I’m a new indy developer, and I’m just wondering if anyone had tips for making a fighting game 
Lots of patience and a good bit of 2D artistic talent!
See my sig. Good luck.
(Amon is right)
You might try one of the bone-joint type of animation tools like Smooth Moves, where you can position the limbs where you want them and animate based off fewer actual sprite frames. That would be a more new school way of doing it.
+1, that’s very efficient for 2D games. Unless I’m wrong, that’s what Mark of the Ninja (absolutely great game) is using.
The only downside comparing to traditional hand drawn sprites is that you can’t really oversize them, or exaggerate some motions (cartoon style, like Marvel vs Capcom or Skullgirls for example).
Plus Smooth moves allows you to add specific colliders on animation frames, so you could add the hitbox for the fist or foot for only the frames where the attack is thrown.
I don’t know if the bone animation tools support it yet but it would be even better to have a tool where each limb is a small mesh which you can deform, so you can do things like making the character look like they’re breathing, flexing of muscles, flapping of clothing, waving of hair etc, rather than just some stick-figure skeletal thing. Then you can stretch/scale/warp the shapes to make them more to your liking. I do agree though totally hand-drawn sprites are always the best but it’s a lot of work.
Heh, seems like an open market for the Asset Store 
(such a plugin would sell like pancakes for sure)
Smoothmoves would definitely be good for fighter. Mesh deforming would be amazing, but you can still get some good breathing effects etc in smoothmoves just from the normal scaling. I’m also excited about Spine Haven’t messed with it much yet, but they are adding 2d toolkit support very soon which I can’t wait for.
Yes!
There is a hole in the market for a 2.5D MUGEN.
Make a fighter that lets you make a character model from scratch, the attach animations to it.
People could make characters very fast and it would be populated with content in no time.
It would be a huge hit, I promise you that.
EDIT: Also, it would need an integrated way of sharing content so that you wouldn’t have to look all over the internet and punch in content piece by piece like MUGEN did. I don’t think people will put up with that anymore.
The Secret to making Fighting Games
1. live in france
2. set aside half a decade of your life
3. go slowly insane like an old grand master speaking in riddles on forums
Release your game with half content then a week later start overcharging for character add-ons.
@Hippo : I seriously rofl’ed …