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nemirambles · 11 months ago

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Fraymakers: Nearly a Year Later

Hello everyone, I just wanna lay some groundwork. I’m an ex-SSF2 modder, SSF2 being Super Smash Flash 2. I used to go under the handle “Foxx”. That’s with two x’s by the way. A lot of my mods are more or less kinda just lost media now. I used to work on SSF2 Delta but left on my own volition due to disagreements with some of the leads. I'm most notably known for making cosmetic related mods for the competitive community. I started messing around with the game when I was maybe 12 or so? I’ve made a lot and I’ve seen a lot in that time and if there are any SSF2 devs or old acquaintances that knew me that’re reading this now, sorry. I was a shitter then but I'm better now and will promise to continue to keep improving myself. When I write this essay, I’m saying this as someone who’s loved modding the game, playing with others and looking back at old community drama somewhat fondly.

When I saw Fraymakers be initially revealed, I was really excited to see a new project from McCleod and for it to be one that seemed to be fully embracing the modding scene that they’ve cultivated over the years. It was finally gonna be this huge breakthrough for this team that had basically been going under appreciated and recognized for all the work they put into SSF2. The Kickstarter showed off 6 characters, assists, training mode hitboxes, stage hazards, some single player content, rollback netcode and a bit more. With the way the trailer was edited, it appeared that most things shown off were either done or close to being completed. There was sparse content sure, but nothing that looked unfinished. No sketched animations, hazards seemed to be working, the UI was functional, the game seemed like it was on a good path.

Two years later, it was released on Steam in early access and I don’t think I’ve ever been any more disappointed playing a game. I know that it’s an early access but when the game can’t even run at 60FPS for some mysterious reason, something is probably wrong. Rollback was shitty, meaning that most people had to just play on delay netcode. Which is kinda shitty in of itself, but the quickplay function just automatically turned rollback on, meaning that you’d be forced to play with it. This basically ensured that quickmatch was more or less dead on arrival. There was a built in online stress test to see if you’d be good for online play and I just wanna say that my relatively new Steam Deck struggled to get a good online stress test score on max quality. For a 2D sprite based game. Training mode was pretty much nothing. There was no hitbox viewer. Several characters had unfinished animations. You couldn’t play time matches. You couldn’t really change any significant match settings. Only one stage had hazards, the hazards in question being two extra platforms under the stage and the UI was abysmal. That last part isn’t like a *real* huge issue I just felt like pointing out how utterly terrible the UI design is here.

This left everyone with 4 characters that’re at varying levels of unfinished or unpolished, 5 stages and a good chunk of assists that sorta feel more like cute gimmicks than anything else. The only other thing was the workshop content but we’ll talk about that later. But that was at launch, of course it was going to be messy. But it’s been 10 months since then! Almost an entire year! Surely it’s gotten better, right?

It Did Not Get Better

Well since then we’ve gotten several quality of life updates, fixes to the input system, some optimization improvements, several finished animations, some online improvements, a new assist and a new character. I might’ve missed a bit here and there but that’s about the sum of it. How did these changes fare? Well they undoubtedly improve the game, for sure. But it’s kinda not enough? I know it’s crazy to say that when we got a new assist and a new character but respectfully, the issue wasn’t the lack of characters as much as it was just the lack of quality surrounding the characters, at least for me. Sure they added like two extra guys but the training mode is still awful, online is still bad (if you can even get a match), some characters are STILL unfinished sprite wise and the game STILL doesn’t have things like time matches. There simply isn't anything to do.

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How about those stage hazards? Well some were shown off in the trailer, seemingly being functional and or finished. Now that the game is out in EA, there's only one stage with hazards. Wanna know what the hazard is? Two extra platforms at the bottom of the stage.

I guess it's now also a good a time as any to mention the absolutely abysmal Kickstarter rewards. Wanna know how much you get for two thousand dollars? You get the game, ONE golden costume, a test build, a DIGITAL artbook, a discord channel, your name in the credits will show that you're angel tier and you'll get some online tags. You also get to play with the devs on their terrible netcode! That might seem like a lot but in reality that's kind of only really three things, the game, a costume and an artbook. Sure you get some fancy stuff by your name in the credits but… y'know I decided to go check this myself to be super sure. Your name doesn't like glow or anything in the credits it just sits in a tier above everything else, which alright, fair enough, but who's gonna be checking that really? Is that really what you want for two thousand?

You could add 5 more characters and people still would pass this by because the general quality of life is still genuinely super shit. Hell, when you change your controller profile in the settings, the controls in the menu don’t even update until after you restart the game. This isn’t even an issue SSF2 had. It doesn’t have controller profiles but it did at least recognize what button did what after having it be set. This might seem harsh but this game is 20 whole ass dollars. You might be ready to say “oh but they’re packaging a game creation tool with this, that’s where part of the money is going as well”. We will get to that just give me a moment. First I wanna ask the question of who this game is even for.

Audience?

Really, I’m genuinely asking. Why would you play Fraymakers? For the gameplay? I mean it’s more or less just SSF2 with assists and those assists aren’t really that fun to play with. They just kinda feel like ways to cheese out stocks. There’s utility ones but… you know nobody’s using those when they can combo into an assist that does damage and kill at like 80 in a game where it’s very easy to rack up damage. The music? It’s amazing but nobody’s playing a game purely for that unless it’s some sort of rhythm game. Quality of life? This is some of the worst quality of life in a modern fighter. It’s not easy to get matches, it’s already a Discord fighter, and when you DO get matches it’s gonna be a lot of the same. It’s fun but it’s not really fun enough to wanna keep playing it over all the other fighting games or even platform fighters out at the moment. So that leaves the workshop which is cool and all but there’s that Rivals of Aether sized elephant in the room. Sure, Rivals is 10 dollars more than Fraymakers but,

It has players

The modding support for that game is huge

The game is much more complete than Fraymakers

The online is actually good

Rivals workshop completely and utterly decimates this game. Considering Rivals is an actual finished and polished product, it’s just not that fair of a fight. But that’s just how these things go, sometimes you just can’t compete and I don’t think Fraymakers will be able to. The worst part about this is that Fraymakers COULD’VE had a strong audience for it’s modding scenes but do to choices made on McCleod’s end, that potential community was basically kneecapped before this game even existed. That last bit is really important. I’m about to get into some deeper stuff regarding the SSF2 modding scene and how McLeod’s choices with it undoubtedly led to the poor modding scene for Fraymakers.

This Was A Long Time Coming

The SSF2 community and Fraymakers community might as well be 1-1. Well not 1-1 in the sense that SSF2 players play Fray, they don’t, but most Fraymakers players tend to play SSF2. One thing you ought to know about the SSF2 community is that it’s sort of splintered. Not as much as it used to be, but it used to be broken up quite often. This game more or less was the next thing for a lot of us, SSF2 is a flash game that’s limited by it’s engine, even despite the absolute magic these developers have put into it to push it far beyond any other Flash project. Fraymakers was or will hopefully eventually be the next step for the scene and for a lot of us to move forward. While the competitive community may, the modding community definitely will not.

This is some old stuff but a good few years back, McLeodGaming was quite antagonistic towards the SSF2 modding scene. You’d be banned from the Discord if you posted mods there or showed off hitboxes. If you were shown to have leaked content from the unreleased beta build at the time, you’d be banned from online for months, even if you weren’t distributing it. I don’t have the proof of these things anymore but if you ask certain people who were around in 2017/2018, they could likely corroborate, but being a modder would actually decrease your chances of being hired as a developer if you were.

While the SSF2 dev team was hostile as shit to modding, it was at least somewhat justified. I won’t pretend that I wasn’t pretentious when it came to editing the game and I had a good amount of “it’s just that easy” moments and while I was being snobbish and many competitive players and modders alike were also being snobbish, they weren’t totally unfounded. Like sure we made fun of the balance but that wasn’t entirely unfounded. Let’s not forget 9b Zelda, 3.2 Samus, memory leak Lloyd, reworked Sora, Krystal, the terror that used to be Tails and so much more. There was also the matter of people sharing around leaks of the beta build of the game. But this was a very small minority in actuality.

There was still a very large community for this kind of content that was pretty much rejected rather than embraced. So modders went and made their own community. There began this sort of disconnect between the developers and the modbase. Sort of. Some developers were still very receptive and interested in the modding scene, shoutouts to TSON, but it was still largely rejected when it came to official spaces. Some of the higher ups in the modding community started to almost resent the people in charge of SSF2. Creating rifts that might still be there to this day.

I mention all this not to point fingers at anyone in particular or to say that one side was shitty. I think that both kind of were, but that whatever chance Fraymakers had to gain a large modding scene basically went out the goddamn window when just a few years previously they had done everything in their power to keep modded content away from their game. Because there was this anti-mod authority, all the people creating content in SSF2 just… went away from official avenues. FrayTools might as well just be a shitty version of Adobe Flash/Animate. If anyone was going to know how to use it, it would be the people who had spent years putting Vegeta into SSF2. But literally all those people are gone, off in their own spaces. But even beyond that, there’s another thing to keep in mind which is that Fraymakers is directly competing with SSF2.

Sibling Rivalry

Fraymakers is very similar to Flash 2. I’d even go out and say that Fraymakers probably runs on some refurbished SSF2 engine or at least borrows elements from it. But Fraymakers lacks a lot of the sauce that SSF2 has while also lacking a ton of content. When you make games that are so similar but one has so much more going on compared to the other, it’ll be hard to make people want to throw 20 bucks into a game like Fraymakers. This is ignoring one huge thing though which is that I wouldn’t call Fraymakers a game based around modding. You cannot change anything about the base game itself. You can only add content. You are not modifying anything, you are tacking on free DLC. As far as I can tell, the files for Fraymakers are impossible to get into and any of the talented people from the old days who could’ve figured out ways to break into it are long gone.

On the flip side, SSF2 is a game that is cracked wide open with tons of resources and complete and total freedom.

It isn’t hard to get your hands on the engine and to just kinda start doing shit. It’s annoying to get the process started and you’ll either need to pirate or buy Adobe Animate but boy, if you can’t do some great shit with the game once that’s all been done. There’s not really any reason for those SSF2 modders to come over with that being the case.

So Now What?

Well, I dunno really. I want Fray to succeed but with the lackluster post launch support and SSF2 being there, I find it hard to believe it’ll find true success. It’s retained some players but it seems to have gained basically none and it’s failed to get even half the attention it got at its early access launch since. But that’s the early access launch. There’s still some hope for it to regain relevance when it truly launches but that’s something the future can only tell. In the meantime, I can't really recommend Fray in a good conscience. Not when SSF2 is there on the table and doing pretty much everything better. It sucks but them's the breaks. Hopefully McCleod can turn it around.

#fraymakers #ssf2

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