The Inception
Cloudstep was founded by Lei Ogerio and myself, we are roommates from college at UF. Lei introduced me to fighting games with Guilty Gear Strive, and from here I was completely captured by the genre, I was trying all sorts of different games like Street Fighter 6, Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising, or Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code. I became obsessed with these games, the FGC, and the techniques, and Lei was by my side through all of it.
However, as Lei and I kept jumping through different games, liking and hating different elements of each game and ultimately being dissatisfied with the landscape of fighting games. These huge studios were completely disconnected to the user base and the only noteworthy games were massively established IP’s. Lei and I decided, we want to build the game that we want to play, and with that Cloudstep was born.
The Idea
The first idea was a cyberpunk-adjacent game called Terminal Zero, where character’s powers and the techniques of the game is derived from the these characters living in a game that had some glitches, allowing some characters to have powers. With this rendition, we also wanted to do sprite-based animation for everything, the characters, VFX, all of it. Reason being that Lei had a longer background in 2D art, and we were heavily inspired by Unernight In Birth II. Additionally, we assumed it would be an easier load for the programming as well.
As we worked though, we began to feel as though our scope was a little limited, Lei feeing the story potential for Terminal Zero was smaller than he would have liked, and the potential visual fidelity not being where we wanted either. With this, we decided to pivot, new IP and new visuals. Then we settled on Odekeeper, a high-fantasy anime fighter with 3D models for our characters. We drew very heavy inspiration from Guilty Gear Strive for our visuals, we loved the anime-like style that the game had and the quality of 3D models. This however was a huge effort, but we got to work.
The Engine
Following our inspiration by Guilty Gear, we investigated how they made their game, learning the ardous task of getting Unreal to look the way we fell in love with. It was as though they had to fight the engine every step of the way to get the 2D feel using 3D models. Additionally looking at the landscape of fighting games, it seems extremely common to use custom engines from Street Fighter, Melty Blood, and King of Fighters. So the idea of making our own engine was not out of the blue in our genre.
The pivot from 2D to 3D was a large one for our team, but thanks to Samuel Morse, a software engineer on our team, it seemed possible. Him alongside Alex Kim and myself, our engine team was complete.
The Present
That brings us to today, Lei on art, Sam, Alex, and I on the software. We are working very hard to get a demo out and we optimistically hope to get one out by this summer. Follow along as I post updates on here and soon enough we will launch Cloudstep on social media!