So, it might come as a bit of a shock, but progress has been a bit slow lately. I’ve always believed in transparency in development, so I’m not going to just pretend things haven’t gotten slower. Truth is, I’ve started a new job recently, and, while it’s a great job that pays well enough to support my family, tends to leave me mentally drained when I get home and I often spend several days making almost no progress.

That being said, I will finish this project, no matter how long it takes. However, with less time to dedicate towards the shotgun approach to coding that I used to take, I figure I should focus my efforts on a single big part of the game and try to finish that. That’s where you guys come in.

There’s a lot of big looming shadows of design that I’ve been hesitant to tackle (opting instead to do little bits of smaller things), but I want to know which of them is the most important to you, the players. So, I’ve made a strawpoll to ask where my priorities should lie. Here’s a quick rundown of the options:

• Character Builder - Finishing up the builder into a stable, working cross-platform visual builder.

• Framerate - The current game kinda runs like garbage on most hardware, which you wouldn’t expect for a game so simple. The big bottleneck here is the sprite rendering, which is done wholly on the CPU due to a limitation in Pygame. Speeding it up would require switching the renderer to OpenGL, which is a huge and complicated can of worms I’ve been trying to wrap my head around for months.

• Online Play - Some framework has been set by sylvanelite, but it needs a good amount of work to be user-friendly and stable. This would involve using a sort-of GGPO framework (it doesn’t actually have a pygame implementation, so it’d be created from scratch) to synchronize inputs, and checksums would be used to ensure all players are fighting with the proper fighters.

• Bots - Online play is inherently risky to base an entire game on, since it requires other players to be playing at the same time as you are. AI Bots, however, are always available to fight against, even if they don’t quite provide the challenge a human would. This would also open the doors for an Arcade Mode, or even Adventure Mode (although those will be later)

• Visuals - Tussle looks… bad. The animations might be pretty cool, but in the end, Hitboxie is just a square, and the menus are just text on a background, and the character select screen is just… bad. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an artist, but I could probably come up with something better given enough time. One thing that’ll be added ASAP: Giving Hitboxie a headband so you can actually see which way he’s facing.

• Content - This one’s simple, more stuff. More fighters like Zero, more stages, more stuff. This would involve converting existing characters into TUSSLE from other fighting games, as well as possibly contacting artists to get their characters in the game.

And if there’s anything else that you think we need to focus on other than these, please feel free to respond by sending a message or discussing this post on the subreddit. I’d love to hear your responses, even if its just telling me off for being slow (honestly, knowing there’s a good number of people I’m letting down is probably one of the best motivators I could hope for).