Hey there! This is Khao, the lead dev for GFM. Things have been quiet for a bit, but I've been making a ton of progress behind the scenes, and I wanted to show-off some of the progress so you know where we're at right now. After the playtest, about 90% of the work has been dedicated to online play. If you've been following the game on discord, you'll know that we managed to get Rollback working (that was kind of a massive relief, netcode is scary!) and after that, we've been making a ton of progress when it comes to the lobbies.
Generic Fighter Maybe's online is powered up by Steam's lobby system. That means you'll be able to freely join and create lobbies, and invite players directly from your Steam friend list. I'm using a system that's very much inspired by the private rooms in most of today's fighting games. Several players get to join the same lobby, and can hold simultaneous matches in several different stations. The current setup has four stations, which is enough for 8 players to fight in one lobby at the same time. But we could absolutely increase this number if we wanted.
I've been making a bit of research, to see what the average player hates and loves about fighting game lobbies, and doing my best to address common complaints. One thing I really want to prioritize above everything else, is that I want to make sure you can do every single thing there is to do within the lobby, without giving up your spot in the station. When you select a station, you get a pop-up window that shows every player in the station.
You can join the left or right side, or just join in as a spectator. I'm also working on setting up a player queue on each station, separate from the spectator list, so you can fight once the current match ends.
Once you already have a spot in a station, either as a player or as a spectator... You can do pretty much anything you want. You can chat with other players in the lobby, you can freely change your character, and even go into training mode.
If you enter training mode, you'll stay within the lobby, and you'll even keep your spot in the station. You can stay in training right until the match begins! In fact, this is not even like, a separate screen. If you pause the game, you can open up the lobby as like an overlaid menu.
You can keep chatting, checking out what's going on in the other stations, change your character once more... And you can go right back to your training session seamlessly at the press of a button.
Once there's two fighters in the station, the station overlay will automatically open, and you'll have a few moments to prepare for the fight. Characters are fully locked-in at this point.
And that's more or less it! The match begins after that, rollback does its thing, you win or lose, and then you can choose to instantly rematch, or go back to the lobby, depending on the lobby's settings.
Speaking of:
This is every option you can define when creating a lobby. Your lobby's visibility can be set to public, friends-only (so it's only visible to people in your friend list) or private (which means it won't appear on any searches). You can set up a password (can be any string of text), set maximum players, rules, and rotation options. Max Wins defines how many times you can rematch the same player before being forcibly booted back to the lobby, and Player Rotation defines which player stays on their spot, and who's removed.
Note that everything you see here is still very much a work in progress (especially UI, it's a bit boring right now), so if there's any specific concerns or requests about lobby functionality, feel free to let us know! We want to make the best possible lobby system we can make, because like... we know the struggle when you play a game and the lobby just... doesn't let you do what you want, when you want it to. And that's if it even works in the first place. So if there's anything specific you want this lobby to have, like, in terms of functionality, QoL features, whatever... Just tell us. We might just end up adding it.