SpecialEffect's accessible GameBase

StreetFighter is an amazing game for many reasons, one being in that it's designed to be inaccessible - think of highly complex control systems, insane speed of gameplay, and in the case of StreetFighter 4 there's a cheap boss character and the 'easiest' difficulty setting is actually quite hard for a beginner - crazy!
StreetFighter can be made to work with one or two switches:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaUnt73NSY0

Here Ryu is being controlled by 2 switches although he can be controlled reasonably well enough with just one.

So there it is, my current project - a little program that'll make many 2d fighting games that follow the Streetfighter format of a stick and 6 (or less) buttons work with one or two switches. Just got to add a switch set for player 2 and work out how to program some artificial intelligence so that 2 player mode works like an accessible one player mode . . .

Sounds brilliant. Can't wait to see what you come up with!

Bill

Making 2D fighting games accessible:
Version 1.0 of 'SwitchFighter' now available. Couldn't think of a better title for it, so SwitchFighter will have to do.

What it does: It's a third-party program that runs in the background while you play a fighting game on a PC and replaces the standard controls with one or two switch controls. There's three different game modes:
- Standard One Player - tends to be the Arcade story mode in most fighting games;
- 2 Player Vs mode - for playing against a friend;
- Player Vs PC - this mode is because adding switch control only solves half of the accessibility problem - the arcade mode often plays too fast with over-agressive AI controlled opponents. This mode attempts to rectify this. It runs in the game's 2 player vs mode but adds custom adjustable artificial intelligence to the second fighter - in effect sort of an accessible one player mode without the storyline.

What you need:
The SwitchFighter program (around 500kb) :
Download link here: http://www.mediafire.com/?7ydu7w3my3mydd9
Includes a Read Me file explaining how to set it all up - please read it carefully.

A game. You could use games that run in an emulator such as MAME (supports StreetFighter 1, various iterations of SF2, SF Alpha series, several SNK titles including the Fatal Fury series and KOF series), or NEBULA (supports SF3) but bear in mind the legal aspects surrounding emulation. I prefer MUGEN-based games as the MUGEN engine is free, you can make your own games and there's a large community providing help, tutorials and other useful resources, and most importantly, MUGEN has many features that add to accessibility, such as adjustable health gauges and speed controls.
You can find games built with MUGEN here: http://www.caiman.us/scripts/fw/ffight.html
Many of these games use an older MUGEN engine, the latest version has many bugs fixed and is much more stable. You can download it for free here: http://www.elecbyte.com/
If anyone happens to have the PC version of StreetFighter 4 I'd be interested to know if you can redefine keyboard controls and run the game in a window - if you can do this it just might be possible to make it work with SwitchFighter. As I don't have the PC version I haven't been able to test it.

A switch that mimics a USB game controller. Or two switches if possible, though one will work just fine.
If you want to play against another person you could add a second switch(es) to mimic a second game controller.
Not sure if there's something like a Console-Switch Interface (C-SID) that would work with a PC? Might be ideal?

I'll admit the program isn't great - for one thing it's a little limited because it can't access a fighting game directly, so making menus more accessible isn't possible. If fighting games came with built-in switch control, the control could be made far more intuitive than how I've implemented it here, because it could take into account exactly what is happening on-screen while the game is playing. Anyways, hope this goes someway to allowing my favourite type of game to be enjoyed by many more people.

If you need help with getting set up, post here or email me.

Very exciting!! Will be looking into this ASAP. What a fantastic idea, Graeme. If you could post some emulation help for those games, that would be great. I own a ton of these games (admittedly on various formats), so I don't think it unreasonable for others like me, who'd like to make them more accessible.

Really brilliant, stuff. Can't wait to get stuck into this, and give it a good plug.

Thanks Barrie!

Here's a great place to start if you want to learn about emulation: http://www.emulator-zone.com/
To get MAME, go to the MAME page and download the file 'MAMEUI(32bit) 0.139 32 bit version' and unzip it.
Look inside the folder and explore what each subfolder does - the dir.txt file in each folder tells you what goes where.
If you want to play Streetfighter 3 - here's a guide: http://www.romnation.net/forums/thread.php?threadid=9604

I can't tell you where to download the game files from - your best bet is to search for them.






I strongly recommend using MUGEN - plenty of stuff for it here: http://mugencharacters.ucoz.com/
Again, searching for characters and stages will turn up a few nice links.
If you ever need to learn how to do something, eg set up an emulator, run MUGEN, etc - Youtube has video tutorials for just about anything!

Thanks for the added info Graeme. This will be a great help as I know zero about emulation. Will give it a go a.s.a.p also.

Thanks,

Bill

Just wondering - did anyone ever try this out?

Graeme, you have my permission to shoot me. I've been unforgivably slow on this. I did try out initially with a Megadrive emulator, but struggled a little, and put it on the back burner until I had proper time to give it justice. What I found at first is that I wanted to be able to reconfigure the controls within your emulator (a bit like with 4Noah) - as having to reconfigure the emulator was a bit of an inconvenience linked to liking my existing settings.

Ah no problem Barrie, I'd pretty much forgotten it existed myself until the other day! To be honest it's more than a little rough around the edges so any ideas you have to improve it would be appreciated. I'm in no rush though, so no worries if you don't get around to testing it anytime soon.

- Graeme