Back in the days of Cohost, a now defunct social media platform that cared more about posting than engagement metrics, I wrote a series of liveblogs covering my time watching Kamen Rider Ryuki, with each post covering 10 episodes of the show. Unfortunately, I never got around to publishing my thoughts on the final stretch of the show before the site was unceremoniously shut down thanks to the money drying up. I’m generally quite proud of the analysis I put forward in those posts, so I’ve compiled them all into one place for the sake of keeping it all somewhere.
I’ve been involved in the competitive fighting game scene for 15 years now. I’ve made a lot of friends, been a lot of places and learned a lot of things as a result of that. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that to chase money in this hobby is a fool’s errand. It’s something I’ve said for years, even before I gained my trademark hatred for capitalism: if I wanted to play video games for money, I wouldn’t be playing fighting games. Fighting games are as grassroots you can get in this world of esports; all our major events are open brackets and all of our production outfits are hobbyists largely funded by Patreon and Twitch subscriptions, if they get any funding at all. This scene and this hobby are not about the money. They never have been, and as far as I’m concerned, they really shouldn’t be - especially if people need to be thrown under the bus in order to get it.
A pretty popular and accessible way of creating custom avatars for VRChat is by using Vroid Studio, a program mostly used to create character models for vtubers. Unfortunately, VRChat has pretty strict limitations on how avatar models can actually be constructed and displayed in a session without setting people’s computers on fire1, and Vroid models by default will flagrantly ignore all those limitations in the pursuit of making your brand new anime femboy self-actualisation vehicle as cute as programmatically possible. There are processes for optimising your Vroid avatar so that it will play nice in VRChat, but actual step-by-step guides for such processes are largely relegated to YouTube videos made by small-time vtubers2, and I would prefer a written guide that’s generally easier to scroll through, so I’m making that in case anyone else has the same brain worms that I do.
I think, fundamentally, engaging with any video game (but especially a fighting game) is akin to a conversation between developer and player.
As a developer, your goal should be to confidently communicate your game’s mechanics to your player, and trust that the player will be able to keep up. There’s a delicate balance here, though – say too little, and your player won’t feel comfortable contributing to the conversation on their own. Say too much, however, and the player won’t have any room to express themselves on their own terms.