Feet of Fury Lives :)

[DanPotter]

I know this isn't 100% DC related ;) but I thought I'd pass it on in case any Feet of Fury fans were interested. This is something you guys probably never expected to see. There is work in progress to bring the game over to the Mac OS X and Windows platforms (and possibly Linux too), and update it a bit:

http://www.cagames.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=556
(includes WinXP screen shots)

The initial plans are for another freebie version release, like we did for FoF on the DC (of course without most of the licensed music). There are a lot more potential plans than that but we'll gauge interest and go on from there.

[curt_grymala]

This is incredible news. I would love to be able to play FoF on Windows, and I would love even more to be able to play it on Linux (since, right now, about the only things I play on Linux are my emulators that I run through Wine).

Does this mean that it would be easier to test FoF swap CD's? Do you think FoF swap CD's for the PC versions would be 100% compatible with the original DC version? Or at least 75-80% compatible?

[DanPotter]

Glad to hear you're interested! :D

The Linux port doesn't exist yet, and whether it gets fully developed along with the others depends a lot on the perceived interest. Linux people aren't reknowned for their desire to buy proprietary software. ;) Also I'm a little shaky on the idea of trying to come out on three platforms at once and support it. Even two is kinda pushing it right now. But we'll see where that goes... I know how much Linux people love companies that make Linux games, since I'm a long time Linux user myself :)

Anyway, on the swap CDs: I'm not 100% sure what the plan is for these. I want there to be some way to play songs from a swap CD, but I don't know if that'll be direct support or a way to convert swap CDs to a new format. The main point of the old swap CDs was that you had to actually burn them to a CD, so you'd want to get as many as you could in there. On a PC there's little point in that -- individual tracks make a better granularity (like DWI and StepMania). If we support something like albums in those two programs then that's no problem, we could pretend the swap CD is another album in a weird format.

Other things may change that may make it less of a 1-1 match too, like I may redo the song selection menu to not use the circular CD textures (they caused a lot of problems). Lots of stuff is still up in the air though so if you have suggestions feel free to post them :)

[wraggster]

Excellent News :)
Posted it on VGN to get a bit more exposure too

[curt_grymala]

Well, as always, my main suggestion would be to find someway to include a step editor in the program itself.

However, I do have a few other suggestions that may improve gameplay a little over the DC version.

1) It would be cool to somehow integrate the characters a little more into the game. Rather than simply selecting a character at the beginning of the game, and never really seeing any evidence of that character again, it would be cool to make small changes in the gameplay according to which character you choose.

First, the characters could have little animations at the top-left and top-right corners of the screen, that would react when certain things happen.

Second - it would be cool to somehow slightly edit the step patterns depending on which character you choose. Maybe each character could rely more on specific "weapons" or whatever they're actually called. Perhaps random steps could be taken out or added in according to specific characters. Perhaps some characters would be incapable of selecting an easy level or a hard level. Give the characters a little more personality altogether.

It would also be kind of neat if users could somehow theme the FoF playing area. I don't know how many people would actually undertake the task, but themeable/skinnable software is always well-received.

If I think of anything else, I'll post it.

[DanPotter]

Well, as always, my main suggestion would be to find someway to include a step editor in the program itself.

StepMania has this but I'm still not completely convinced it's the best way. :) I guess the big advantage to it is that you have just one program written with one GUI lib, etc, so it's instantly portable. It's possible too though to embed parts of FoF into an editor so that you get an instant preview and such, and still get nice GUI controls native to the platform (not to mention native resolution). I've got FoFEdit for Win32 that needs some work but basically works, and I'd just need to add a preview to that. An OSX editor would be a piece of cake, Cocoa is really easy. I'm not sure I'd want to undertake a Linux editor, so that may be an advantage of doing it all in the game itself.

The earliest versions of FoF actually had an editor built into the program, based on KGL, and it looked more or less like the StepMania one (though not quite as nice and polished). We took it out of the final game becaused it really didn't have anywhere to get source files and save its output. The most practical way to use it was to load up an editor binary under dcload and use files over the ethernet. Definitely something to consider again though...


1) *It would be cool to somehow integrate the characters a little more into the game. *Rather than simply selecting a character at the beginning of the game, and never really seeing any evidence of that character again, it would be cool to make small changes in the gameplay according to which character you choose.

Actually funnily enough not only did we plan to do some of this stuff you listed (like animations), we actually did make it change the gameplay based on character. When you fill up your furiosity meter it does an attack based on which character you picked.

I know it's not much but that's what happens when you run out of time. Point well taken though, a lot more could be done now potentially.


First, the characters could have little animations at the top-left and top-right corners of the screen, that would react when certain things happen.

The original FoF-DC plan was actually to emulate the look and feel of Puzzle Fighter and Puyo Puyon, so we wanted to have fully animated chibi characters in the background of the gameplay screen fighting based on attacks. Never did find enough art help to pull this off. This may be changing so it's something we'll revisit.


Second - it would be cool to somehow slightly edit the step patterns depending on which character you choose. *Maybe each character could rely more on specific "weapons" or whatever they're actually called. *Perhaps random steps could be taken out or added in according to specific characters. *Perhaps some characters would be incapable of selecting an easy level or a hard level. *Give the characters a little more personality altogether.

Yes, more interaction of character with gameplay is desired in general. I think in FoF-DC the effect of adding the characters at all was pretty negligible. Not as bad as DDR where they basically just provide a background ;) but not as nice as I'd like.

This is one area I've definitely been planning to revisit so I'm glad to hear it's something people want.


It would also be kind of neat if users could somehow theme the FoF playing area. *I don't know how many people would actually undertake the task, but themeable/skinnable software is always well-received.

Yet another funny thing, this support is actually built into FoF-DC too but we never had time to expose it! I took time to make a "skin" class that contained all the texture and sound data so that it'd be easy to swap that out in a swap CD or whatever but just never got the time to finish that task. (You can see this in the source release in "gpskin.h".) So maybe I'll go ahead and finish it.

Might be a nice feature for the "pro" version to have too...

Thanks for all the comments so far!

[josemci]

Have you thought about an improved FoF DC version?

José Manuel

[DanPotter]

Have you thought about an improved FoF DC version?

Pretty unlikely at this point. :( The PC-based versions are looking to be a whole 'nother beast in a number of ways. Some of the things we didn't do in the original FoF were because of a lack of time, but a number of things weren't done because of limitations in the DC (like the in-program step editor). The plan is to try to exploit those more now. The main reason I posted this over here is because I figure previous FoF fans might be interested in it, didn't mean to get anyone's hopes up for a new DC version.