible. We always aim to have some sort of base concept thought out based on a character's source material rather than simply adding a character and trying to make them work after the fact. Having an attack plan is important when it comes to design!
Cleod9: Matches containing more than 2 players online will be possible. Supporting rollback with more players will be tricky, but we'll make every attempt to support it in as many online mode scenarios as possible.
Ramsey: Hard to pinpoint exactly, but I will say you'll definitely be seeing full matches from people streaming the Tester Build. As for before then we're loosely considering streaming some matches at some point.
Ramsey: I can't get into the first one, so for the second question i'll say that there aren't really any steadfast rules. If we can imagine a unique functionality and are interested in the character alongside you guys, then it's always worth looking into!
Cleod9: For me in particular, it's been a very long journey. I started in middle-school writing text-based games in BASIC on my TI-83 Plus calculator, eventually moved on to Flash, then JavaScript for my professional career, and now we're using Haxe to develop Fraymakers. During this transition between technologies, working in Flash made things easier to comprehend since the animation process was much more intuitive than anything else I found at the time. Now that Flash has fallen out of fashion we expect FrayTools to fulfill that void. I think there are enough aspects to game development that are tedious and tough to pick up, so FrayTools is being designed around the very processes that I found made Flash a more efficient way to develop a 2D game like Fraymakers. This way we can spend more time designing and less time wrestling with our toolchain just to get some sprites onscreen.
Cleod9: FrayTools will be given to the testers at the same time as the tester build so that we can collect valuable feedback before Early Access is launched! Of course FrayTools will be released to everyone for free at the release of Early Access too.
Cleod9: Of course! We expect custom content to be especially appealing to casual players as well, since they allow much more control over the gameplay rules.
Ramsey: Sneaky… I like the cut of your jib. But nice try! Not gonna get me on this one haha
Ramsey: I'm a huge fan of rhythm games, so having a Rhythm Doctor assist is suuuuper exciting for me personally! Although it's hard to not be excited about literally every single series in a huge crossover like this!
Ramsey: We haven't confirmed or denied this yet simply because we're undecided. There are some design, engineering and logistical challenges to overcome with this feature specifically so we're holding off on committing. Though we're aware that it's a super highly requested feature!
Cleod9: Because we're all veterans from working on Super Smash Flash 2, the idea was sort of out there for quite some time that we could create something new in the platform fighting space with our experience. While we didn't start Fraymakers development until late 2018, it was only a matter of time before we'd decide to pull the trigger on a new project.
Cleod9: We currently do have an input buffer in place that we're experimenting with, though it may be subject to change (no plans for a hold buffer though)
Ramsey: The airdash mechanic allows you to airdash in any direction. You can cancel the airdash with any aerial – if you land the attack you're free to act again, if you miss the attack you enter freefall until you land. Similarly if you airdash and don't input any aerial you'll enter freefall there as well.
Ramsey: Not getting into this anytime soon if ever, haha.
Ramsey: It's very much its own thing, but if we had to pick one it'd likely be SSF2 all things considered. It's such a unique game in so many ways that it's hard to make the direct comparison to any one other platform fighter though.
Ramsey: All indies are all over the table!
Cleod9: That's something we can definitely consider!
Ramsey: If the game does well enough and there's fan demand we'd love to look into the possibility of post launch DLC, representing as many indies as possible is our M.O.!
Ramsey: All indies are in contention for a spot – we can't dive into specifics beyond that.
Cleod9: We're not sure if we'll have 5 or more players yet for online or offline, but we'll be experimenting with it!
Cleod9: We plan to have some sort of player-sourced moderation features that help mitigate bad behavior in our ecosystem. We don't have it all planned out yet but we will make sure measures are in place to keep your gameplay experience as safe and friendly as possible.
Ramsey: We love all of the Rivals characters, but we thought Orcane's mechanic would fit well in Fraymakers' environment, thought his design would translate really well to the style and had some fun ideas for his throws among other things (get hype for his Super Attack 👀). Plus we really like the guy! Though I really feel like any Rivals character would fit well in the game.
Cleod9: Small wins, small goals, and constantly asking yourself questions! To keep myself motivated in the world of coding, rather than trying to focus on larger goals like "I'm going to make a platform fighting game", I started with questions like "How do i get a character sprite to show up on the screen?". "How do I move that sprite to a specific location?". "How do I move the sprite in response to user input?". "How do I simulate gravity?" etc. With books and the internet at my disposal, there was a never ending wealth of information I could use to gradually learn how to do these things. Over time all of these little steps added up, and it became easier to grasp these concepts without having to constantly research. If my motivation ever wanes, I try to find another small question to focus on to exploit my curiosity. It can be very satisfying to start the beginning of the day not knowing the answer to a question and by the end of the day you do. I feel this can be applied to just about anything in both the creative and technical world.
Ramsey: It entirely depends on how well the game does and if there's demand for it! We'd love to have to further expand Fraymakers beyond the already promised offerings.
Ramsey: I will say it took a looooot of pre-planning, and the first couple of pitches/acquisitions especially were extremely scary because their approval largely determined whether or not we were going to be able to make the project at all.
Ramsey: Not very many off of the top of my head, we don't really have many steadfast internal rules outside of greatly prioritizing indies.
Cleod9: At the end of the day health must always come first, but so far we are proceeding at a sustainable pace! If anything like stress concerns were to ever occur, we would be transparent with you all about what that means for Fraymakers' release timeline.
Ramsey: We're here to answer your questions in as timely a manner as humanly possible!
Cleod9: We're using rollback netcode for all of the game's official content online! Note that custom content has some technical challenges when it comes to rollback and may require delay-based netcode, but we'll be doing our best to give the best experience possible for all types of online play.
Ramsey: We'll do what we can to help it prosper and grow – but we don't want to have an iron grip over it. At least at this point, it feels as though it'll be largely up to the community to decide specifically what the competitive scene will look like. We'll perpetuate one to the best of our ability though!
Cleod9: We plan to use a system that lets you choose when you're ready, that way you can save your gold costume for characters that aren't released yet if you'd like.
Ramsey: We don't have a finite list like this with regards to Fraymakers content specifically – expect more details like this to come out as the game gets further into development.
Ramsey: First off, I'm really sorry about the bad experience you had with the other Kickstarter. We're good on our word though – you can expect the rollout of the rewards around the time that was designated below each reward tier.
Cleod9: Keyboard absolutely yes. Many other devices will be supported as well (with the ability to assign any action to any button you like), but we won't know the full list of supported devices until later on in development. So far major devices like the Xbox 360 controller, Mayflash Adapter, and official GC Controller Adapter (via vJoy) are supported.
Ramsey: Ledge uses ledge hogging with limited i-frames for ledge actions/drop to prevent stalling. We have all of the standard ledge actions: get up, roll up, jump up and ledge attack.
Cleod9: It's definitely a mixture of recognizability and what kinds of interesting layouts and hazards we can come up with. We want stages to be fun and not too repetitive when playing on all the different environments, while also familiar to players with an expectation of what platform fighting stages should look and feel like .
Ramsey: Assists is a huge one for many reasons but what appeals to me is how it influences matchups. You can strategically choose an assist to maybe cover a character's weakness, or bolster one of their strengths – maybe even to counterpick your opponent. That combined with all of our system wide differences which create unique gameplay scenarios (like one way shield + airdash creating the opportunity for crossups) makes the game stand out in a really fresh way.
Cleod9: We're not certain yet what features we'll be allowed to port to Switch yet, but we'll be doing our best to implement as much as we can.
Ramsey: We have quite a few game modes announced (check out the Kickstarter trailer and our KS updates for more info on those), but we have some more ideas that we're playing around with too!
Ramsey: Definitely a possibility – can't say more than that at this point.
Max: We're pretty flexible with what characters we consider indie – if the game was made by an independent company, they're generally fair game!
Cleod9: We're not sure exactly what shape custom content will be presented in yet, but we do plan to make it possible to explore custom content created by others within the game itself to some extent!
Max: Unique moveset potential is one of the primary factors we consider for new characters. If we think a character would have a unique moveset while also representing their source material well, they're probably a good fit!
Ramsey: Absolutely – that's one of the key areas we'll be looking at during the Tester period for example!
Max: We have a lot of mode ideas! We're super excited to show off some of them through Match Modifiers in the future.
Max: Our plan at the moment is for super attacks to be balanced! We're still playing around with the specifics of their functionality, though.
Ramsey: We'll have to dive into this one some other time, but for the most part development has been nice and smooth!
Ramsey: I love them all!! ❤️
Cleod9: Having a handicap setting of some sort is something we can look into!
Max: We're committed to supporting Fraymakers to the best of our ability for the duration of early access at the very least. We'd love to continue to support the game well after 1.0, though to some degree that's gonna depend on the reception and demand for more content post-launch.
Ramsey: We're mostly targeting the Tester Build (which Alpha will get his hands on for sure!) so if he'd like to show it off in some capacity that's absolutely welcome!
Cleod9: We're still in the planning process for how and when trailers will be released, but ideally we'd love to have something to show off as soon as we're possibly able!
Max: We're approaching this from multiple angles! We plan to have some pretty fleshed-out training mode options for Fraymakers and tutorials for Fraytools, so even people who haven't played platform fighters before have a good way to learn the ropes. Our controls options are highly customizable, allowing players to set them to whatever they find most comfortable. Mechanically speaking, our guiding principle is that complexity should tend to come more from different options available than overly precise inputs or functionality that's hard to understand. We want users to be able to pick up each character and figure out mostly how they work through play (though of course there will often be more below the surface).
Ramsey: We'd love to! I will say it depends on how successful the game is and if there's a demand.
Ramsey: None of them have presented any particularly difficult design challenges, though I will say the Watcher's design being as complex as it is makes her a bit more of an art ask than someone like say, CommanderVideo. The results speak for themselves though!
Cleod9: That's pretty far out to know for sure, but if the game does well enough we'll be sure to announce any plans we have on additional content beyond our stretch goal DLC.
Cleod9: Currently we're planning to develop both a match-making system and a match hosting system for users looking for both randomized games and running matches with their own rules.
Cleod9: Fraymakers and M.U.G.E.N. are a pretty good comparison! The major difference with Fraymakers is that it offers a full experience as a standalone game, while custom content is something meant to expand on that (as opposed to the entire game being centered around custom content like M.U.G.E.N.)
Max: Assuming I'm understanding the question correctly: we wanted to make sure each character and assist brought something unique! We mostly looked for characters that could provide that while representing their source material well. I think we ended up with a nice diverse lineup of character playstyles and assist functionality!
Cleod9: Whenever you guys mod him in 🙂
Ramsey: There weren't too many outstanding surprises, but there were a few! Can't get into the specifics though!
Cleod9: We don't plan to release the raw data but we may reveal bits of information over time about it!
Cleod9: Yes, Fraymakers has the advantage of having analog support, running in 60fps, and having a more robust list of supported devices. All of this will help contribute to stellar controller support.
Cleod9: Yup, we confirmed a few already actually – Backyard is planned to have a destructible fence on both sides in addition to random lawn objects that can be knocked around. And Stratostar will have springs embedded into the stage with its main platform raised (these are demonstrated on our Kickstarter page). There will be more hazards revealed in the future as well, all of which will be toggleable with our hazards switch.
Cleod9: I can only stick to one answer per person, so to answer your first: We're not certain yet how many of our features we'll be able to port to Switch for technical reasons, but we plan to implement as much as we can!
Max: We're largely looking for characters that came from indie companies, but aside from that pretty much anyone is fair game!
Cleod9: We're still working on what kinds of modes we'll build ourselves, but if we don't do it there's certainly nothing stopping the community from building that out as custom content!
Ramsey: Seeing as Tankman was added as an assist, I'd say it's not out of the realm of possibility! We're treating these instances on a case by case basis just like any other possible addition.
Cleod9: That's the plan! We'll be relying on testers to give both Fraymakers and FrayTools a spin so we can make improvements before they're released.
Cleod9: We can't confirm at this time, but it's something we're looking into!
Ramsey: We don't have any plans to include a story mode at the moment, though we might consider it later on.
Ramsey: I'll answer the first one – if we're interested in including their character in some form we reach out! From there it's a back and fourth conversation depending on the developer, could possibly get into the design or discuss their terms of use for the IP. More than anything, they've all been extremely friendly and great to work with!
Ramsey: I have a soft spot for all of the Bugsnax friends!!
Cleod9: So far we've confirmed there will be items and stage hazards of various sorts, but we haven't revealed the rest of our plans yet. Nothing is off the table!
Cleod9: Single player design is still in the works, but we'll be considering modes like that and more.
Ramsey: He actually doesn't have gills on his in game model for Slap City 👀 We felt that the gills would clutter the spritework, but it's true that he has gills features in some of his other appearances! We love your attention to detail Bedoop~ ❤️ And thanks for being such a pillar of our community!!
Max: Super generally, we aim for all of our content in Fraymakers to be implemented in a way that's unique and fun for players of all skill levels. We want to make sure each character we include maintains their identity from their source material and doesn't overlap too much with any of the other content.
Ramsey: We'd like to, but it depends on the reception of the game and if there's fan demand :3
Cleod9: Right now we're using a scripting language called hscript for coding custom content (a subset of the Haxe language), though this may subject to change.
Cleod9: Well, we need to finish the current game first 🙃 But we'll see!
Cleod9: Nothing set in stone yet in terms of collectibles, but we're considering it!
Cleod9: For now we're just planning on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Switch. When all of those are completed we may consider expanding to new platforms.
Ramsey: Nothing concrete to say about this yet, other than "Before Early Access" – but the Tester Build reward people will be the first to know!
Ramsey: Gonna address the first question – we have a very talented and passionate group of artists we work with, from stage art to game animation! The UI design is an iterative process like everything else – come up with an idea, try it out, if we hate it trash it and try something new – if we like it then polish it up!
Cleod9: Loading assets from other engines has some technical hurdles involved since movesets don't line up one to one between different games, but the plugin system in FrayTools could potentially be a place where anyone interested in that functionality could build out something like that (and base sizes could be tweaked with a multiplier).
Cleod9: Thanks, you too!
Max: Yes! Fraymakers features both spot dodges and rolls on the ground, as well as techs/tech rolls.
Ramsey: We plan to have lots of customizability across the game, from controls to the way you're able to play the game (like toggling the assists themselves) – we'll get into more specifics later on.
Cleod9: FrayTools supports layered sprites, motion tweens, frame labels, frame scripts, collision boxes, and more! If you wanted to make something like hats for your character, you could add a box that acts as an anchor point where you'd like hats to appear, and programmatically assign a hat graphic to it.
Ramsey: We want playing it to result in an air of excitement!
Ramsey: We haven't made a concrete decision about this feature due to some of the associated challenges, but we hear the community on this one – it's definitely a very highly requested feature!
Cleod9: We've been approached a few times since going public! It would be too much to get into here, but the Rhythm Doctor devs are an example of someone who reached out to us and we'll now have an assist from their game.
Cleod9: I can only answer one question here, but for the golden skins we will send information out on how to activate them via email at a later date, and you'll be able to save your decision for which character you want to apply it to when you're ready.
Cleod9: Right now it's too early to get into extensive detail, but know that we will have all sorts of resources at your disposal to learn how to create your character. For starters, we'll have step by step guides and documentation to demonstrate how to get your character up and running.
Max: I can't talk about what our future chars will be specifically yet, sorry!!
Cleod9: That's an interesting idea! I'm not sure what kinds of extra inputs like that we'll add, but we'll experiment with it! I can confirm now though that you can turn without triggering a run by holding the walk input when auto-dash is enabled!
Ramsey: We'll do what we can to assist with it and help it grow! We'll work with the community to develop plans over time
Cleod9: Check out the requirements on our Steam page! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1420350/Fraymakers/
Max: Unfortunately, we can't confirm specifically who we're interested in collabing with for future content at the moment. We'll reveal more stuff later on, though!
Cleod9: Full details are not set in stone yet, but to start off we'll be focusing on supporting custom characters, assists, stages, modes, and other settings. Customization of the official character/stage content may be limited to some degree, but it's up for consideration.
Cleod9: It's hard to say when we'll be ready to announce new characters, but sit tight for now!
Cleod9: For newcomers we plan to have a bunch of documentation and samples lined up that you'll be able to comb through and learn the ropes by following simple instructions.
Max: It's been stressful but surprisingly smooth! We looooove indie games and in our experience so far, indie devs are amazingly approachable and great to work with. Also developing platform fighter movesets is so dang fun!
Mass: His Hell palette has some pretty nice shoes.
Max: Thank you for participating in the backer Q&A 🙂
Mass: Both; some will be more situational than others but still do very well in those situations, while others are more general in use. It all depends on what your gameplan is and how your assist synergizes with your character. Try them all out and see what works best for you. And generally, we're aiming for all of them to be balanced for competitive play.
Ramsey: Nothing to share on that front yet!
Cleod9: We've got you covered with FrayBets! We briefly described how it works over on our Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mcleodgaming/fraymakers-the-infinitely-replayable-indie-platform-fighter
Max: There isn't really a super rigid rule – we normally scope out some design and look for characters that we are a good fit from there!
Max: Trans rights!!
Ramsey: We haven't decided yet on this particular feature because of some of the challenges associated with it, but we definitely see the community's desire for it!
Cleod9: Totally, you can make assists, stages, modes, and if you wanted you could indeed code a buddy that follows your player around!
Ramsey: We've revealed a "target test" like mode – other than that we're focusing primarily on the promises set forth by the Kickstarter campaign. We do have some ideas though!
Ramsey: We would love to do post release content, it depends on the popularity of the game and if yall have a hankerin' for it!
Max: Honestly, it was just a matter of reaching out to them directly and telling them about the project! Things have changed a bit since we've gone public, but largely indie devs are super cool and approachable.
Max: While generally we'd tend toward the most prominent character in a given game, I'd say that pretty much anything is on the table!
Max: We're planning on having extensive support for control customization – you should be able to assign pretty much anything to any button!
Ramsey: We're targeting indie characters for Fraymakers! So they're all fair game.
Cleod9: I think you nailed it with the latter! Since SSF2 and Fraymakers are both platform fighters, there are a lot of similarities to how we develop both games. But since Fraymakers is much more ambitious in scale, we've had to get a bit smarter and more efficient with our processes to be able to accomplish what we've done so far (FrayTools is a big example of one of those efficiencies!)
Cleod9: Assuming you mean working with other indies directly, some folks we've met in person at various public events (we've often met up with Dan at Super Smash Con!) but in general though this is our first time being in communications with most of the devs who so graciously allowed us to use their content in Fraymakers.
Ramsey: They were all mostly seamless from a design perspective – i'd say maybe the Watcher is on the more difficult side purely from the art production side due to the nature of her details and fabric movement, but we're super happy with her results so far!
Ramsey: We definitely intend for UGC content to be usable online in some form! We'll get into the specifics as the game gets further into development.
Ramsey: Yes you may!
Ramsey: Indubitably – depends on the success of the game and if there's fan demand.
Ramsey: Not confirmed explicitly, but not closed off from the possibility!
Ramsey: We don't plan to do any official DLC from smash flash
Ramsey: We have definitely considered the possibility! We're focusing on the already promised Early Access and 1.0 content, but we're really excited to explore the possibility of bosses.
Max: Unfortunately, we're not sharing much on that front from the time being!
Ramsey: It's something we're looking into. If we end up doing something like this, we'll be sure to let everyone know.
Max: Early access is currently slated for Early 2022. We don't have an exact date for the tester build yet, but it will come out before early access – we'll keep you in the loop as we nail down our plans.
Max: We were throwing around ideas for a while beforehand, but we estimate that development proper for Fraymakers started in late 2018, a little over 2 years before our Kickstarter.
Max: Most of the assists we've done so far are suitable for all styles of play, though we're open for some more casual-oriented ones potentially. As far as stages go, we're going to have both hazards on and hazards off versions for every stage, so hopefully they'll be usable by everyone!
Max: Development is going great! We're making steady progress and we're confident in our timelines. I will never choose one character, though – I love them all and if we liked one less than the others we'd probably do what we could to fix that LOL
Cleod9: That's a great question! Generally the process for choosing each character was very similar where we started with a base concept, developed a prototype for that concept, and eventually presented that concept to each indie we pitched to. We can't get very far without a base concept so that's one of the most important aspects to deciding what characters to invest time into. In order to come up with the base concept, we take into account other factors like fun, uniqueness, and source representation (not to mention picking characters from games we just enjoy!). Then as long as we're able to devise a solid foundation for a character, we simply commit to it and move forward. Of course there are so many characters out there to choose from, so at a certain point you just have to pick what we think is the best option!
Ramsey: No set timelines as of yet! When we're gearing up to show off some new content in the form of a trailer, you all will be the first to know!
Cleod9: It won't be very efficient to get into the weeds of this during the Q&A, but rest assured we'll have plenty of documentation and samples that explain how the process works when the time comes!
Ramsey: Yessssssssir! You'll have to wait to find out exactly which series those are though.
Max: Both are important, but generally we want the needle to tip a bit toward aggression. A better way of summarizing though is that we prefer to emphasize interaction between players, which is something that can result from aggro play and is sometimes discouraged by overly defensive tactics. We also don't want the game to devolve into both players charging forward and throwing out hitboxes over and over, though. The ideal balance would have players interacting with each other constantly, but not reaching that extreme where the interactions become less interesting.
Cleod9: For now all we can confirm is that online play for official game content in 1v1s will use rollback netcode. Custom content and matches with more than two players pose their own challenges for rollback, so we're looking into our options there.
Cleod9: If you're comfortable with SSF2's keyboard controls you can rest assured you'll feel right at home when playing on keyboard in Fraymakers!
Ramsey: To oversimplify, it just requires a conversation with the IP holder. Fortunately, the indie community is chock full of vibrant, easy to talk to developers! It truly is a wonderful community.
Ramsey: Thanks friend!! You too!
Max: We think we've established a few flagship features that set us apart (assists, our indie crossover cast, and a robust custom content tool to name a few). We've also worked to make sure the game's mechanics feel distinctive, both through new mechanics and incorporation of some old ones. We think you'll agree that Fraymakers feels like its own thing!
Max: poggers
Ramsey: It's not off the table! You'll notice we have some double series representatives in the form of character/assist, like the Watcher and the Silent!
Ramsey: I wouldn't say so, no. Those themes are very effective in those games for sure (some of my favorite music in all of video games), but the focus of our soundtrack on covers of existing songs from those games for use in stages. In a way you could consider those songs their themes since it represents their universe, however we aren't planning on making any unique music to represent the character.
Max: Each character can airdash in any direction. You can cancel out of your airdash with any aerial, but if your aerial doesn't hit an opponent you'll end up in freefall and get a bunch of landing lag. You can also use airdashes for wavedashing and associated techniques (wavelanding, etc).
Ramsey: Honestly all of the acquisitions were a bit of a surprise, we're so touched that these indie developers believed in our project enough to trust is with their IP! We're doing everything we can to honor them and represent their characters with the highest degree of quality possible.
Cleod9: We've announced there will be items actually! We can't confirm the specifics of how they will work yet, but stay tuned!
Cleod9: We certainly hope so!
Cleod9: For sure! We'll be planning out the specifics of how to do that in the future, but for starters we'll certainly plan to signal boost the content created by our community.
Ramsey: We'll likely pair the public confirmation of the identity of the additional characters with a more grand announcement of some kind (like the two animated character trailers that got funded!).
Ramsey: It's something we're very carefully considering – not 100% sure one way or the other due to some challenges.
Max: Thanks for this question! This is definitely a finer mechanics point that we'll be looking into later on, but we'll be looking into making it work as you'd expect and let your airdash input come out properly.
Cleod9: That tweet is actually a good example of how Fraymakers' sprite dimensions are aligned with some existing resolutions in the 2D fighting genre. While we don't have plans to implement any features specific to porting M.U.G.E.N. content, the sprite dimensions of said content would certainly feel right at home in Fraymakers 🙂
Cleod9: At this time we support 4 players in a match, but that may be subject to grow in the future!
Cleod9: No specific date yet, but it will land somewhere within the months leading up to our planned March 2022 Early Access release.
Cleod9: Apparently it wasn't 😅
Ramsey: We aren't opposed to the possibility, but we don't have any plans at this time.
Ramsey: We're open to all indies! No further details for now, though.
Cleod9: Not certain about direct MP4 conversion yet (we'll see!) but we will absolutely have replay support.
Cleod9: That'll be up to you creators! You'll be able to access functionality from our engine in your custom content, so the sky's the limit in terms of depth! For newcomers we plan to provide plenty of documentation, sample files, and example scripts that will help achieve commonly desired functionality with minimal effort.
Mass: By making them. Making…frays, that is. Makefrayers.
Ramsey: It's definitely been a precedent… LOL. We had a great time, just maybe didn't quite expect this level of turnout 😂
Ramsey: We'll let you guys know how we plan on specifically implementing Fishbunjin with regards to his changes from Slap City to Fraymakers when we get closer to his release! I can say he will definitely retain the dumbbell throw attack in some form.
© 2024 Team Fray | McLeodGaming Inc.