Hey there! This is my very first time writing a developer's blog, and I’m not exactly sure what to say, but I guess starting from the beginning is a good idea!

It all started when I first played Street Fighter 2 at an arcade. I loved it so much that I’d sneak out of school just to play! (Having an arcade right across the street from my school didn’t help, either.) Growing up, things were tough between me and my mom, and eventually, I decided to run away. I traveled all the way from my home state to Florida, and at every bus stop, I would look for places to play Street Fighter 2. But, eventually, I got caught and had to go back home.

After that, I started collecting fighting games on my Super Nintendo, along with guidebooks from Prima and Brady Games. I even imported a PlayStation just so I could play Toshinden!

Looking back, these games were more than just fun—they were a big part of my journey. And now, here I am, starting this new adventure as a developer. 

When Street Fighter 2 was super popular, I’d often end up playing a lot of SNK games while waiting for a turn. I remember trying King of Fighters '94—it was cool to see characters from Art of Fighting, but I wasn’t a fan of the style. Then my friend brought over King of Fighters '95 for the PlayStation, and it looked and felt way better.

Years later, I got really into a game engine called MUGEN, where you could build your own fighting games. Playing KOF 2002 got me thinking: why doesn’t SNK put all their characters into one game, like Capcom does? It always seemed like they got close but never quite finished the job. Fatal Fury and Samurai Showdown would do it, but not KOF.

With MUGEN, I started creating my own game for fun, adding characters I downloaded from ICQ trades, and piecing it together the best I could. It wasn’t perfect, and it never really felt right. Plus, reading has always been tough for me, so coding was a big challenge. But you know what? That didn’t really matter—I was just having fun creating.

Then KOF 2002 UM came out, and they almost had a full roster... but not quite. It was a great game, but I always felt like it was missing just a few more characters to really wrap up the series. I was a little disappointed, so I decided to put together my own game, learning to edit and create as much as I could.

It wasn’t easy—I had to start over three times! Most of the coding just didn’t make sense to me at first. Back then, the community was more of a “figure it out yourself” kind of place. They didn’t like answering questions, and it made things feel pretty tough.

But then, I had a big realization: my game needed to have just one consistent play style. There were too many different versions of each character, and it made things confusing. Once I decided on that, things started to fall into place for the first time.

So, I went through and took out a bunch of old code from different versions of KOF and other random things I had added. This made everything a lot simpler. And as I did that, I noticed a pattern—out of the over 100 characters I was working with, they all came from just five main templates.

After that, converting everything started to become a lot more fun. I wasn’t making my own moves just yet, but I was making them look cooler by adding effects. I even started learning how to use the same effects for all characters so everything matched up, making it easier to swap things out later. I also learned how to make different color palettes, so each character could have different skins!

Then, I met someone named Bigruss, completely by accident! He was live-streaming on a site called HITBOX, and my job at the time had me connecting with content creators. It turned out he wasn’t actually a partner, but he was still on our list. That random encounter changed everything for me. Bigruss became a great friend, and he taught me so much about fixing things in my game and helped me whenever I got stuck.

This was a huge turning point for the project. Suddenly, anything seemed possible! Every character was reworked with new code. Honestly, those characters are now only about 35% of what they originally were. Most of what’s left is the collision code, some sprites, and parts of their moves.

We had to redo so many details for each character—timing for their animations, effects when they got hit, sounds, movement, pauses after being hit, pushback, and so much more. Every single move needed to be adjusted. Some creators had done a good job, but we had to take those parts out so we could use our new code from KOF 2002 UM. We really wanted everything to be consistent.

After years of work, I realized something super important: you need a goal and an end date. Otherwise, you’ll keep working on the same thing forever. This is a fan game, and we knew we couldn’t make money from it. It might seem silly to put so many years into something without getting paid, but we were determined. So determined, in fact, that Melcore noticed our project and gave us old sprites for characters that had never been finished before.

Now, we have a real goal: we’re bringing original art to a game that nobody else has. And the craziest part? We’re even hiring artists to create brand-new sprites so we can have a fully complete classic KOF roster! I can’t believe how far we’ve come from just a little hobby project!

So who will even play this, right? I mean, really, who’s going to care? This is something that a lot of creative people worry about every day. The answer? Find people who like what you’re doing, talk with them often, and make some awesome friends! If you just sit in one spot and don’t reach out, you’re not going to get anywhere. That’s just how it is.

For us, we made a bunch of friends, and we still hang out with them all the time. In the end, they helped us spread the word about our game, and I’m truly grateful for that. But honestly, it’s their project too—we all made it work together. Now, we’re close to 6,000 downloads, and we’re still updating the game every few days!

More and more people are telling us about bugs and issues they find, and that’s helped us make the game super smooth and well-polished. Luckily, we have AI that’s written for every character and every move, so we can watch the game play itself to find problems even before anyone else does.

When the game finally launched, the response was really positive. Sure, some people found a few bugs, but nothing that totally broke the game. We spent almost a whole year polishing it, and it really paid off. YouTube channels started making videos about it, and our characters even started showing up in other people’s hobby games. It spread faster than we could’ve imagined! We even saw people talking about it in the live chat at EVO, and most recently, it was mentioned in the comments on Maximilian Dood’s channel! And no, we didn’t even bring it up first—how cool is that?

Looking back, I can say we did a great job, and it’s all thanks to everyone who helped along the way. We still want to add a few more touches before wrapping it up for good, but it’s been an amazing journey! If you’ve got a project you care about, just keep going. You never know where it might take you!

^Fan Art for KOF Final Attack by https://twitter.com/LunaProdu

I want to thank everyone—past and present—who has been a part of this project. To all the people who might not even realize how much they contributed, and to those who are no longer with us, thank you for allowing your work to live on in fun projects like this. Your support and creativity have meant the world to us. Thank you so much! We’ll share more info soon about what’s coming next. Stay tuned!