I wouldn't be so sure. MikeZ, it's creator, has an absolute toaster of a laptop and he's able to run the game fine.

But the Skullgirls has an infinite protection system!

Actually, people have crunched the numbers. If it keeps up at the rate the donations have been going? It'll definitely be met.

...and Fighter Maker 2000, the engine that Fighting is Magic was originally run on, probably wasn't intended for four legged fighters either.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what an 'engine' is, by the way. It's the foundation you build a game on, there's nothing endemic to Skullgirls built into it that would somehow make nothing except games exactly like Skullgirls possible. To put this into perspective, what do Alice: Madness Returns, Borderlands 2, Mass Effect, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Gears of War have in common?

Unreal Engine 3.

If you aren't going to support Skullgirls, you shouldn't think of a donation (should you even make one) as a donation towards Skullgirls and more as patronage and appreciation of the insane amount of work that Lab Zero, it's developers, put toward their project and their commitment to the community that has gathered around their project. Whatever you might think of the Skullgirls designs (I'm well aware they're contentious, though I've never had a problem with them), you should at least recognize the great deal of effort that their artists and animators put into making them. Part of the appeal of Skullgirls doesn't even come out of the designs themselves - more that all of the characters are drawn and animated by hand. It's a very difficult process that demands each frame be individually drawn, corrected, cleaned up, and shaded, and coloured, and it pays off with, well:

http://i.imgur.com/ekJAjQ2.gif
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzlj04pWMN1qanw...

Whatever you might think of the designs themselves, there's an undeniable amount of heart, effort, and time that goes into the actual animation - and the character in the first gif actually has the LEAST amount of frames in the game, an astonishing 1200. That's a really, really serious amount of work. For gains that a lot of people don't really wind up understanding.

Of course, the simplest answer is just not to donate. You have more than a few entirely valid reasons not to pitch in and if you spend all this time trying to convince yourself it's a bad idea or something you're not willing to support and going through with it regardless, you're in all likelihood going to regret it.

You'll have to explain this one to me, because 2D games are hardly 'plentiful' by any sense of the word, and it reads awfully dismissively of the absolutely immense amount of work that goes into crafting 2D art - especially in fighting games. Sprites that need to individually drawn frame by frame. Characters will usually have hundreds and hundreds (maybe even more than a thousand) frames making up their entire animation set and none of this is made easy by 3D (or even Flash) techniques like skeletons or rigging. It's all done and checked by hand. You ever wonder why the mainstream animated film industry as a whole has moved on from hand drawn animation since Toy Story? Certainly, part of it was a misguided attempt to emulate its' popularity, but CG proved to be a cheaper, easier, and faster solution to animation. It just really kills me to see people who misunderstand the differences or write them off.

I don't mean to call you out or jump down your throat or whatever, but there are better ways to say you're not interested than writing off an entire medium. I really wish I lived in a world where 2D games were generic and plentiful - because '2D games' that use more than preexisting sprites or aren't drawn in more than 8-bit format are very, very, very few and far between.

Not with that attitude. They made 400k in fourteen days, 325k in twelve is hardly impossible - the attention it's been receiving within this community and more should be enough to push it into the realm of belief, and almost every fairly visible crowd-funding project that goes through channels like Kickstarter or IndieGogo (in this case) see a massive uptake of donations in the last 48 hours or so.

But what do you think the 'Skullgirls engine' is? Skullgirls? Or something else?

The fact of the matter is that FM2000 is a vastly outdated piece of software (the hint is in the '2000') that Mane6 spent a lot of time trying to fight rather than actually work on. None of the features of Skullgirls are endemic to the engine that Lab Zero uses, if that's what you're implying. It's a framework, nothing else. It just happens to be far better at it than FMK2000.

I can assure you that what you 'liked' about the fighting engine in Fighting Is Magic had nothing to do with the fighting engine and everything to do with the efforts of Mane6.

It was lost somewhere in your entitlement.

It's not their fault they needed to throw out a year and a half worth of work on their project, and picking up the pieces with the good will and graciousness of more than a few prominent figures in and outside of the brony community is far more constructive than just souring over game development in general and putting the entire thing to bed. Just because it's no longer about ponies doesn't mean you need to condescend towards it.

I absolutely would not be surprised to see Lab Zero hire Mane6 after their new project is finished. They're an absurdly talented bunch and Lab Zero's been very good about their olive branches.