Design Principles

Writing on principles of design that generally inform game design

Stealth Game Informational Warfare

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Do you think third person stealth games are inherently weaker than first person ones? Even when you get x-ray power in first person games like Dishonored, you still don’t have the same advantage of being able to see all the enemies around you, that a third person camera, inherently brings.

Depends on how important you think the game of information is in stealth games. early MGS and other top down or side-on stealth games don’t really prioritize this aspect at all (such as monaco or mark of the ninja). Though monaco and mark of the ninja (at least in NG+ mode) both hide where out of sight enemies are, only illuminating areas in your field of view (executed surprisingly well in mark of the ninja, not the type of thing you’d expect to work in a 2d game). Continue reading →

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.

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.

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 →

Cultivating Creativity in Game Concepts

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What is your thought process when coming up with game ideas? Do you think of the premise first? The game mechancs? The genre? All of the above?

I bounce all over the place. Creativity is the product of constant tinkering and recombining pieces. It’s about coming at things from different angles and being persistent about it. Sometimes I try to think about how FPS games can inherit certain desirable behaviors from fighting games. Sometimes I try to think up ways to counter common complaints with a genre (RTS is all about APM? How can we continue to incentivize APM, but limit its effect over more tactical play?) Sometimes I try to think of how to combine weird physics models with projectiles, or character/enemy behaviors, sometimes I see a really cool animated gif and ask if you could make a mechanic out of that. Continue reading →

The Effect of The Meta on a Game

Celia WagarLeave a comment

I’ve been hearing people say that if the meta of a game is figured out, the game becomes stale. If I’m not using the term right, I mean that if a game is basically figured out than it no longer becomes interesting and dies. Is this true?

You are using the word meta correctly. Metagame can refer to the ongoing process of figuring out the optimal way to play in a competitive versus setting. If the optimal way is found out, then it’s just a matter of improving at doing it closest to the optimal possible. Deep games help prevent this from becoming the case by having a massive number of relevant states. Shallow games are figured out more quickly. The efforts of the community can also affect this. Melee survived as long as it did in part because it is crazy deep, new discoveries keep being made, such as recently someone found a ledge tech option select that beats rising up Bs (Hold light shield as you grab ledge, then before they up B, hard press shield, this will trigger a tech instead of ledge roll, and you can punish them from tech, which also grants iframes) and in part because the tools that the community has used to explore the game were primitive initially and grew over time. SFV has not had the same benefit of slow lasting discoveries, because the community is way better at finding tech than in SFIV’s heyday.

When the meta is developed to its peak, then the game becomes samey because you only see people repeat similar patterns instead of playing in new ways. There are ways to fight this, like making the game deep, making the game require a ton of memorization and experimentation of permutations (making it complex), or patching it every month so everything is totally different and people have to figure it out all over again. You’ll never guess which one League of Legends does.

Even when the meta is fully developed and there is seemingly nowhere else to go, a game can still be fun for lower level players who have not gone that far into it yet, but it can be rather boring for high level competitors.

Checkers is considered dull by many high level players, same for chess. These are for similar reasons. the state space was explored to the Nth degree, and if the opponent pushes it somewhere undesirable, it’s easy to push the game into a draw. Despite that, Chess is a lot more popular than most video games. If you’re interested in this you should look into chess’s history, because it used to be considered a more romantic intellectual exercise, but modern development of the game lead to essentially memorization of massive numbers of board positions, which makes many high level chess champions not so fond of it. Go thankfully remains interesting at a high level, and probably always will.

So yeah, this is the primary thing that depth exists to fight. Staleness. On both a big level and a small level. Make every session different, make every moment different.

I would like to elaborate on my “meta” question. They stem from these two comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/59eimk/slug/d981lv5 and https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/59eimk/slug/d985e65. Are they correct?

The way I view it, the meta is a reflection of the game. The meta is the way it is, because the game is the way it is. The meta develops in reaction to players finding out more about the game, and showing more about how the game is efficiently played.

People hate the meta because they view it as a human social convention, rather than a human model of how the game works.

Creating balanced games is not impossible, blizzard just sucks at it. They got lucky with brood war, and also took a ton of community input, and the community balanced the game out by banning literally every map, and replacing them all with the equivalent of final destination (Lost Temple, and now Fighting Spirit). Blizzard haven’t really succeeded since then.

SFV released a year ago, and the meta has mostly solidified by now, however we’re seeing a massively diverse cast of characters in top 8s, taking tournaments, and bizarrely the top tier character, Chun Li, who is revenge of 3rd strike + SFIV light link into medium levels of good, is not winning any majors. Some characters clearly lost out, like Zangief, Bison, Juri, Ibuki, Alex, FANG, Laura, but this is a great result, and even the bad characters aren’t amazingly bad, with high level players repping them. So basically, good balance is not impossible. It’s possible to balance so well pre-release that you get this almost a year down the road. I think SFV is taking totally the right approach to balance by waiting a year between patches, and they did a super stellar job to begin with.

I agree that if the game doesn’t develop, it dies.

I totally disagree that smash bros becomes worse after knowing the metagame. The metagame is still developing, Fox’s dominance is still in contention, there are a fair number of viable characters besides the top two, there’s a massive number of strategies and approaches to the game that we still see play out regularly, which is why the highlight reels every week are so great. Melee has bad balance, but it is a deep game regardless. Throwing out half the characters isn’t a problem if the best characters are the most fun in the game. This is more of an issue in these team games, because the characters in those games are shallower, and the games rely on variety to create depth.

Dude has the wrong info on the pokemon tiers, that’s the smogon ruleset, which exists to essentially create a bunch of segmented off competitive pokemon games, so that each of the tiers can have diversity flourish within it. The official format has no restrictions and everyone runs the same team.

People hate the meta because they dislike being told how to play. They dislike playing to win. They have bad mentalities about winning, competition, and fairness. They don’t understand the subtleties of the game. They don’t want to accept that any way is more efficient than any other. They can get mad about it, but it will not change reality.

What do you think of when some games like League of legends make everything different for each patch and radically change the metagame? Is that a good thing? Or a bad idea?

I don’t think it’s a good idea. It obviously helps keep the game from getting stale, but it also means that high level play is impeded from developing, because anything you figure out will be gone or not viable next patch. It obviously helps their business, but it’s not the right thing for the game.

The key is to patch on long cycles, to keep patches as minimalist as possible, and to not screw up what the players develop. Sometimes bigger sweeping changes are necessary to get the game in the right place. Marvel 3 would need that if it was ever patched again. However you usually want to keep it minimal, because if you change too much stuff at once, you get this complex cascading effect, and you don’t know what really happens.

The Line Between Content and Depth

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Would you say it’s possible to define the line between giving more options and just adding more stuff? An extreme example, let’s say a bigger weapon loadout contributing to the same combat system versus a jetskiing minigame in a shooter.

A minigame is segmented off from the rest of the game. It cannot interact with any of the other elements, therefore it cannot multiply or exponentiate the number of game states, only add. Think about how many matchups a fighting game can have, based on the number of characters. If you have 10, then there’s 45 different matchups. If you add 2 more, then that’s 66 different matchups (12 characters). 2 more on that is 91 matchups total (14 characters). Adding even a small number of new options can vastly increase the state size of the game. And the state size doesn’t merely get bigger additively, it has a rate of increase that is similar to an exponent, because you’re increasing the number of combinations. So as you add more elements, the state size increases drastically more depending on the number of existing elements.

This is why Go is so much more complex than Chess, you’re allowed to pick many more things on any given turn. There are many many more ways the stones can be combined.

Imagine if you made a fighting game with 10 characters, then you added 4, but those 4 new characters can only fight each other. 10 characters is 45 matchups, 4 characters is 6 matchups. Together that makes 51 matchups, which is significantly less than the 91 you could have if you integrated the cast together.

This isn’t a perfect example, you could nitpick it by examining whether each of these matchups themselves is deep (which for evaluating the game’s quality would be more important than just the sheer number of matchups, because you can consider each matchup segmented off from the others in much the same way as the segmented off mini-game is). The point is to make the math behind state size a little more concrete.

Given the way the number of combinations is related to state size, we can infer that an increase in depth translates to a perceptual increase in quality across an exponential, or logarithmic scale, similar to the way decibels are measured, rather than a strictly linear scale. Of course, this is theoretical and measuring the depth of a game precisely, I don’t know if it’s really possible except for extremely simple examples like tic tac toe. Especially because state size is not the only determining factor for depth, but also redundancy, and relevancy to the playerbase (in terms of their skillset and knowledge of the game).

Because redundancy and relevancy are also a factor, things that are pure increases to the state size of a game can ironically decrease the depth of the game, because the number of relevant states might decrease because of how new elements affect the existing elements, and the new states introduced might just be rehashes of the existing states. I have my 4 criteria/rules-of-thumb for depth to prevent this.
https://critpoints.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/4-criteria-for-depth/

Why does Execution matter?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What makes execution so special? I remember in Tatsunoko vs Capcom there was a button that you can hold down to perform a super. Why is it bad to map a specials or supers to a button (or at least a less complex execution method)? Why does execution matter?

For one, there’s a lot of things that are extremely difficult to implement without using execution in some way. It’s harder to implement a wide range of moves if you don’t include execution. Street fighter for example has 6 buttons, then even more special moves on top of those buttons thanks to being able to do command inputs.

I was playing Pocket Rumble for the first extended period of time recently with Pictoshark (Shoutouts to how you won’t punish my sweeps, and keep sweeping at the wrong times in 3s) and something that struck me was just how goddamned annoying it was to input crouching normals when I can’t hold downback to block low, then press the button to do say a crouching sweep.

Games like Rising Thunder, Divekick, Fantasy Strike, and Pocket Rumble inherently limit the number of moves they can implement, and the range of more subtle manipulations of those larger actions possible by removing the execution component that is present in the similarly structured games around them. When you insist, no command inputs, it means you simply cannot implement 5 normals and 5 special moves, one of which has 2 versions, another has 4 versions with 4 followups.
http://guilty-gear.wikia.com/wiki/Slayer/Command_List
It means you can’t have versions of the same special move differentiated by which button you press, like ryu’s slow, medium, and fast fireballs, or Oro/Urien/Gouken’s differently angled fireballs (Rising Thunder got around this with crow’s fireball toss, by having you press a direction during it, but that’s mildly tight timing, which still requires execution). Without execution you also don’t get cool stuff like Slayer’s backdash cancels (BDC). For example, the input on Slayer’s BDC Bite can be 6321447H or 44632147H. 44 is the point where you backdash, it can be at the beginning or end of the input. The first gives you a near-instant bite with little movement, the second gives you more invincibility frames and moves you backwards. They are applicable in different situations and should be treated like different moves.

Something else I have pointed out is that there is no way to implement wavedashing in smash bros that keeps all the current nuances of the move without it being difficult to execute. The closest thing you can do is have jumpsquat cancel directly into wavedash, but this still takes moderate execution skill to perform. As-is right now, wavedashing has an effect proportional to the time you airdodge off the ground, and the angle you dodge into the ground, allowing you to move more or less distance, and that gradient in distance can be important. Wavedash in place is a fast way to get out of shield or dash dance. To get this fine-grain level of tuning, you need to have the analog stick factor into the movement, it cannot be a single button or button combination. Not to mention Wavelanding and triangle jumping, which necessitates that airdodge is its own button to make all these nuanced possibilities available.

The other thing is, Execution is something that allows players to distinguish themselves. Having an execution gradient across a game allows players early on to play a game one way, then dig deeper and find out it’s actually played a different way. Then dig even deeper and find new ways to play. And you continually integrate these new ways with the old one and ideally end up with a more rich and varied game that stays fresh no matter how long you play it, and no matter how good you get at it.

SFV has kind of a setback there compared to SFIV. SFIV had really hard combos, and a combo system that allowed for a massive amount of intepretation. This lead to a lot of degenerate tendencies, which is unfortunate, but in the clean-up job for SFV, they ended up seriously limiting the potential of the combo system in regulating which moves are allowed to start juggles, continue juggles, and the gravity limitations on juggles. They started learning their lesson more around Urien/Ibuki/Juri, and they have a larger number of potential combos (but Ibuki and Juri have lame damage output and suck in other ways) however the damage was largely done by that point. So in tournaments we see a lot of top players doing the same combos we do at home and not varying them that much between each other, and that’s really boring. SFV improved its neutral and pressure games in many ways because of these changes, but it’s still a letdown overall.

It’s disingenuous to assume (as Sirlin typically does) that players in tournament will execute every single advanced technique 100% of the time, so therefore they should be made so easy that everyone gets 100% consistency. It’s like saying that every tournament player will get the 100% most optimal punish off any given hit like it’s a combo video. Not only do flubbed inputs happen, but players differentiate themselves through which combos off which starters they’ve mastered, as well as movement tech, specific setups, and so on. This is a part of why players each play the game with their own style. Being able to figure out what your opponent is weak at and exploiting that weakness is a standard part of competitive play and it doesn’t vanish at the highest level, because no player has perfectly balanced mastery of everything. Maybe one player is really good at okizeme setups, maybe a another has a strong neutral game. It’s not just a matter of flubbing X% of the time, it’s also a matter of confidence. Speedrunners have this issue too, they don’t always feel confident about a trick, sometimes they feel more confident, and they can judge to a degree whether they’ll get it that time.

Additionally, in fighting games and other games, many inputs are specifically designed to be balanced based on their ease of execution. The 360 input with Zangief is a classic example. The light punch version in SFV has more range than many pokes, and deals 180 damage, which is more than some weaker combos, like Ryu’s c.MK xx Fireball. His HP version does 240 damage, which is more than most up close combos. And they both have only 5 startup, and are unblockable. They’re balanced because in order to use them, Zangief needs to input that 360 motion, which takes real time. The fact that it takes real time not only adds something similar to startup, but it constricts where he’s allowed to do it to avoid startup. He can buffer that motion during other attacks to conceal the startup, which changes where you’ll be watching out for him trying to command throw.
http://shoryuken.com/2012/07/16/lost-strategy-series-the-role-of-execution-by-james-chen/

Guile and other charge characters are balanced on a similar basis. Their charge moves are given more power compared to normal special moves because they have that charge limitation on them. There’s a relationship between the power of the move and execution required to pull it off. When you have a relationship like this and it is proportional to the effectiveness of the move, then players feel this natural reward for pulling off hard moves.

L canceling in Melee is another example, as is Parrying in 3rd Strike. These mechanics exclusively work and are exclusively strategic because they are hard. If the window is wider, then the need to read the situation and correct difference in timing is completely removed. You wouldn’t need to read hit/whiff/shield. You wouldn’t need to read when they’ll attack, and how many times.

Put simply, people enjoy doing things that are hard to do and provide a reward for accomplishing them. People enjoy improving in consistency at things. This is the root of where fun comes from (in terms of what actually triggers dopamine release, favorable outcomes from typically inconsistent outcomes). The real design question shouldn’t be whether such mechanically difficult things are included, it should be “how hard is too hard?” “How good is too good?” The answer to that isn’t the same for every game, every move, or every character.

I think that to make a good game, you need to have some things that are harder than others, some things easier. There needs to be a skill gradient that players work their way up. Give players room to specialize. Give them room to learn. And in many cases, it just plain feels better kinaesthetically to perform this tight difficult motion.

Sirlin sees all the value in Daigo knowing Justin would use his Super. However if anyone could do that, if simply predicting the Super was enough, then events like that would be commonplace and boring. Chun Li’s super would be significantly weaker. Of course Sirlin is also on the 3s parry hatetrain, so whatever.

In fighters like Guilty Gear Xrd, you have Ramlethal whose dauro move turns green and does more damage if you just-frame the button input. In Marvel 3, a ton of supers do more damage if you mash them. In SF3 and SF2, a ton of pummel throws do more damage if you mash them. In nearly all 2D fighters there’s safe jumps which let you get in a meaty attack without risk of retaliation. If you’re going to do a crouching medium kick in street fighter with Ryu, there’s absolutely no downside to always buffering in a fireball every time. Reward on hit or block, no penalty on miss, no penalty for messing up the input. If you land a tatsu with akuma, you’d be dumb to not throw in a followup, because either you hit them for more damage, or you miss and they’re knocked down anyway. And should buffering into hadouken off a low short be automatic? Should there be a safejump command that does it for you? For that matter, why have inputs more complicated than quarter circles at all?

Yeah, it is a matter of feeling good, we play fighting games for the challenge, in part the challenge against the opponent, and against ourselves. People enjoy pulling off difficult combos, some more than others. Fun is variable success, in all its forms, head to head or individual. Good fighting games are a mix of both, not allowing one to destroy the other. Having that tight link between input and response is a good feeling, we shouldn’t toss it out just because it’s arbitrary from a decision standpoint, because it’s not arbitrary to enjoyment of the game.

Many people feel that fighting games should be these high-level competitive pure decision-making exercises, but these games are played in realtime. There is always a dexterity element, always a timing and reaction element simply because they’re in realtime at all.

People enjoy the process of working to hone their skills and pick up new techniques.

Sure combos have tradeoffs, but if someone wanted to they could easily substitute a combo system for a menu that gives you a few different pre-strung combos with meter/damage/positioning/knockdown tradeoffs between them, and vary these based on the starting move. But that’s obviously not as interesting.

You could have it so multishines are automatic on people’s shields as long as you hold down B in smash bros, but not only would that not be nearly as hype as someone making the 1 frame link continuously, but it would make the multishine option outright broken, beating shields effortlessly.

The benefit of having an executive barrier is also that players are all at different levels of execution from one another, people work in the lab to stretch just a bit further than the day before. The combination of reads, understanding the game, and execution are part of what make fighting games interesting. If you remove that factor, then you won’t end up with as interesting or as deep a game, because the depth of these games is very deeply tied to their realtime execution element.

The thing to learn from games like rising thunder is, no, there wouldn’t be more high level players. Execution barriers don’t hold people back from being high level players, you’ll still get your ass kicked by the same people who were better than you before. The thing to learn from games like Smash 4 and Brawl is, if you remove the execution barriers and all the tricks that people have to master using execution skill, you don’t end up with more people engaging in that high level play. Instead you end up with nobody being consistent enough at the game to form a high level playerbase in the first place. The top players shift around and nobody has that space to really develop themselves over others at all.

One answer is because then players will do combos that produce damage proportional to their skill, if it’s easy then people will either all do the same combo, which is boring, or combos will get ridiculously long at higher skill levels.

Another answer is because it’s more direct control over the character. The sensation of direct control, especially in hitting tight frame windows, feels really nice. It’s related to “Game Feel” or Kinaesthetics. If you have everything cancel into everything, or stick huge buffer periods on everything, or input shortcuts, and so on, then things feel really loose and like the response to your inputs is sloppy or delayed. Like compare trying to dragon punch on wakeup in SF2 or 3, to SF4. You have a 1 or 2 frame window versus a 5 frame window with input shortcuts. In SF4 you can just mash reversals, it doesn’t feel like a tight refined input, it feels like you’re slobbering on the stick practically, where in SF2 or SF3, you gotta do exactly the right motion at exactly the right time, and that feels really tight by comparison.

And the last answer is because, pulling off hard stuff, even if it’s small hard stuff like needing to link instead of cancel attacks, is really fun. The neurochemical phenomena of fun is essentially being able to profit off finding patterns in inconsistent phenomena. By having things be hard, by having a lot of hard things, people always have new things to find patterns in, to get consistent at. So games take longer to master and not everyone gets stuck in the hellscape of being consistent at everything except winning tournaments. Sure we can get these high-minded, “everything should be in the decisionmaking phase” ideals, but if that’s the case, then the game gets solved a lot faster, because people don’t discover new ways to use the characters as much, and people get bored when they learn how to follow the optimal set of decisions for their characters. Yeah, everyone can be a “high level competitor”, but being one matters less, and nobody can actually stand out from the crowd.

Games don’t inevitably become solved, they inevitably get closer to being solved, but there’s a ton of unsolved games, and skullgirls (along with nearly all fighting games except like divekick and smash 4) is one of them. Making games difficult to solve, having them be complex enough that people can’t just pick it up and play in the most optimal way possible, is related to what makes games interesting in the first place. Games are ostensibly about improving consistency. About learning things, picking up on patterns, and putting it back into your performance. Making a game complex and difficult to solve is a part of that (though it still has to be a good game underneath). If everyone can solve the game, if everyone can play optimally, like in tic tac toe, then the game straight up dies. The process of being able to pursue higher skill continually is what keeps games interesting for high level competitors (and low level ones too). It’s about the spirit of continual improvement, of always having some new way to stretch out.

However if you can simplify everything down to the optimal punishes, the optimal options, the optimal decision trees, then the game ends up getting repetitive, because you know it all already. You’re no longer improving. The fun cycle of picking up on something then steadily improving in consistency until you have it down stops. The draw of a truly deep game is being really far away from knowing everything about the game, the draw of always having something new to master or work on, and decisionmaking isn’t the only skill in the world, nor the only one that competitive games should ever test. We shouldn’t segregate competitions between pure execution and pure decisionmaking, mixing the two is great, and allows them to recombine in ways that test both of them to even greater levels.

I’ll admit that L canceling doesn’t add a lot to the game, it’s not a very deep mechanic compared to others. You could just halve aerial landing lag and not lose very much of the interesting elements that make smash what it is. The other thing is, you could disable L canceling for me, have it be automatic for yourself, and I would still probably kick your ass (unless you’re like a power ranked player in your region or something). I’m sorry that this sounds like bragging, but L canceling isn’t everything. There’s a lot of other strategic aspects of the game, and people who are bad at L cancels right now can get good at those other things, can outperform their opponents without using L cancels. L cancels give people a skill to expand out into and become more consistent at to get an advantage over their opponents. L cancels require people to recognize if they’ll whiff, hit, or hit shield. L cancels make it so sometimes people are vulnerable and sometimes they’re not, which you can exploit.

Meteor Cancels have nothing to do with reading or playing against your opponent either, they’re purely a reaction/timing test, press jump 18 frames after being hit, don’t press too soon or you die. Reaction Tech Chasing too. There’s TONS of elements like this in Smash bros that are pure optimization without any element your opponent can interfere in. And that’s alright. It’s alright to let people work to become more consistent at an element for a pure statistical advantage in certain scenarios. Not everything should be made flat-out automatic, or you lose that decision-making aspect of, “my opponent is weaker execution-wise in this area, I can exploit this” If I know my opponent can’t L cancel consistently, then I can abuse them in different ways than my opponents who can. If I know they can’t do the mew2king angle, then I can cover different recovery options without fear. If I know my ice climbers opponent doesn’t wobble often, I can be a bit less afraid of getting grabbed. Even though all these things are pure executional things that don’t involve your opponent, they still affect the way you strategize and can adapt to your specific opponent.

It’s nice to have games like Dive Kick and Rising Thunder where it is easy to execute. It is nice to have variety in the fighting games available to people so that people who are not as skilled have something to pick up so they can learn, and which also explore the unique strategic and design spaces those low execution barriers offer. However not all games should be this way, and we shouldn’t aim deliberately to make future games closer to this standard, we should aim to more or less stay the course, developing games that replicate the successes of the original ones and try new things so we can have a diverse environment.

What do you think of execution barriers for command moves in single player beat em ups like TW101’s Wonder Liner? Are they necessary to keep the game balanced and less spammy or does it not matter because you’re just pitted against AI?

Wonder liner is designed the way it is so you can perform a bunch of different functions with the same mechanic. So you can circle around people or objects on the ground, and so you can select different unite morphs. But it’s not just selecting unite morphs, it’s selecting between several different ones AND how big they are from your pool of wonderful 1s.

It’s also there because drawing shapes is more fun than tabbing through a menu, even though it’s slower.

Like yeah, you don’t need to worry about balance in that way versus AI. The player can’t really be overpowered or underpowered, and something like this isn’t necessary to balance the player’s options against the AI. You could balance morphs relative to each other based on how difficult it is to input in that system, and W101 chose to do that by making Sword one of the weaker unite morphs, but it’s not the biggest deal in the world for a single player game. If you could instantly pick any unite morph, then the game wouldn’t be significantly different than it is, but it would lose out on the multifunctionality of the wonder liner, and it would be harder to specify the size of the unite morph (which is important because that’s resources for the multi unite morph), and it would be slightlly less interesting than getting good at drawing shapes.

If you believe crazy david sirlin logic, then singleplayer games are the only place where arbitrary execution barriers make sense, since it’s not interfering with the raw decision-making that multiplayer games should be about.

Visited by RNGesus

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What are the dumbest pro-rng arguments you’ve ever read?

One of the worst I’ve heard is from Sirlin arguing that 1 frame reversals, like in Super Turbo, should be randomized instead of execution-based. Reversals are bad in ST, unlike SF4 or SFV, because they’re so difficult to perform (I used to be REALLY good at reversals in ST though, including ones off of air resets, I’ve gotten worse at reversals as I’ve fallen out of practice unfortunately). So when waking up, the opponent can okizeme and not have to respect the DP as much, as opposed to later games that made reversals easy and you always need to respect the DP. Sirlin basically got to the heart of the matter, saying that it works because it’s inconsistent, but mechanical skill shouldn’t determine any part of the game, so it should be randomized instead. The idea that he considers randomness more fair than mechanical execution is fucking insane. Continue reading →

Single Player Game Balance

Celia Wagar1 Comment

What does it mean for a single player game to have good or poor balance? Like does it just mean that things are too easy or difficult?

Balance in a single player context typically means balance between the options the player has, so they’re used in roughly equal proportion. So if you have 5 weapons, you want a balance between them, so they each have a moment where they’re useful. This can mean giving options each their own unique utility, their own thing they’re best at, but also regulating how often more powerful and less powerful options are used. If options aren’t balanced in singleplayer games, then they become all about doing the same thing all the time. Options in single player games need to be balanced both in terms of what they actually are, and the situations that crop up across the game. Something might be really powerful, but if it’s situational and the situation for it never comes up, then that’s kinda lame.

In an abstract sense, even a game like Mirror’s Edge can be said to have a type of balance. There’s tradeoffs between different routes through each level, and the different types of movement capabilities you have. You use all of them in roughly equal proportion, but you have the ability to choose which you use in many places.

Halo had a good example of this with its weapons. There’s a clear sorting order of power between them, but more powerful weapons are constricted by ammo scarcity. I think ironically Halo 2, which has better weapon balance in terms of damage output, does weapon balance a bit worse for a single player game, because it means the power weapons have lower utility as a result. I can see how it would help multiplayer though. Sometimes it pays to balance differently between singleplayer and multi. Starcraft 2 did this for example.

Keeping this type of balance in mind when designing a singleplayer game is important. It helps the game express the depth of all the elements you put in, instead of leaving things on the cutting room floor.

Which single player games do you think have the best overall balance?

Best balance? In a single player game? I mean, balance is a thing in single player games, you need to balance different options, but a lot of single player games don’t totally work that way, at least not nearly as demonstrably as multiplayer games.

How balanced is Mirror’s Edge? How balanced is mario, or castlevania? Balance begins to become a question as you get into RPG territory like dark souls, where there’s multiple ways to build the character. It begins to become a question for games with lots of overlapping options, like Devil May Cry. However judging the game with the best overall balance, who knows? Who can say?

In Single Player Games, the balance just needs to be good enough most of the time, rather than really fine-tuned perfect. Also single player games can cheat a bit by giving different elements unique utilities, so you need to use them all to some extent. In many games, you’re perfectly capable of ignoring the balancing between different options and just powering through with one underpowered option, where that gets you slaughtered in multiplayer (except versus very bad players who can’t adapt).

That honestly gave me the idea at one point that a boss enemy, like in the souls series, should perhaps try detecting if the player is using the same tactic over and over again and specifically doing the tactic that counters that. Like if the player only punishes this one move, never use that move. If the player never attacks long startup short recovery moves, use more of those. Basically, use moves in inverse proportion to how much the player punishes them.