I've been asking myself this, as I sit here finishing a bottle of Quality House and wondering why Bagel's fucking bubble move won't work correctly. To be honest, the closest Ive ever gotten to being competitive at a fighting game was Smash Bros, and TFR clearly is different than that. So to help ease my mind, what truly makes a fighting game?
Well I haven't really played many fighting games, I usually play adventure and open world games.
But I always consider that originality, balance, good mechanics, and nice graphics can make a good fighting game. But it should also have a scent of competitive attraction for anybody to be able to pick it up and play it with friends.
What makes Smash so fun is that it is unbalanced, has items and lot of characters. Also stages that are more than just backgrounds.
For games like Street Fighter, what makes the game is the charaters, the combos and different attacks and tight gameplay.
I think TFR seems to have most of this, so maybe just add stages that you can interact with and lots of combos?
Edit: Also, obviously, multiplayer is what really makes fighting games fun.
any fighting game has this in mind:
1- Space control;
2- Reflexes;
3- Adaptation.
Explaining them in order,
1- In order for you to be successful in a fighting game, you need to be able to control your character's movement AND your opponent's movement. Fighting is manipulating the rival in a way that traps him, thus increasing win rate. For example, if you throw a fireball move, you'll either force the opponent to jump over it, or block it. You can use these scenarios to your advantage: if he jumps over the fireball, you can hit it with an uppercut move while he's in mid-air, or if he blocks it, you may leg sweep him.
2- Reflexes are much more important in this game, as you are dealing with inputting commands to pull out moves, as well as attacking and defending at the same time. This means, the more reflexes you use, the more competitive it will be (as it'll demand more of the player). It is ideal to seek for a balance between casual fun and competitive as SSB already is. Also, commands are better if they make sense: for example fireballs usually has a quarter cicle motion; an aerial uppercut attack is forward-down-diagonal, and so on.
3- Adaptation is a skill that is born with these two, because those who is able to adapt himself with the round's pace will be more likely to win. So for example, if one attack doesn't cut it, another might work. Of course, since this is a classic arcade-styled fighting game, you don't have as much freedom than say, SSB (which includes many platforms, moving bits etc).
Closed arenas in the primary game. If your worlds are too open, it turns into a Beat-em-Up. Narrowed goals and direct competition between two (or more) objects where the goal is to remove one from the event.
I wanna make a bigger, more detailed post in this thread more specific to tFR but for the time being I'm just going to post a link (IN BIG OL LETTERS SO PEOPLE CLICK IT) to REQUIRED reading for anyone wanting to play, make or simply understand fighting games:
-->The Educated Gentleperson's Fighting Game Primer<--
Like, if you want a good place to start thinking about tFR's structure, start there.
Oh, and feel free to hit me up for comments and ideas and whatnot! I uh, spend probably way too much time thinking about and playing fighting games (all the while not being very good at them, heheh) so I'm full of suggestions!