From Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix producer Rey Jimenez:

Hey Street Fighter fans, I hope the deluge of Street Fighter related news hasn’t been too much for you to handle. It looks like Kotaku got the jump on us regarding some new art, so we’ve opted to show you some older work-in-progress assets now, and over the next few months.

Enclosed in the zip file below, is a ton of work-in-progress art files. These files are almost 2 months old, but they are a good selection of files that illustrate some key issues and highlight and some of the steps that we are taking to ensure the final product will live up to the name of Street Fighter.

They will give you guys a window into our process of how we’re getting super-detailed art into the game, show you some of the challenges we’re facing and provide insights into how we’re addressing them.

Before we move on, I want to emphasize again that these are old files that were and still are very much a work-in -progress. In fact, as I will explain, some of the frames will be going through a major re-draw and other polishing steps before they make it into the game.

You might notice a magenta colored box around the files. This is the same as the grey box explained in a past blog update (http://blogs.capcomusa.com/blogs/digital.php/2007/06/29/p349#more349). For the blog, I colored it grey because, well, magenta is an ugly color. But for production purposes, we use a magenta box because it’s easier to see the drawing elements against a magenta background. Most of the files have been colored only in a flat color with no shading done yet.

Once the flat color step is done and fully approved through our quality control process, the file will move to shading, where it will once again go through a quality control process.

Ok, now we’re past all the boring explanations, let’s move on to the good stuff. Below is a shot of Cammy doing her standing fierce punch.

As a whole, this set is looking pretty good. But you’ll notice that I’ve circled her right foot. That’s because this animation should mostly remain stationary, with the foot rotating slightly until the last frame, when it rotates fully to face the player. If you take a look at what the foot does during the animation, you’ll see that the laces are not consistently drawn and when animated, will look like they’re popping. If this is missed and the frame goes to the shading process, the popping effect will be more apparent. We can’t have that, now can we? It’s very important that we catch these issues before going to shading, so we don’t waste time shading a frame. An error is much easier to fix in the flat color stage than in the fully shaded step.

You may also notice in one of the frames that Cammy’s arm look blurred. You may or may not know this, but this is not new to the Street Fighter frames. I’ll tell you that I never noticed the blurring effect back in the day because they go by so fast. It’s amazing the detail that goes into these that could have been almost impossible to notice without careful dissection. Below is a still frame of the original sprite of Cammy doing the same move to prove this was in the original:

Here’s a bit of Street Fighter trivia about what’s going on here. When SFII first came out, it was on the CPS1 board. (The CPS1 is a proprietary arcade board that Capcom developed and many of your favorite arcade games were released on this board.) When Super Street Fighter II was released, it was released on the newer arcade board, the CPS2. This board made advancements in arcade technology and essentially, was capable of handling better, more detailed graphics. So any character or move that was new to the game between SFII and SSFII was developed on the CPSII board. So Cammy, Fei, Long, and T Hawk were able to have some cool effects added to them, like the blurring, which was not possible for the other characters developed on the CPS1. You’ll see an upgrade in some other characters moves, like in Chun Li’s animation and Ken’s Crazy kicks, and Ryu’s fireball. Very apparent was also the quality of the character portraits from SFII to SSFII.

But back on to some of the frames. The below Ryu animation has reached the shading phase, but now that it has, you can see that some additional problems are showing up now.

On Ryu’s right arm, you can see that the shading isn’t consistent. One of the frames is much darker than the others and some of the lines are moving around a lot. Also, in his neck, there’s a magic muscle that’s appearing and disappearing. Ugh. We’ve worked that out and it’s looking much better now. As magic as that muscle might seem, we’re glad that it’s gone.

One of the characters I wanted to talk about was Blanka. We haven’t showed you any of his frames because he’s been in a stage of flux. As you can see, he’s still very far from looking good in the line art stage. We’re going to do some major re-drawing for Blanka. We’ll show you his official look as soon as we can.

Well, there’s a lot of work in progress stuff for you guys to take a look at. Some of the issues we’ve shown you have already been corrected, while we’re tackling others. There’s variance in the line weight, some popping when you animate them, and some of the basic design issues that need to be worked out (such as Sagat’s giant shorts). You can actually see some of our notes in the files. I just know that many of you are successful or aspiring artists and hope that these files will give you some understanding in the artful process that goes into making a 2-D game such as Street Fighter. We’ve also found that looking at work that still needs some work might be just as cool as seeing the final product. It certainly gives you more respect for it.

Enjoy playing “Arm-Chair Producer”, ripping these apart and we hope you’ll look forward to the changes you’ll see to them in the coming weeks.

http://static.capcom.com/SSF2HD/SSF2HDRemix.zip

Also, be sure to check out David Sirlin’s article on the changed he’s done for the Remixed mode of Super Street Fighter II HD Remix: http://blog.capcom.com/archives/542

And here’s part2 of the multi-part balance changes series, focusing on Ryu!

http://blog.capcom.com/archives/558

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Screenshots, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, Street Fighter®. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.