GamaSutra sat down with Yoshinori Ono to discuss many of the intricate details of Street Fighter 4's game play. A thing that I found to be a problem with people trying to make 2D fighting games in 3D in the past is that there's too much focus on finishing animation -- like, making sure that the entire punch goes all the way through and comes back, instead of just snapping back so that it's more functional than visual. Where was the balance for you?
YO: That's a really good question. Like you said, we couldn't possibly do it the way we did it in Street Fighter III. What happened with Street Fighter IV was at the beginning, the way that characters get punched or kicked or the return motion of their fist or foot... we left that at 60 frames, moving really smoothly, and left all of the animation in there.
So a fist would go forward in five frames, then return in five frames. Even though the timing was the same as the ordinary 2D Street Fighter, it looked really weird, and it kind of gave the visual impression that it was moving too slowly or too smooth.
So basically, the adjustment that we've made is that when you first throw a punch, you have that 60 frames per second polygon smoothness, but when it pulls back, we've deliberately skipping large amounts of frames, as opposed to a smooth movement.
