ECE 4760 Final Project: TKButtons

Kofi Amoako (kae87), Bryce Roth (ber72), Lily Yu (gly6)

Introduction

Fighting games are rising in popularity around the globe. However, a consistent barrier to new player entry has been the difficulty of the inputs. Rather than pressing a single button for attacks and moves, fighting games often require complex frame-perfect combinations of buttons to perform combos necessary to compete at even basic levels. Many new players find that learning these combos and button strings are not worth learning, and become disenchanted with fighting games early on. This problem also extends to players at the highest level, who may have difficulty consistently inputting the most powerful and optimal combos possible.

To help solve this problem, we created a project called TKButtons. With the modified controller (Betsy) and our program, you can record your combo ahead of time, and then playback during the game. The controller contains a PIC32 microcontroller and some circuity which allows the player to play the game through a arcade stick. When the player is ready, then the player can hit the record button. The PIC32 controller then keep tracks when each button and stick input were hit and the time that they were hit. To finish the recording, the player hits one of the playback buttons. To play the recording, the player just needs to hit either the left or right playback button. The PIC32 will then play through the button/stick inputs that were just recorded. The player can also cancel the recording and the playback whenever they want. In this project, we will be mostly explaining the controller in use with the game Guilty Gear. If you are unfamiliar with the game, we recommend you to check out the appendix which have guides and instruction to all the different moves that we are explaining on this website.

Take Tiger Knee Bomber (TKB) for example, the case study for this project. In the game Guilty Gear, the player controls Axl Low to do this combo. To do massive damage however, the player needs to loop TKB three times and then break the wall. This combo can do up to 60% of the opponent HP. However, the combo loop is know to be hard to pull off, which can lead to player when they mess up to be vulnerable to the opponent attack. With this project though, the player can easily record the TKB combo beforehand, and then just hit the playback button at the right timing.

The video below shows the full project including the TKB Combo. Thanks to Professor Hunter for being the guinea pig for our demo.