Other Early Game Feedbacks

[Lulero]

Game version: from 3.2.1 to 3.3
Platform: Android 9
Phone: Huawei P smart 2019
Location: Brest, France
In-game author tag: Lulero
Job: Research Engineer since 2005

Prior experience with similar games.
I played fighting games back in the 90s, absolutely loved Street Fighters 2 Turbo on SNES and Mortal Kombat on Megadrive. I also played some Tekken. It been 20 years since without any.
I played some “Gatchas” more recently, mostly “Idle Heroes”. I also gave a try to several others among the usual suspects (“Summoner Wars” and others).
I’m mostly playing on PC nowadays though, SkullGirls Mobile is thus pretty far from my usual gaming experience.

Why did I start playing.
Got a new phone, browsed app store. What worked for me were:

• HellCat app icon
• Reviews, especially the parts about no “paywall”
• A fighting game felt like a refreshing experience
• The absence of a guild system is actually a major plus for me. I probably wouldn’t have started another “gatcha” if it had one.

Current progression.
From nothing early in 3.2.1, I’m now at 1500 rift rating with a combined FS past 140k from my top 20 fighters. I cleared all the stories right before 3.3 released some more, all the master dailies and, for 3 weeks now, I’m able to clear Accursed Experiments. Primed prize fight is the last one I didn’t manage to get top 10% reward (about 2? months ago). As you can guess I’m pretty active, at least 4 hours daily.

First impressions.
At the time (early in 3.2.1), game had a lot of server issues and timed out on a regular basis. In particular, I won’t comment on the tutorial as it was quite painful going through it due to disconnections.
I still got hooked though, and glad I did since servers felt more stable after 2 or 3 days of playing and, as far as I understand, it got even better with 3.3 and will keep improving.

Sound Track is right in my alley. The only thing I dislike about sound is that, when grinding, you get to hear repetitively at most 20s of a few pieces for possibly hours long sessions.

User Interface is intuitive. I took some notes about a few bugs and annoyances, but most of them are addressed in 3.3. Positively impressed by the involvement of the team. Some Special Moves and Blockbusters could use some more documentation, at least a link to a website (but I don’t know of any that could be linked). An illustration with the move hitbox would be particularly helpful. I'd also love to see a clear visual indicator on which character will be at the front when setting a defense team.

Gameplay is surprisingly good considering the challenge (fighting game on a phone). I wouldn’t believe it works if I wasn’t already playing it. Right from the start I could see that there is a lot to learn skill-wise to be a better player. I was not overwhelmed by the controls and included “advanced” moves much later down the road (I did not use block for the first two weeks of active play or so).

Progression felt nicely paced. I especially like the fact that money doesn’t help much in this area. Everyone is in (mostly) the same boat when it comes to level fighters up. Here is probably the main reason why I like SkullGirls Mobile: I do NOT feel like I’m fighting against designers trying their best to milk me dry. THANK YOU for taking good care of your players.

A word about Power Up . It is a huge waste of your fighters, that’s the first tip anyone will give to a newbie. Still, most won’t ask for tip before they played a little and some (like me) will already have used the feature before. An in-game tip is worded as: “Make good use of your unused fighter, POWER UP the ones you like!”. It would be cool if it was true, if not it would make sense to hide/lock the option until you reach your collection cap for the first time, or anything fair you can think of.

 

[Liam]

Thanks for the feedback!

when grinding, you get to hear repetitively at most 20s of a few pieces for possibly hours long sessions.

Is this because the fights are over 20 seconds in, so you don't hear the rest of the music? One solution there could be playing the last played on stage's soundtrack when you return to the Prize Fight lobby screen, or perhaps playing the stage song that's visible in the background of a Daily Event map.

You'd hear the menu theme a LOT less if that was the case!

Some Special Moves and Blockbusters could use some more documentation, at least a link to a website (but I don’t know of any that could be linked). An illustration with the move hitbox would be particularly helpful.

You can find examples of hitbox for moves like this:

On this page here:
http://wiki.shoryuken.com/Skullgirls/BigBand

Skullgirls console and mobile share the same hitboxes, so you can check them out on these pages, or inside of Skullgirls console. I don't think we have any plans to make these hitboxes available in game. For what it's worth, viewing hitbox data in most fighting games is unheard of, developers usually hide it.

I would personally like to find a way to display frame data in game eventually.

I'd also love to see a clear visual indicator on which character will be at the front when setting a defense team.

This exists already. There are numbers behind the cards that you can look at if you're confused about which character is the point:

“Make good use of your unused fighter, POWER UP the ones you like!”. It would be cool if it was true

Since evolution is so important for late game with the inclusion of Diamonds, I agree that we could perhaps look at the wording of our tips surrounding POWER UP again. I'll pass it along to the rest of the team and we can discuss it. Most of our tips were written with the economy of PRE 1.0 in mind. A lot has changed since then!

 

[Lulero]

@Liam

Thanks for taking your time to comment in-depth Don't waste your time answering that other one, I'm just sharing some more thoughts about what you just said but I know full well I'm probably way off the mark.

About sound, I'd be happy to see some options heading this way indeed! But might not work for everyone, as the fight music pieces seem to be composed to support the game-play, becoming more epic and/or dramatic as the round time limit draws closer. While I pointed it out as something I found a bit annoying, I also acknowledge it's not easy to fix. But SG soundtrack is so good it might deserve the troubles.

About hit boxes, that site seems to be a nice resources indeed! Kind of overkill to include in-game, I agree. Don't know what are those frame data about, but if they can, at a glance, give a good intuition of what a move is supposed to do without having to equip it and head to training, that'd be awesome. It becomes less of an issue as you play more, but when starting out it can be puzzling and after a couple months I still have no idea what some of the moves do. Maybe that's me being lazy.

About visual indicator to know what character is in front, I noticed those numbers. But I still had some doubts. In rifts, for example, portraits face the other way. In rift logs, as far as I understand, left most (resp. right most) character is the one going first for the left team (resp.right team), 123 321. I'd expect the opposite 321 123. Maybe it's those bits that got me confused at times.

About in-game tips, indeed some could be reworded. I'm sure the community would be glad to help, too! Another one that comes to mind is the "don't hold back on evolving". Its intend is to stress that you won't need silver keys after evolving a bronze fighter, but you should still hold back and make sure you don't need that fighter for bronze pf or stories. It doesn't matter much very early nor very late, but for most of the game it's important to weight your decisions carefully when evolving, no matter the tier (that's my opinion, not sure if everyone would agree).