Rising Thunder was a cancelled

free-to-play Free-to-play (F2P or FtP) video games are games that give players access to a significant portion of their content without paying or do not require paying to continue playing. Free-to-play is distinct from traditional commercial software, which ...

fighting game A fighting game, also known as a versus fighting game, is a genre of video game that involves combat between two or more players. Fighting game combat often features mechanics such as blocking, grappling, counter-attacking, and chaining atta ...

developed by

Radiant Entertainment Radiant Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer based in Los Altos, California. Founded by twin brothers Tom and Tony Cannon in 2011, the company has developed ''Stonehearth'', a city-building game, which was released in July ...

. Originally released in alpha state in 2015, the game closed following the acquisition of Radiant Entertainment by

Riot Games Riot Games, Inc. is an American video game developer, publisher and esports tournament organizer based in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in September 2006 by Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill to develop ''League of Legends'' and went on ...

. A

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for t ...

version of the game with available server source code, entitled ''Community Edition'', was released in January 2018.

Gameplay

Rising Thunder was a free-to-play fighting game that used simplified controls, in contrast to most 2D Fighting Games which utilize motion or charge commands. This was to make the game more accessible while still being deep and balanced, being capable of standing up to years of high level competitive play. There were eight buttons in total which consist of three normals, three specials, an Overdrive/Super, and a throw. Each character had a listed fighting style and level of difficulty. The current build includes training mode, ranked match, and custom match. The game utilizes Tony Cannon's signature

GGPO GGPO (Good Game Peace Out) is middleware designed to help create a near- lagless online experience for various emulated arcade games and fighting games. The program was created by Tony Cannon, co-founder of fighting game community site ''Shoryuken ...

3 as a rollback netcode, making sure that matches are lagless. The game will also auto-detect frames per second. Rising Thunder currently supports native Windows controllers (

Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. As the successor to the original Xbox, it is the second console in the Xbox series. It competed with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generati ...

Xbox One The Xbox One is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. Announced in May 2013, it is the successor to Xbox 360 and the third base console in the Xbox series of video game consoles. It was first released in North America, parts of ...

) as well as PC-compatible arcade sticks. Rising Thunder uses an

Elo rating system The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor. The Elo system was invented as an improved ...

to determine skill rating and has a level-like system for ranking tiers. The matchmaker juggles the three factors being the players skill rating, location and time spent in queue. This will allow players to experience the best match possible.

Setting

The game takes place in the far future where robots will battle it out for supremacy.

Development

Development team Radiant Entertainment announced that they raised $4.5 million to build PC games. Radiant mentioned that Valve's

Steam Steam is a substance containing water in the gas phase, and sometimes also an aerosol of liquid water droplets, or air. This may occur due to evaporation or due to boiling, where heat is applied until water reaches the enthalpy of vaporizat ...

platform has created a central hub for game developers to post their games, attract, and monetize users. Rising Thunder is led by former

Capcom is a Japanese video game developer and publisher. It has created a number of multi-million-selling game franchises, with its most commercially successful being '' Resident Evil'', '' Monster Hunter'', '' Street Fighter'', '' Mega Man'', '' ...

and

Santa Monica Studio Santa Monica Studio is an American video game developer based in Los Angeles. A first-party studio for Sony Interactive Entertainment, it is best known for developing the '' God of War'' series. The studio was founded in 1999 by Allan Becker a ...

employee Seth Killian with assistance from EVO co-founders Tom and Tony Cannon. The game was announced in July at Evo 2015 by Radiant Entertainment's Seth Killian. It was confirmed it would utilize

Unreal Engine 4 Unreal Engine (UE) is a 3D computer graphics game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game ''Unreal (1998 video game), Unreal''. Initially developed for Personal computer, PC first-person shooters, i ...

and an updated version of GGPO titled GGPO3. Rising Thunder had external funding and did not need to be crowdfunded. The game is also going with a free-to-play structure built around selling cosmetics rather than charging people for gameplay. It went live in the form of a "technical alpha" version roughly one week after EVO 2015. Radiant mentioned they were inspired by games like ''

Dota 2 ''Dota 2'' is a 2013 multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game by Valve. The game is a sequel to '' Defense of the Ancients'' (''DotA''), a community-created mod for Blizzard Entertainment's '' Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos.'' ''Dota ...

'', which led them to use the free-to-play concept that most successful eSports games use so that ''Rising Thunder'' can have a large and active player base, as well as not needing to pay at all in order to play. On March 8, 2016, Radiant Entertainment was acquired by ''

League of Legends ''League of Legends'' (''LoL''), commonly referred to as ''League'', is a 2009 multiplayer online battle arena video game developed and published by Riot Games. Inspired by ''Defense of the Ancients'', a custom map for ''Warcraft III'', Ri ...

'' developer

. The Cannon brothers Tom and Tony announced that ''Rising Thunder'' would be closing down on March 18, 2016 as well as saying that they would be focusing on a new game. On December 18, 2017, it was announced that the game would re-release as ''Rising Thunder: Community Edition,'' incorporating local multiplayer and including the server source code for networked matchmaking.

Release

The game is currently in Technical Alpha which was initially released on July 28, 2015 to a limited audience. It was eventually released to the public on August 10, 2015. The Build 1292 patch fixed performance issues with the

User Interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

and

AMD processors The following is a list of AMD CPU microarchitectures. Nomenclature Historically, AMD's CPU families were given a "K-number" (which originally stood for Kryptonite, an allusion to the Superman comic book character's fatal weakness) starting wit ...

The Build 1341 patch added custom matches and lobbies, allowing people to play with friends. The current patch is Build 1391 which had balance changes and bug fixes.

Promotion

On September 9, 2012, well-known streamer ShowDown hosted the very first Rising Thunder tournament in

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for "Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

Evo 2012 The 2012 Evolution Championship Series (commonly referred to as Evo 2012 or EVO 2012) was a fighting game event held at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas on July 6–8. The event featured a major tournament for six fighting games, including '' Super Stree ...

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is a crossover fighting game developed by Capcom in collaboration with Eighting. It is an updated version of '' Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds''. The game features characters from both Capcom's video game franchises and comic book ser ...

'' champion, Ryan "Filipino Champ" Ramirez was the winner of ShowDown's inaugural tournament utilizing Chel.

Awards

References

External links

*{{GitHub, RiotGames/rtce-server 2018 video games Free-to-play video games Indie games Multiplayer and single-player video games Video games about robots Unreal Engine games Fighting games Video games developed in the United States Video games with 2.5D graphics Cancelled Windows games