Thank you! Always love to hear from people who enjoy my games.
The music is by Rory Donovan: https://soundcloud.com/r4ry_donovan/albums
He helped me with a bunch of previous projects as well. This time I basically told him to make something inspired by the nightclub fight scenes in John Wick, Blade, The Matrix etc., maybe with a bit of Perturbator, and he really nailed the vibe, even on kinda short notice. I had also made a beat counter system for one of my previous projects and was able to reuse a small snippet of code here.
Another inspiration was an old Flash game called Death Vegas, it has a few similar elements but without the rhythm aspect.
For a bigger, more polished game I would probably include more than 5 moves per character, different characters with unique moves and expand on the resource management/special attributes of their specials. The special or "X" meter ended up being crucial to making VS interesting, since you can cancel any move into special, and follow up with anything after it, without any recovery. Combined with the fact that simultaneous attacks always clash you can use it both offensively for combos and defensively to clash with an attack that would otherwise punish you after a whiff.