Month: February 2017

The Importance of Rock Paper Scissors

Celia Wagar2 Comments

You often mention the RPS model in some of your examples and answers but what does it entirely mean? I mean yeah, it’s Rock-Paper-Scissors, but how is this important in the context of video games?

In single player games it’s debatable. In multiplayer games, it practically is the game, assuming there’s hidden information of any kind, and that hidden information can have a disproportionate effect on the other player.

Most multiplayer games can be modeled as a huge web of rock paper scissors interactions. My Street Fighting for Beginners guide lists a few that are common in various fighting games.
https://critpoints.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/street-fighting-for-beginners/

I went over rush > greedy > turtle in the last ask, so here’s some other counters in Starcraft (because I’m not really familiar with other RTS games). Melee units usually beat missile units, air units beat melee easily, and missile units beat air. But of course it’s not really that simple. Missile units can beat melee units if they’re on higher ground, or far away. Air units can beat missile units with harassment and focus fire. Melee units aren’t ever really going to beat air units though.

Counters can be flexible. Fast moves don’t always beat slow ones, slow ones can win if they’re timed correctly. SFV even rigged the system to make it so slower medium and heavy moves can beat the faster light punches and light kicks if they trade on the same frame, making it so frametraps consisting of stronger buttons are better.

Counters can also have different levels of payoff. In SFV, if you block high on wakeup, and I hit you with a combo starting off a low, that’s usually a really powerful combo that can lead into another knockdown. If you block low, and I hit you high, then you take peanuts for damage. If I decide to throw you, then I get a moderate amount of damage and another knockdown. If you try to dragon punch me and I block it, then I get to use my best combo. On your end, if you block correctly, then you’re in a blockstring at worst, or can punish me at best. If you throw tech or jump versus my throw, then you’re home free. And if you uppercut my attack, then I take a strong single hit and get knocked down.

Good multiplayer games are built off webs of counters with situational risks and rewards, that also can counter more or less consistently based on the situation.

Good single player games can take a lot from this principle to build deep gameplay, but true counters aren’t good singleplayer design, because the player needs to be able to always win.

True counters are enforced in multiplayer games by hidden information. This can come in the form of the reactionary blind spot, or the fog of war in Starcraft. Real-Life Rock Paper Scissors only works because of the reactionary blind spot. You throw close enough to the same time to prevent the opponent from reacting and changing their throw. Sirlin’s game, Yomi, uses a hand full of cards your opponent doesn’t know, and laying down both cards simultaneously to get this effect.

Not all multiplayer games work this way, like Racing games most of the time, but all of them featuring direct player interaction do (so racing games feature this when your cars are close and trying to pass one another). I call the other style of game, “efficiency races”.

Back in your talk on RPS model you talked about true counters. What exactly is a true counter that makes it different from a regular one?

Alright, it’s not an official term or anything that people use. I was just trying to distinguish between the way in multiplayer games you can have things that just flat-out counter each other (like rock paper scissors) and in singleplayer ones, you can’t really do that. You can’t have an enemy that just straight-up counters the player’s actions, otherwise it turns into a guessing game, rather than a game of skill. So enemies in single player games can’t truly counter the player character’s choices, they can at best have soft counters that make things harder on the player depending on the player’s choice of action. If you play RPS with a computer, the only way to make it fair is if you see their throw first. A lot of single player games end up like this, they throw rock paper or scissors, and you need to react quickly to throw the one that beats it.

Enemies in single player games need attacks and behaviors that limit the effectiveness of easy player strategies, like running away, or running past the enemy. These can be framed as counters. Player likes doing this, finds it really easy to do, give the enemy a behavior that counters that so the player needs to play a bit more honest. However as above, it cannot truly counter it by totally shutting it down, it needs to be flexible and create a gameplay challenge in its own right. You can give the enemy a whip to pull back in players who try to run away, or give them a bullrush ability to rush down fleeing players, but in both cases, you need to make it so the player can dodge, block, or counterattack these things. So you can have these type of loose counters aimed at making certain player strategies less effective, but you can’t make an enemy who can just pick an option that beats whatever the player is doing.

Something brilliant about the Elites in Halo is the way they dodge. They never dodge your hitscan fire pre-emptively, only after being hit first. Many enemies in other games, like God Hand, Curse of Issyos, or Dark Messiah, don’t follow this rule, which means that sometimes they randomly don’t take damage for all intents and purposes and there’s nothing you can really do about it. Elites, they take a bit of damage at the start, then you can react to them dodging after the initial burst of fire, and keep shooting at them as they dodge.

Book Review: Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Joris Dormans

Celia Wagar1 Comment

What do you think of the book “Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design” by Joris Dormans?

I skimmed through it, and it seems pretty good. One criticism I’d have is the use of the Machinations flow diagram system for describing game logic, but it still has a lot of great textual examples backing it. I think that these flow diagrams never really work out too well (Raph Koster’s game grammar was kind of a disappointment, the one used in the book seems a bit more realistic though). They don’t have strong descriptive or predictive capabilities most of the time. I’d honestly prefer code or written word descriptions usually. But I mean, it’s not really taking away from the book at all.

Overall, the book features tons of good and useful information and examples of different game mechanics and means of implementation. I’d totally recommend it!

One critical thing it leaves out though is rock paper scissors. It loosely alludes to it when it goes over rushing versus turtling (RTS games have the early game counter loop of rush > greedy > turtle > rush). Greedy builds spend all their early resources on maximizing the rate of resource acquisition. Rush builds spend those resources on fucking people up as early as possible. Turtle builds spend those resources on defending against a rush. It’s pretty obvious to see rush beats greed and turtles beat rush. Greedy builds beat turtles because the turtles don’t have as strong an economy, and lose out in the long run. In Starcraft the meta has kind of settled on mixed turtle builds being the best early on (far as I know). The book sort of alludes to greedy builds on page 69, but it doesn’t say the word greedy anywhere and kind of forgets about this early example when it goes into turtling versus rush later on.

Without the dynamic of rock paper scissors, I think the book misses something really important to any type of multiplayer game, but it makes sense given the simulation game background the book appears to be coming from.

Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t think the economic modeling system used by the book is entirely appropriate to describe platformers, or action games or FPS games either really. It’s kind of limited to games that are more strictly about economics. Hmm. It does mention Dan Cook’s Skill Atoms, but it talks about those more in a structure similar to locks and keys in order to teach the player a chain of skills, rather than looking at the game dynamics from the perspective of a player who is already experienced and merely engaging with emergent systems composed of familiar components and familiar skills in an unfamiliar arrangement.

So, still a good book, but I guess it’s not comprehensive. Good if you’re building an economics game, or game that features economics somewhere, useless for building a racing game, or most action games including fighting games and platformers.

Real-Time Pause Menus

Celia Wagar1 Comment

What do you think about games having menus that freeze the in-game action? Should more stuff happen in real time? I vastly preferred how TLoU handled the backpack feature, than MGS3. gilgamesh

I’m kind of ambivalent on it. I’m fine with a lot of games freezing time for menus. In most cases, I don’t think it seriously matters.

Cases where I’m not fine tend to be games like Skyrim, where you can pop into a menu and heal yourself with an infinity of healing items. If you could do that in Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls, that would be horrible.

Basically, when you have a menu that pauses time, you’re effectively making any action that takes place inside the menu instantaneous. This is why all the games with weapon wheels slow time while you’re looking at the weapon wheel. Because they want switching to be instantaneous in game time.

If healing is instantaneous, it’s not risky. If you can carry an infinite number of healing items and healing is instantaneous, then you have infinite health. Megaman has subtanks or etanks you can use to heal in menus, and that’s fine.

If healing is limited, then instantaneous healing means you effectively just have a slightly bigger health bar. If you can carry unlimited healing items, then you have an unlimited health bar, which sucks.

Menus not pausing means that whatever’s in your menu, you better have set up before combat comes, or take a risk setting it up when combat’s happening. Witcher, they don’t want you brewing potions mid-combat, they want you with that stuff set up ahead of time (menus in witcher do pause, but you can’t brew potions I believe). In Dark Souls, similar deal, you gotta put on the right equipment ahead of time or pay the price in the moment.

I think it ends up being more about tone than substance most of the time. You can choose to have them real-time to make switching things in combat riskier if you feel that’s important to the tone of your game, but I can’t think of any specific game dynamics that rely on the player not being able to instantly do whatever in the pause menu.

Improving Beat Em Up AI

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Do you think the beat em up genre could do with a level of shaking up in the AI department? I find that the enemies mostly repeat the same moveset, and don’t act all the dynamic most of the time. Although the same could probably be argued about the enemies in a lot of martial arts films.

Here’s one big change: Record when the player deals damage, and perform attacks with inverse proportionality to where damage is taken. Keep updating this as the battle goes on. So if the player is only trying to deal damage during one particular cycle, or punish one particular attack, start using that attack less, forcing them to get damage elsewhere. This can help force continuous aggression from the player and improvisation instead of really safe play.

Beyond that, better AI is really a matter of thinking up specific behavioral characteristics. Making observably good AI is hard. Halo enemies dodge only after they’re initially shot, or if you throw a grenade or fire a slow moving shot. They can’t dodge pre-emptively or on reaction to your shots, so their dodging behavior is predictable instead of random. Continue reading →

Mass Effect Combat Review

Celia Wagar1 Comment

What do you think of the combat in the Mass Effect series?

I played about half of Mass Effect 1 and beat Mass Effect 2, but it was so long ago I don’t really remember it. I remember it was REALLY boring cover shooting. Mass Effect 1 was a poorly optimized abomination that managed to run poorly on my much newer than the game computer, when ME2 didn’t. Enemies don’t move a lot. They shoot hitscan bullets, there’s the usual regen health/shields. You play peekaboo with cover and try to tank enemy hits while shooting them, because they take damage permanently and you don’t. They also don’t take hitstun, and all your weapons use the same ammo (ME2), or have cooldowns with unlimited ammo (ME1). There isn’t a lot of reason to move around during combat, because enemies don’t move around much, and you’re basically always using mid/long range effective weapons. Occasionally enemies throw grenades, I think. I don’t think you have grenades, only cooldown abilities, some of which might resemble grenades. Continue reading →

Why Controllers Suck at FPS Games

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Why do you strongly dislike using controllers for first-person shooters? What exactly is wrong with using a controller as opposed to a mouse and keyboard? While I’m at it, what do you even think about console shooters (shooters made strictly for controllers).

Basically, unlike fighting games, controllers are a completely inarguably inferior method of control for first person shooter games. In fighting games, and a lot of other (digital input) genres, using a controller over another input method is usually a matter of preference. In first person shooters (and RTS), mice are the best way to control the game, period. Continue reading →

Audio Cues in Action Games

Celia WagarLeave a comment

If someone were to make a game, should every enemy attack have its own unique audio cue? Or should there only be one audio cue per enemy? Or should every enemy share the same audio cue?

All of these work. DMC has every attack given a different audio cue. Furi gives every melee attack the same audio cue.

Audio cures are helpful versus visual cues because average reaction time to audio is 170ms instead of 250ms from sight. The advantage of sight is you can process pictures in parallel, see the whole thing at once, where sound is a serial input, you can only really process one sound input at a time, even if you can juggle them really quickly. Continue reading →

Marth’s Throw Followups

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What’s the best way to use Marth’s throws in Melee/PM? As in, a couple of good examples for each throw? I often end up just using uthrow

Alright, I’ve mapped out Marth’s throw combos and setups rather thoroughly. Basically, Fthrow gets the most frame advantage, dthrow is like a reverse Fthrow with a worse angle and worse advantage time, bthrow is nearly useless, uthrow gets guaranteed combos on all applicable characters. Combos are not guaranteed with any other throw, except fthrow under specific circumstances. So Uthrow is your respect option. It gets the worst followups (on most characters), but it’s guaranteed regardless of their DI. All of Marth’s throws are so fast that they’re unreactable. It’s hard to react to how fast marth can grab and throw you, it’s impossible to react to which throw he decides to use. Uthrow is great on spacies. Fthrow and Dthrow are great on floaties. I recommend dthrow for super heavy characters. Bthrow is good for sending people onto platforms when you want to do platform setups at high percentages and almost nothing else. Continue reading →

Stealth Game Distraction Tools

Celia Wagar4 Comments

Stealth games need more distraction tools, here’s a list:

Old ideas:

Tap, bring enemies over to your position via sound, tapping on walls, or simply making noise in place
Coin, throw an object to make noise far from you

flash bang, temporarily disable enemies, but alert them. Can stun them during alert phase to allow for an escape.

Smoke Grenade, Obscures vision inside of and into an area temporarily, but alerts guards

Tranq, shoot someone from afar, they conk out after a delay

Sneak/Crouchwalk, move silently, but slowly.

blackjack, hit someone from behind/up close, they conk out.

Remote detonated noise maker, makes a noise, needs to be planted in advance

Water Arrow, shut off light sources

Moss Arrow, dampens sound on a surface

Decoy, guards will follow it when in alert if they can’t see you, will be drawn to it otherwise, dishonored 2 lets you swap places with your decoy and leaves the decoy to fight

Cardboard Box, move slower, but ignored while staying still, unless directly in guard’s path
Camouflage mat, like cardboard box, but must be set up

Fulton, dispose of guard bodies

Stealth Action Camo/invisibility potion, cannot be directly perceived, lasts a limited amount of time.

Disguise, allows access to areas granted by disguise. Certain suspicious actions may trigger an alert
Possession, like disguise, but possess a guard or animal, moving them around until they’re released.

Run Silent, removes the sound of your footsteps temporarily, allowing you to move fast silently.

Camoflage, blend into certain areas/surfaces, can be changed to match surfaces, octocamo in MGS4 changed automatically based on staying still

thermal vision/wallhacks, lets you see through walls, usually blinded by sources of light or heat, like grenades or flashbangs

Scouting Orb, see from another viewpoint, limited use

Lean, see around corners, making yourself slightly visible in the process.

Directional Microphone, Hear further in a specific direction

EMP/Chaff grenade, disables electronic sensors temporarily without alert

Magazine/stuffed puppy snare, lures enemies in and holds their attention, even when in investigation mode

Fake Death/Revival pills, Allows a player to fake being killed during an alert, then revive themselves, wait too long and die for real

Handkerchief, inconspicuous melee conk during disguise
Cig Spray, inconspicuous slightly ranged conk during disguise

Colored Smoke Grenades (Yellow, Red, Green, Blue), From MGS4, trigger enemies to laugh, get mad, scream, or get sad, then fall unconscious afterwards. Laughing has enemies kill those on their side, anger has them kill other non-allied enemy combatants. During these last two they’ll ignore snake. While screaming they’ll run around.

Bamboo dart, stuns enemy very briefly, causes them to investigate where it came from

Caltrops, stuns enemy when walked over

Blink, instant teleport to a position, ignoring everything between including guards and their line of sight. Can get away when spotted, ideally sets the investigation point to where you teleport to.

Swoop, move quickly across a short distance without making sound, limited by a recovery/cooldown time.

Bend time, slows guards, making it easier to move around them.

Stops guards, making it easier to move around them, or possibly through their line of sight temporarily.

Remote Drone/clone/spiderbot, can scout areas, sometimes using different routes and movement abilities than you, attack or interfere with enemies without risking yourself. Usually has limited environmental interactions, being incapable of completing some objectives

Patsy, accuse other guard of being a bad guy while disguised during a clearing phase

New Ideas:

Blur Ward, Place a small zone that when guards step into it, they cannot perceive anything outside that zone, but don’t realize something funny is up unless something egregious happens, or maybe the effect wears off based on how long they stay in there.

LIFE gun, Nonlethal tranq weapon that overheals enemies and buffs them for when they wake back up, so you can tranq people, but in the process you’re making them more powerful later

Holo-wall, an object that makes a detour guards must move around, can make hiding spots out of dead end hallways. Expires when passed by too much or after a period of time

Mass Mind Tuner, changes guard’s affinities towards certain objects, lets say red, yellow, and blue arbitrarily, so they patrol around these objects more frequently. Allows you to adjust the guard patrol patterns, but as a matter of level design, this opens up and closes different routes as well as forcing guards in the short term to move by you, so you gotta keep your wits about you (this absolutely depends on good level design and guard scheduling). Can have differing effects based on each guard’s distance from the affiliated object at the time of tuning, determining the direction they go, so the player needs to use timing and adapt in the moment.

Smelly garbage, makes guards adverse to moving near an area, might make them surround the areas around it though. (needs a better drawback, and a clear counter)

Reversi, Reverse guard patrol schedules, so they patrol backwards

Fake Grenade, makes guards rush away from a specific point, potentially onto the player’s position.

Slow Guard, makes a specific guard’s movements slower or stopped temporarily, broken by alert. Slow people while they’re in favorable positions. Faster to alert in this state, maybe wider peripheral vision

Caffeine Shot. Guard spends less time standing still, goes through patrol route faster. Speed people up to get them out of your hair quicker. Alert triggered more quickly, buffs enemies during alert.

Recall Point. Set a point that can be teleported back to, maybe takes time to teleport back to, maybe the point is conspicuous and can be destroyed.

Fear Gas, (inspired by the MGS4 green gas grenade) causes enemies to temporarily run in fear, ignoring the player while doing so, mixes up guard positions all over the place, potentially in good and bad positions, gives you a chance to move through enemies in the short term. Alternatively, you could need to hide while the fear effect is going on and take advantage of it afterwards.

Darkness aura, decrease guard vision cones in a limited area, triggers investigation and clearing of area. Like a less effective, but presumably larger radius smoke grenade.

Pretty Painting, draws guard attention, they don’t investigate it, but they can’t look away from it while patrolling, effect is stronger as they get closer to it. Won’t look over their shoulder at it though.

Position Swapper, swaps your position with a guard or other person. Makes them want to get back to where they just were.

Sleep gas but slow, temporarily makes a small area that will put enemies to sleep if they stay in it for too long.

Sleep poison, sets guard to clearing mode, gives them time limit to find you before succumbing to sleep, ineffective on alerted enemies

Shoulder Tap, causes enemy to turn around in your direction and look around for a bit.

Instant Barricade, throws up a wall behind you that enemies need to destroy or go around. Very loud.

Push, shunts enemies further away from you, making space to run. Obviously triggers alert.

Trip Wire, a wire that trips enemies who run over it, temporarily stunning them, ineffective on enemies in idle or investigating states, will be removed by those and trigger clearing. When Tripped, extra time can be devoted on knocked down enemies to easily knock them out.

ADHD Inducer, Guard in Alert or Clearing is temporarily forced down into doing an idle patrol of the immediate area. If they can directly perceive you when hit, they will only have a momentary lapse in concentration.

Swift Kick in the Shins, slows guards down.

Sonic Flashbang, deafens guards temporarily, also stuns for a brief period. Causes them to go into clearing or alert phase while still deaf.

Meme Machine: Change a guard’s memory so it remembers everything that they currently know as being in the wrong state

Amnesia: Wipe all current object state knowledge

Meme Virus, set a charge on one guard, have them pass it off whenever they encounter another guard, so it gets passed between guards one by one. Not duplicated, just passed. Then some effect on whoever’s holding it.

Block off doors, either with an adhesive tool, or by physically moving objects in front of them.

Recorder/tapedeck, record guard conversations and play them back in different places for an effect, maybe to keep people out of a room

Sticky floor: Slows down pursuers who walk through it. Useful in escapes.
Glue bomb/thrown object: throw at people chasing you to stun them briefly, giving you a chance to run away. Probably only stun for like half a second, because more than that would end the chase completely.

Constraints to think about:

Guard movement paths through levels, predicting and affecting it. How can you reward someone for predicting where a guard will be in the future? How can you reward them for predicting where multiple guards will be in the future? How can guard paths be altered strategically, how can this have drawbacks as well as benefits? Maybe tune guard affinities to inspect and patrol around certain areas?

Items targeted at interacting with different guard states (idle, investigate, clearing, alert, unconscious, dead). How can you interestingly move them from one state to another? How can you differentiate the states? How can you manipulate them while keeping them in the same state?

How can these be made to have varying effects based on when and where they’re used in relation to the guards?

How can the guards’ scheduling be affected?

Scale, how can you make people worry about future and past encounters more? Maybe a way of setting up

Affect guard vision, change what they look at?

How can escaping be made more interesting? Ideally in cycles of causing the alert, running away, and triggering more alerts as you go.

How can clearing phases be made more interesting? How do you force people to pick good hiding spots, then move from them regularly? How do you give people options when they’re cornered? How do you give people options to get the guards to not look where you are currently hiding versus the other hiding spots in the room? Rather, how do you make selecting a good hiding spot a fuzzy heuristic evaluation instead of a binary right or wrong?

Guard states

Idle: No perception of the player, purely following schedule
Investigation: moving slowly to look at something outside of patrol, small perception of player, not coordinating
Caution: Follows Alert and Clearing phases, like Idle, but skips investigation phase to go directly to clearing, and has more aggressive and fast patrol patterns.
Clearing: Moving quickly to check over areas, follows direct perception of player, but not currently perceiving player, coordinating together
Alert: Moving to attack player, directly perceiving player, coordinating together
Unconscious: Cannot act, revives after a timer, can be revived by other guards, triggers investigation or clearing
Dead: Cannot Act, triggers clearing
Injured: Can act, Actions impaired during active states

On guard AI: maybe enemies could have narrower vision cones during alert and clearing phases and more wide ones during investigation and idle. So they have the easiest time seeing you when idle, and the hardest time while alerted. This also incentivizes moving around more during clearing and alert phases, when players normally want to bunker up.

General categories of tools in Stealth games:

– Distraction

– Escape

– Information

– Self Obscuring

– Disablers (weapons)

– Mobility/Area Access

Enemy Ideas:

Eleven Men, an enemy that can split off and rejoin

An enemy that can see in all directions but not hear (dishonored 2 sort of did this with jindosh’s robots, but only 2 directions, which makes more sense than seeing in all directions, which is kind of dumb actually. narrower vision cones in multiple directions makes a lot of sense)

Enemy that is blind, but good hearing. (feel like this has been done before)

An enemy that can see extremely far, but tight like a laser beam

Enemies that function like pacman ghosts, alternating between investigation phase and sleep phases, regardless of what you do and whether you trigger them, so there’s always some enemies that aren’t just purely patrolling (and therefore function as simple timing puzzles), but are actively looking for you and thus need to be avoided.