ApochPiQ, Thank you again. You answered all my questions. And given the information you just provided me, my only other question is what are the chances a publisher would green light a new fighting game specifically, by a company I start? If lets say in the future I do start a company and my team members and I are known to have good track records in delivering a shipped product. I ask because one doesn't really see any new fighting game IP's coming from large companies within the U.S. Do you by chance know why this is?

Also forgot to ask, can games in 3d space still be considered simple games? And if so, to what extent is this simplicity constrained to?

Thanks to all who contributed to this thread.

Thank you DarklyDreaming. Can you elaborate on what you mean by this: "Don't be mistaken, you can certainly create a fairly simple 3D game if you are determined and smart enough with a reasonable amount of time investment. But it will have to be a very simple concept or it'll get awefully complex dangerously fast" What is considered a very simple concept?

I think I might end up going the indie route though, even if mistakes are made. I was speaking to a friend and he said the creator of Mount & Blade, sought help online by posting his vision of what he wanted in the game to many forums, and many people contributed since they really liked his idea. Does anyone know the details about the development of this game? For example, did he pay the people who worked on his idea and did it start as a commercial venture? I can't find any of this info on the game.

Hodgman, I forgot to ask you, but when you said this, "Also importantly, you've got to realise that your first attempts at game-dev are going to be flawed." Okay, well what is it that makes someones attempt at game development flawed? Is it lack of knowledge? Because if so, can't someone just come to a forum such as this or go to school to learn about their respective practice? Is there something I'm missing here? I get that doing this as a hobby is potentially unstable, but can't other team members pick up where other team members who took leave on the project left off?

Hello SwordMaster, I'm a long time reader first time poster here. I'd like to add my two cents on your original post.

In regards to which engine is right for a custom 3d fighting game, there are several things to consider. With Unreal Engine and CryEngine, you have complete and proven full featured game engines that have state of the art features and extremely complex systems already set up such as particle systems and animation systems. With something like XNA or some other "starter" engines there is almost nothing already done for you but the bare basics of 3d engines. If you went with UDK or CDK, you have access to some very good level building tools and features. If you chose to go XNA or some other starter engine you get a blank slate with the bare workings BUT this blank slate enables almost limitless extendability with any features you can think.

If you can find a programmer who is looking to expand their skill set and have fun not too worried about commissioned paying job, I would go with XNA. I say go with XNA because with a fighting game, the core of the game, the soul of the game is the fighting action, not so much these incredible realistic levels with all these things going on at once that will seriously suck some computing power. Can you make lower detailed levels in these engines, sure but that kind of defeats the purpose of using them.

Building a fighting game from the ground up may be the better choice because from the get go all your systems that the programmer will implement can be focused around character to character interaction whether that is one character fighting many at once or one on one or whatever. Also, your team will be doing a lot of prototyping, which can go pretty fast using something like XNA since it is Very well documented, has been used to develop some good commercial games and it will be far more simple because it is so basic to start with so you eliminate that complexity while being able to extend the engine feature by feature only including what you want.

So get a few people who are enthusiastic about fighting games, and start from the beginning, get an animated character into the engine and go from there. And keep in mind when your starting out these don't have to be custom made characters, download some characters that have been extracted from other games and use them in prototyping while your modeler is making your custom models that way your animators/riggers can go ahead and start working with the already made models.

Once your team can get animated characters inside the engine then they can start work on implementing your fighting engine, the part of your fighting game that governs how characters will interact with each other and the environment.

I am no expert, but you get like minded people together who are enthusiastic about the project and not concerned with getting payed right away, some great things can happen.

By the way I am a martial arts fanatic and want to play this fighting game so hurry up.