[DLC] Wazama... I mean Move Craft - Out NOW!

"It's TIME!"

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WAIT WHAT? MOVE CRAFT?

Yes, Move Craft! As the name implies, it's a mode for customizing moves, splicing together existing animations, even creating brand new animations altogether. Although you can't play online using these custom moves - same as the custom parts/sprites introduced in Parts Craft - they are usable in any other offline mode.  Announced in late 2018, it was finally added to Fire Pro Wrestling World on June 17, 2020 for Japanese PS4 and worldwide PC users, with a release slated for the next day for North America on PS4!  As has been the case with Spike Chunsoft's titles on console, unfortunately, the EU version is delayed until June 23.  I recommend sending villagers with torches and pitchforks to Koch Media GmbH.

WHEN WAS THIS A THING!?

Move Craft was formally announced in late 2018, actually, during a Famitsu-hosted niconico douga live stream. With nicovideo being ... rather obtuse in design, this info went largely unnoticed, save by Miguel-F on reddit: seen here.

The seeds for it were planted much earlier, though, sometime during Early Access. During the twitch streams hosted by Firepro director Tomoyuki Matsumoto and translator David Kracker, there was mention of a "secret weapon" in the works for this game, though what it was going to be was left extremely vague. Though Matsumoto took notes of player requests, it seems like this may have been an idea from the very start of the game's development cycle, given the reference to it in this manner.

Throughout 2019, Matsumoto mentioned it in Japanese on twitter on multiple occasions, as well as in further Famitsu interviews, without a solid time table on its release. Creating the tool set required some considerable work, given the need to fix some serious bugs on the PS4 version and essentially get the game back on the rails after the porting staff was fired.

Around the time that the second STARDOM DLC was announced, Spike Chunsoft put out a roadmap for the final Firepro updates - Champion Road Beyond, the previously mentioned STARDOM pack, Parts Craft, and finally Move Craft sometime in spring 2020. Though it might have come out around that time under normal circumstances, well, we ended up falling as a species into Hellworld thanks to COVID-19 and that has derailed basically everything, even software development. So it took until just before the end of Spring to come out!

SO LIKE... IS THIS PC ONLY, OR...?

Move Craft is designed for use with both mouse and keyboard and on a gamepad - though the former method is no doubt a bit easier to handle! So in that respect, the PC version is probably the better choice... but! It's still something PS4 players can enjoy.

HOW DO YOU CRAFT MOVES?

There will be a full manual for the mode, because yes, it's that involved.

As you might have remembered from the Q&A sessions on Twitch, Matsumoto mentioned that the move animation team could take upwards of 1.5-2 work days to animate a particularly detailed move from scratch. Well, the reason it's kind of time-consuming is that the sprites in Fire Pro aren't like what you'd see in, say, Street Fighter or King of Fighters. They're split up into pieces of limbs - yeah, exactly like how it looks in edit mode! - which are rigged together like a marionette or a posing reference doll. And the animations are done frame by frame by positioning the limbs and telling the game which angle(s) to use per frame, for both wrestlers (up to 4, even).

Some moves, such as running attacks, dives, and most standing strikes, require two or more different sets of animations, too - one for when the attacker is below the opponent and thus facing away from the game camera, one when they're above, and then the side profile animation.

Move Craft essentially gives you the same set of tools the developers used, but with a somewhat more user-friendly presentation, sort of like the map editors released for various FPS games. As mentioned previously, using the tools, you can do something as simple as changing the damage properties of a move - like increasing the damage a submission does per "tick" of time, or adding a dizzy state to a move that doesn't normally have it. You can probably make fixed versions of the top-rope roll up reversals, Bamiyan Stamp, and El Es Culero, all of which tend to abruptly end matches, too. In fact, in previous tweets about Move Craft, Matsumoto encourages players to start with this, as it also gives you a good idea of how animations are broken down bit by bit.

Once you do that, you can try your hand at copy-pasting frames from two different moves - sort of like how people made GameShark codes for No Mercy on N64 to make new moves using existing animations. And should you be willing or able to see it through, you can start doing more elaborate things like what you may have seen on @suneed705's account over the past several months.

SO, WHAT ABOUT THOSE MOD SUITE MOVES...?

Surprise! Those were made with a very VERY early build of Move Craft. Yes, the mode has been in development for that long. There were... several issues with move positioning in this version, in that what you saw was not what you get. Additionally, any attempts at optimization for PC use hadn't been made - it ran like molasses even on a powerful PC. If you look at some of the older videos from both suneed and toyonakaOJF, you can get an idea of the work that was required then.

A lot of the time spent on Move Craft was in fixing these performance issues and other bugs from before. For example, making it so you can customize moves with particle effects (read: Big Fire and Mist), props of any kind - from something like the mic taunt or illegal weapon attacks, to the Chair's Illusion move - and other nagging problems.

OKAY, COOL, I CAN MAKE MOVES!

Yes.

... BUT HOW MUCH DO I HAVE TO PAY THIS TIME?

Absolutely nothing!

UGH, FREAKING SPORK CHUNKSO... wait, nothing?

Yes, nothing. It's a free DLC, and was announced as such several months ago!

It's also the last update on the plate for the development team, barring any necessary QoL fixes that pop up in the future. Of course, you can never say never, but this is being positioned as the series' swan song, and the way in which Matsumoto and Spike Chunsoft can keep it alive, as long as there are still people interested; enthused; addicted; obsessed with Firepro.



SO... HOW DO I GET IT?

If you're on Steam, and don't feel like finding it in the DLC link on the store or library, you can add it to the game here: store.steampowered.com/app/1120540/Fire_Pro_Wrestling_World__Move_Craft/

AND THE MOVES!?

Same method as always, through the Workshop on the Steam client or your web browser of choice, or on FPW NET on PlayStation 4 by going to firepro-w.com on your web browser! They added a number of new categories to represent every possible move situation.

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING!!!!

Then I'd suggest watching these videos about Move Craft mode! www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS2ekceoJplUlqll2d5ghCZBrkcDkRbYJ

Most of them are pretty short, though they show off the process of fixing a move animation in depth - about 2 hours and change of sweet, sweet limb repositioning goodness!