Do arcade-like game design have a place in the modern era?

Okay, what’s Arcade-like design? Lets have a look at some elements I think fit:

-Low Persistence. Almost nothing is retained across sessions, or built up over time. You always start and end in the same place. Even across levels few things are typically carried over, so there is no worry about things like running out of ammo.

-No Direct Tutorials beyond a 30 second video (at most) at the beginning of play

-Pick up and Play, get into the action instantly due to low/no investment and short play cycles.

-Short Session time. 30 minute or less session times.

-High Difficulty, likely to die or take damage at any time.

-Fairness, all damage can be avoided, no need to manage attrition over time.

-Small numbers. Anything that’s a resource usually is dealt with in small chunky integers that are easy to keep track of. Like health being lives or icons, and granting mercy invincibility when you’re hit.

-Temporary powerups that are picked up and have a big effect. No 2% bonuses versus undead here. Quad Damage or go home. Powerups replace typical resources and are nonessential to progress.

-Lives, sometimes instead of Health. Lives change how checkpointing works, so you have big checkpoints (for when you continue) and little checkpoints (for when you lose a life). Sometimes lives are basically just health and the character respawns on the spot when they lose a life.

-Continues. When you run out of lives or health, you can put in another credit to continue, sacrificing your score, but getting all your health and ammo or whatever back. Lets you destroy the difficulty of the game in exchange for currency. But if you’re better, you can spend less money. Sometimes you’re asked to repeat some sections in exchange for continuing so it’s not completely free.

-Scoring. Scores give people a higher standard of play to work towards, and encourages 1 credit clears. Scores can institute their own systems of risk versus reward, track more carefully how perfect player perform certain actions, award players for conserving resources, milking enemies and the environment, and consistent performance. Scores are superficial, not used as a form of persistence. Gives people a reason to come back to games even when they beat them, and to not credit feed.

-Lack of exploration. You never backtrack, the way forward is always obvious. Branching paths may exist.

-Time Limits. Progress either continues automatically, or actual time limits penalize players that do not progress. Progression is inevitable. The only thing preventing progression is death.

-Local only. Everything happens at that one machine or set of machines.

-Twitchy fast action. No Puzzles. Usually nothing that could potentially be memorized or more accurately, trivialized through memorization.

What’s arcade design in a nutshell? “No Bullshit, go right at it, enjoy.”
I think there’s an audience that wants this, but developers and gamers keep getting distracted by other stuff. Not that it’s all bad, there’s a lot of games that you can’t really do in the arcade, like Dark Souls of course. However I think there’s something to be said for each of these design elements.

You’ve talked about how a lot of Melee’s advanced mechanics were intentional. So, how do you determine, in Melee or any game, whether or not a mechanic is intentional?

Only a couple are truly intentional honestly. Like L canceling is undeniably intentional. Edge canceling and teeter canceling are arguable but unlikely. Wavedashing was discovered and left in. Multishining is almost certainly unintended.

How do I judge? I look at how the mechanic works, what the developers definitely did implement that lead to the trick, how hard the trick is to perform, changes in the sequels.

Like L canceling, you look at that and it’s almost certainly intentional. There’s no other mechanic in any fighting game I know of or heard of that can increase the speed at which an animation plays. That’s the type of thing you’d need to specifically set up. Having a 7 frame window beforehand is even more unlikely. Having a buffer to speed up the next animation, that’s the type of thing that doesn’t appear by accident.

Wavedashing I largely argue is intentional because I’m stubborn and the sakurai interview. Wavedashing works because air momentum is inherited into ground momentum, and airdodging imparts momentum. Those are things the developers had to set up, but if this were any other game I wouldn’t argue wavedashing is intentional.

Jump canceling in Devil May Cry, that’s something else that can only be intentional, because it’s in every game in the series, and it’s too weird to allow the character to jump in midair without the normal midair jump effect (the magic circle beneath his feet) and reset all his air options.

Kick Glitching in Mirror’s Edge is weird, same with the other fall height resets. When the animation ends, you’re set to a grounded state. There’s no real purpose for this. One might presume that maybe this fixes weird collision issues with the floor, but it doesn’t. It’s there, and there’s no reason for it to be there. Maybe they just goofed in development and set the state to standing rather than falling after a kick, roll, or fence damage?

(description reads: “It would’ve been so easy to fix for the developers, it’s almost like they put it in the game on purpose.”)

Another one is Charge Partitioning in 3rd strike. It’s so weird, it’s hard to judge if it’s intentional. First they clearly build a timer that allows you to act while retaining charge, but it starts at an effectively random point. Maybe it’s there so you can do standing normals and cancel them into charge moves? Maybe it was improperly implemented? Who really knows? Since the timer meter exists, I’d point towards intentionality with bad implementation.

All the soul duping glitches in Dark Souls I’d argue are unintentional. They typically involve buffering actions, then replacing the item that’s used. The system is set up to perform the action associated with the animation, but decrement the counter of the item current slotted. Similarly, dropping the item before the counter can be decremented is an obvious abuse.

Intentionality doesn’t matter much to me though.

Should games have health upgrades? They just seem like ways to make the game easier.

Hmmm, maybe?

Like for nonlinear interconnected games it can make returning to older areas less repetitive, since you can breeze through everything without much risk and avoid content fatigue. Continue reading →

What do you think of tradeoffs in games (like trading all your meter for a melee attack in Vanquish, or trading off tankiness for mobility in the souls series, etc.)

If you don’t have tradeoffs, then elements that overlap in niche literally don’t work. This is a rather weird question, it’s kind of fundamental to games that everything needs to have a tradeoff in some way. Tradeoffs are what differentiate design elements. I mean, this is super broad. It’s hard to say anything.

Nier which I reviewed recently is probably a good example of a game that lacks tradeoffs between its elements. You have charge attacks, a ton of magic types, multiple weapons, but you never need to really trade off between them, because it’s always better to not charge attack, to use only dark lance, dark fist, dark blast, and to always use the stronger weapons.

I mean, tradeoffs between things with similar roles (things that make you move fast, deal damage, inflict hitstun, etc), are what allow multiple of these things to exist in the system, they have differing functions because they trade off. Simple.

Adding a cost to things, spending one thing to get another, helps prevent you from doing that one thing all the time, if that is the most efficient thing to do otherwise. Yeah, you might have a powerful rocket launcher, but you can only use it 3 times, so then the skill is in using it at the right times.

If you lack tradeoffs then people will only use the strongest thing. Balance between elements promotes diversity in play style, makes it a lot harder to win using any individual thing. Tradeoffs are what make elements themselves different from other elements, and what reinforce their use.

Not much else I can say.

Do you think that the whole “2D is more precise than 3D” argument/meme that gets brought up primarily by nostalgic old guards has any truth to it? Tbh, having grown up with 3D games, I find 3D Mario much more precise and easier to control than any of the 2D Marios (except the New games). Granted the old 2D Marios had slippery movement and looser controls, but the point stands, that it kind of depends on which one you developed your muscle memory with. Plus, with all the scary-precise speedruns, I don’t think the argument holds much salt. I’ve never even seen anyone specifiy just what they mean by “precision” other than “I find 3D Mario difficult b/c I’m an old man, therefore 2D games are more precise”.

Precision is vague here. Does it mean that in 2d you’re able to more reliably replicate scenarios involving fine movement, or does it mean allowing one to express a greater degree of precision in operation? In 2d games, there are less variables involved in their operation. Especially old 2d games on pixel based platforms, because there literally was no unit of movement smaller than a pixel (even though a lot of these calculated movement in subpixels, the environments didn’t have subpixels anywhere, so it generally didn’t matter), where the same is not true for say super meat boy or Ori and the Blind Forest, where units of measurement can be infinitely subdivided. Continue reading →

Are there some types of RNG you’re ok with?

Looking at my notes, yes, there is.

Enemy attacks in a TON of action games are at least partially random, but they’re designed to always be longer than 15 frames of startup, meaning you have time to react. There’s always a tell of some kind more than 15 frames away. Even if the attack startup is shorter than 15 frames, the tell can be the enemy approaching you, and knowing they’ll attack when in range. DMC3 has audio cues for every single enemy made so the game can be played practically blind with royal guard. Continue reading →

Why is it that collision boxes still have to be boxes and not other shapes that would better conform to the body of sprite?

Simple collisions like squares or circles on a 2d plane are extremely cheap and processor efficient. You could arbitrarily draw shapes on a 2d plane and compare if they overlap if you wanted to, but this costs more processing power per-frame.

The thing is, modern CPUs are actually powerful enough to do this. Game Maker games support arbitrarily shaped collision bodies. This is many times more expensive than rectangle collisions, but modern CPUs can totally handle it. The trouble is that it’s also a lot more time consuming to produce, and less consistent.

When you place rectangles, you can compare each frame to the last frame to see if they match up. You can reuse the rectangles even. You can easily scale something down if it sticks out too much, you can check exactly how high up a hitbox is and whether it will hit or miss another hitbox. That, and there’s a ton of weird shit that happens when hitboxes are too close to the model, like gaps between characters’ limbs, bits of the characters’ hittable area that stick out slightly too much. Tons and tons of glitches in all sorts of games are caused by having more complex hitboxes than necessary, which allow the characters to push through things, or miss by being too close or triggering a certain animation at the right time.

The basic idea is, if you keep it simple enough, then it’s a lot easier to build, debug, and results in less weird hitbox shit happening, like multihit combos (think chun li’s lightning legs) randomly dropping because the hit character moves slightly differently for a frame, or the edges of the character are drawn inconsistently between frames.

Probably the best example of this is SFV versus SFIV.
http://watissf.dantarion.com/sf5/boxdox/#cbt4/EC2-5MP-18

SFIV was known throughout its lifetime for having tons of ridiculous hitbox oddities that nobody could explain. SFV is keeping it simple, moving the boxes as little as possible, and it’s resulted in a vastly more consistent game to play and understand. I don’t think all games should go for this approach. I like games with highly articulated hitboxes, like smash bros, but it’s best to keep it consistent in most cases. And even smash uses more general hitboxes for stage collision.

Is it possible to make a game too hard?

Yes. Absolutely. It’s easy even. Just make a game where you need to do something that highly skilled people have trouble doing consistently multiple times in a row, like pressing a button on a 1 frame window, also releasing it on that frame, like 6 times, spread semi-randomly across a second. This is an extreme example, but it’s not hard to imagine more concrete ones.

On a more practical level, games need scaffolding for players. They need a difficulty curve for practical reasons. You can’t start someone off on the hardest combo trial, you gotta have them build their way up.

This is part of why depth is nice, because in deep games, there are a lot of ways to succeed. This means that if you can’t beat a challenge straight up, you can try it from another angle. Maybe you’re winning neutral a lot, but your punishes are really weak, so you can step that up. Maybe you’re not using your healing items as efficiently as possible. Maybe you’re taking too much damage in your focus to output damage. Should try the route on top versus the bottom, could try pressing the buttons a different way. This allows people to succeed at small things, even if they can’t beat the overall challenge, they can still see that they’re making some kind of progress, and there’s significant variation between each time they attempt.

Even back in the combo trial example, because combo trials don’t really have any depth if you consider them by themselves. They’re a straight up, do this really hard and specific thing, or you fail. If you just hand someone the hardest trial, they’re going to have trouble with even the first cancel or loop. If you work your way up through the trials, then it builds your skill, allowing you to begin tackling the harder ones, or even do better at combo trials in other games.

Probably the real mistake isn’t making something too hard, it’s not placing anything easier around it.