He also gives an interesting lesson on how hitboxes and collision works in 3D fighting games
Fighting game development has become exponentially more complicated in the past few decades, and sometimes not everything comes out right as it should.
One of the most infamous examples of such in recent memory came from a big Tekken newcomer, who released in a pretty messed up state, and now we have the story as to how and why that happened.
Longtime Tekken Director Katsuhiro Harada is talking quite a bit about characters and development stories lately like why Eliza is hard to bring back again and how the team made a last-minute change to Josie that kinda backfired.
He also recently discussed at length what happened with Fahkumram’s launch in Tekken 7 that still gives players nightmares.
Although it feels like the “new” Muay Thai fighter just dropped into the series not that long ago, Fahkumram hit Tekken 7 back in mid-2020, and there were quickly some big issues discovered.
Players found that the massive fighter appeared to have something wrong with his hurtboxes because it could be extremely difficult to hit Fahkumram using certain attacks because they’d simply miss him even though they visually connected.
This was especially a problem around his head and legs.
It got to the point the latest DLC character at the time was starting to get banned from tournaments, and Bandai Namco had to take multiple attempts to fix him since the first update didn’t fully solve the conundrum.
Harada pulled back the curtain in his own breakdown, and he confirmed there were issues with his hurtboxes or what he calls the “hit decision collision box” for 3D fighting games.
Unlike 2D games, hurtboxes aren’t actually boxes, but Harada shows examples of them actually being cylinders that account for positions in 3D space.
He shows how Tekken attacks can be viewed as line segments that represent the limb being used, and if the line connects with one of those cylinders, the move hits in simple terms.
Click images for larger versions
The problem with Fahkumram was his “hit decision collision box” made for a larger character was somehow mistakenly swapped out with a smaller one in the release build.
This means those cylinders covered up less of his body and left gaps where he essentially couldn’t be hit correctly.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t show what Fahkumram’s messed up hurtboxes actually looked like, though.
Harada claims this was not an issue during the character’s development, but rather an error that occurred in the final data conversion and compilation phase.
He describes how the testing team found the issue immediately after launch, however, it takes time to release a game update on modern systems even if the developers have already fixed something in-house.
Ultimately, the Director is glad they can respond to issues much easier now than in the past where fixes could only really come in whole new release and production versions.
There have been rumblings that Fahkumram may be returning to Tekken 8 as DLC for quite some time now too, so it’ll be interesting to see what the community reaction is if that does come to pass.
You can find Harada’s full discussion about Fahkumram’s launch issues in Tekken 7 below.
There are so many requests for LORE on each of the characters, but I will take a separate time since there are so many characters and episodes for the past 30 years.
As for Fahkumram, I will mention one point about a story that I can tell you now because it is in the past… pic.twitter.com/aKqZhApNrZ
— Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) November 19, 2024
There are so many requests for LORE on each of the characters, but I will take a separate time since there are so many characters and episodes for the past 30 years.
As for Fahkumram, I will mention one point about a story that I can tell you now because it is in the past (sometimes these episodes can only be told when it is in the past). Just before we released him, he had a major problem.
Or rather, it was discovered after we released him. There are many reasons why it was not discovered, but it is probably because the bug did not occur until just before the release, and it happened in the last data conversion & compilation.
The tuning team noticed the problem immediately after the release.
Of course, you all felt the strength of Fahkumram immediately after his release due to his long reach, but after a little more time passed, you began to realize that the secret of his strength lay in another factor, not just his reach (The length of his reach was as we had intended).
3D fighting games have various different internal systems from 2D fighting games. If you know the difference between these systems, you can say that they are not the same fighting game, but almost different genres. But I won’t go into details.
In Tekken and Virtua Fighter, there is a collision that judges the collision box of characters’ bodies with each other, and another collision box that judges the hit of the opponent character’s Arts (in addition to this, there is a judgment of the hit line of the technique and the trajectory of the Arts by the player who performs the Arts).
Looking at this element alone, it seems like there is no difference between 2D and 3D, but if you look at the pic we will be referring, you will notice the difference.
I have included only three pages of Power Point excerpts for reference in this area. These three images will help you understand the explanation of this post’s episode (but this is only a very small excerpt of the material, so this is not all of it).
Each character has a different physique, so every character has an original, personalized polygon model, Skeleton(Bone Rig), Body collision box, and hit decision collision box for their unique physique.
Fahkumram naturally has its own “hit detection collision box”.
Since Fahkumram is tall and has a fairly large build, the body collision box and hit decision collision box are also larger. For example, Marduk is one of the larger characters, so his hit decision collision box is naturally larger, and his body collision box is also larger (and his joint bones are longer, so he has a longer reach for the same animation).
But somehow, at the time, Fahkumram’s “hit decision collision box” – the collision box needed for him to take a hit from his opponent – had been replaced with a [small hit decision collision box] instead of the “hit decision collision” applied to the larger character. On the other hand, the [Body collision box] was correctly applied with a larger one for the system.
As a result, Fahkumram was released in a very troubling way: “During close combat and Air Juggle, the opponent’s character would be far away from Fahkumram, and furthermore, Fahkumram’s hit judges were small, making the opponent’s Arts hard to hit.”
These problems, as I mentioned earlier, were far from the original design and tuning stage, and were unforeseen troubles.
Of course, the problems were fixed in later patches. However, the difficulty with these problems is that they cannot be fixed immediately after release, because even if they are fixed within a few hours on the development side, they must go through the default re-debugging period and checks before release, and then go through the platform-side checks and approvals.
Still, we are now in an era where we can respond much more quickly than in the past.
As every player of the generation who knows the heyday of arcades knows, there was a time when many games and many fighting games had some problems, which were solved either among players or by arcade (game center) house rules, right?
Oops, once again the LORE character has become a failure story. Success stories are inevitably quickly forgotten…
I will tell you another time about the episode that led to his creation.