We were lucky enough to have David Sirlin involved with the development of Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix over at Backbone. He’s worked on a lot of things, including Capcom’s recent “Capcom Classics Collection” titles. And on top of being a professional game developer, he’s also one of the top SFII players anywhere.

Yesterday Mr. Sirlin posted an in-depth article on his website detailing how he went about re-balancing the X mode in Puzzle Fighter to create the new X’ (X Prime) mode for the soon-to-be-released game (yes, very soon – hope to get a date confirmed soon). This re-balancing was done to better even the playing field for competitive and ranked matches. As a huge Puzzle Fighter fan, David used to play it competitively, so who better to be in charge of the re-balancing than him?

Click through to keep reading.

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It was a great honor to have the opportunity to design the balance changes and help oversee the new art for the High Definition version of Capcom’s Puzzle Fighter. Game developers do not often talk about why specific changes were made, so I thought the fans (and other game developers) might be interested in the reasoning behind these balance changes.

My high level goal was to change as little as possible because the original game is very well-designed and fun. I would even go as far as saying it’s the single best competitive puzzle game. That said, it does have a problem: only 2 of the 11 characters are playable in a serious match. I did not want to get into any deep changes with the underlying formulas or rules because—character balance aside—the game is very good already. So, I restricted myself to changing only three variables: 1) drop patterns, 2) damage scaling per character, and 3) the “diamond trick.”

Go here to read the full article.

If you are interested in game design, theory, etc., I encourage you to check out the other various articles he has up on his website, in the Articles section.




Street Fighter HD Remix update: I compiled all of the Achievement suggestions last week, and we are working on sorting through them all (and there were a lot!). I appreciate all the thought that went into the suggestions. There were so many good ones, it’s going to be hard to choose! We’re no longer taking suggestions, so you’ll notice the comments section on that post has been closed. I hope to have an update from the producer soon as well – no art or screens probably.

—Brian