Mechanic Analysis

How Do Games Make Characters Touch the Game World?

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As video games have moved to 3d, a number of techniques have emerged to create game animations that are more tailored to the environment, to make game characters feel less like autonomous pawns floating through environments and more like grounded characters touching the world around them. This largely revolves around Animation Blending and Inverse Kinematics (IK for short).

3d game characters are typically animated using a skeleton made of bones. Animators create animations by moving these bones, then the character’s mesh will deform relative to which polygons are controlled by those bones, rotating in the direction specified. This allows animators to move characters around without having to manually control every single vertex in the mesh.

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Melee Attacks in PVP Must Be Fast!

Celia Wagar8 Comments

There is a common misconception in PVP game design that melee attacks should be slow and reactable in order to make it fair for your opponents to play around them. The problem with this is that it fundamentally breaks the core game dynamic, resulting in a game where doing nothing is the best option.

PVP games focused on Melee combat must have some way to either hurt the opponent that they can’t react to, or a way to set up a situation where they cannot avoid getting hurt that they cannot react to. If a game doesn’t have this, it will result in a complete stalemate. A more broad way of formulating this is: A PVP game must have a way for any player to advance the game towards a conclusion where one side wins, and any action that would prevent this advancement must be dependent on Rock Paper Scissors Guesswork, or have a chance of failure.

I believe that all PVP games are a complex (or not so complex) combination of 3 simpler games: Rock Paper Scissors, Skill Tests (or efficiency race), and Random Number Generation. Everything PVP is a game of chance, a game of skill, or a game of prediction; or some combination of the three.

Melee combat games are games of largely RPS. Melee strikes have a commitment, like a throw of hands in Rock Paper Scissors. And when they connect with an opponent, they will inflict hitstun, interrupting the opponent’s action. This means that different choices will counter one another, like in Rock Paper Scissors. This is a non-transitive relationship between different options and how many points they score. And critically: When you throw hands in RPS, you do it on the count of 3, throwing them simultaneously, so that neither of you can see which hand the other person threw.

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Building Counterplay for PvP Games

Celia Wagar3 Comments

I have a 4 factor model for move/option design in PvP games:

  • Stake (how much you stand to lose by choosing this option, either in costs or penalties)
  • Reward (how much you stand to gain if this option succeeds and stand to gain regardless)
  • Difficulty/Chance (the likelihood that the option will be successfully executed)
  • Counterplay (what range of options this move beats, and how hard/soft a counter)

The purpose of dividing across these 4 factors is to help illustrate to designers the different levers they can pull, instead of focusing purely on a linear risk/reward relationship.

It’s common for a lot of designers to get stuck thinking that everything risky has to have a proportionate amount of reward, and everything rewarding has to have a proportionate amount at stake. Having lopsided stake/reward relationships is possible and healthy when the difficulty and counterplay are considered.

A subtle factor of this model is that cost is a type of risk, and therefore something you put at Stake. When you pay a cost, you’re risking that that investment won’t pay off. Therefore An upside of this model is that it separates Risk from Difficulty/Chance of Success, which are often conflated. “This move is risky, because you’re likely to mess it up.” By separating Risk out into Stake, Difficulty, and Counterplay, we can think more carefully about how each of these different factors play into an option’s design, and we have a wider design space for option design.

Within counterplay there is a lot of nuance to how counters can be designed. I’m going to identify 2 spectrums:

  • Hard vs Soft
  • Wide vs Narrow

A hard counter is one that is guaranteed to always shut down the option that it counters. A soft counter is one with more wiggle room.

A wide counter can beat a wide variety of options. And a narrow counter can only deal with a very specific one.

By dividing counterplay across these two axes, we can see the relative strengths and weaknesses of different moves and intentionally alter the counterplay of moves relative to our needs.

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VR is Focusing on the Wrong Things

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Disclaimer: This has been on the backburner for a very long time. I’m sorry if some information is out of date, or if I’m missing something.

My original attitude towards VR was skeptical to dismissive. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m skeptical about anything promising “immersion” and pretty much the concept of immersion in general. I got to try a prerelease Oculus VR headset at a showcase in New York City and it was pretty much what I expected, a screen strapped to my face, while I controlled an FPS game like I’ve always done. To me, VR was another type of screen, I didn’t expect it to fundamentally change anything about video games.

First Gen VR devices changed my mind, they brought on motion controls, like the Wii and PS Move. I eventually got to try a Vive headset, with Valve’s The Lab, SuperHot VR, and a couple others, and I saw what the device could do, and it was pretty obvious that there was untapped potential there. VR seems like a way to make motion controls work much more feasibly than they ever had before, and that could lead to some legitimately new game genres!

The Shortcomings of Current VR Games

My trouble is that VR is also couched in this “immersive promise”. People want the holodeck and full-dive like SAO or Ready Player 1. VR Companies promise that VR is the future of immersion into a virtual world, where we can finally enter The Matrix, The Metaverse, Ready Player 1; You get the picture, right? Except, VR as it currently exists is horrible at all of those things. VR isn’t suited for you to walk around virtual worlds at all.

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Parries are the Mindkiller

Celia Wagar18 Comments

Parrying is so cool that it short-circuits people’s higher brain function, leading them to slam it into everything, and allow it to beat absolutely everything. Parrying in single player games is an EXTREMELY DANGEROUS thing to add to your game, and it should be done with utmost caution, at risk of destroying your entire game’s design.

So first up, what exactly is a parry? A parry is a timed button press with a narrow window that will completely nullify almost any attack headed at you, and sometimes will leave the opponent in a state to be punished, or sometimes outright deal a massive amount of damage to your opponent. A parry is different than a block, because blocking can be held continuously for a variable length of time, and there are frequently penalties to blocking, or blocking too many attacks. A parry is different than dodging, because your character will not move, and will absorb the incoming attack rather than ignoring it. This can mean playing a paired animation, or taking some hitstop and parry-stun. For the sake of this article, if the first few frames of blocking will nullify an attack and negate all damage you take, I’ll be including it as a parry.

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Sometimes it’s No More than Mashing

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Mashing is when a player rapidly presses a button or buttons as fast as they can. Mashing is one of the simplest video game skills. It’s worth recognizing that mashing is actually a skill. Some people are better at mashing than others. People devise techniques for mashing most effectively. Mashing can vary by game. Mashing isn’t always recognized as a skill, because many people do it in order to avoid learning how to play certain games, and other people deride some games as “button mashers”.

There are a lot of reasons to mash buttons in all sorts of games. If you want to perform an action at the soonest possible moment, then mashing is a good way to guarantee you’ll be close, especially if you don’t know exactly when to press the button. If you want to hit a tight window, then mashing similarly gives you a lot of chances to align a button press with that window. If you don’t know how to play an action game with a lot of similar attacking moves, then mashing all the buttons can be a way to of useful results. If a move has a short or no recovery time, then mashing can help you perform that move as many times as possible in a second. And of course, some games include minigames and special moves that rate how fast you can mash.

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Cost Granularity in Card Games

Celia Wagar14 Comments

In Charmed Chains, I chose some early restrictions to emulate some of how Yugioh plays, and over time I’ve been shifting towards different ideas of what I want to do with the game. I chose these restrictions because there are a lot of indie and industry collectible card games that emulate Magic The Gathering (Force of Will, Hearthstone, Lorcana, Final Fantasy, Digimon, etc) in whole or part, and very few that emulate Yugioh (Dual Spirits). When I started making this game, I was really into Yugioh (I’ve recently been swallowed whole by MtG Commander), and I was very much inspired by different facets of Yugioh’s design that I felt could be pushed further (having a defined grid and effects that are based on columns), as well as some aspects of Magic The Gathering (blockers getting a choice in whether to take damage with their creatures, or let it hit them directly).

However, these limitations have lead to some issues with granularity, which I’ve previously discussed. I’m worried that low granularity in creature costs will lead to homogenization in people’s decks, unless I either adopt a resource system more similar to most card games, or start to enforce more strict archetypal synergies, like Yugioh did.

To understand the issues I’m facing, first I’ll need to explain how the resources in Yugioh and Magic The Gathering work.

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Mashing: Rote Memory vs System Mastery

Celia Wagar2 Comments

Many players of fighting games and beat em up games start out by mashing. When you have 2-6 attack buttons, it can be hard to tell the difference between moves, so you might as well press buttons and hope something good comes out. A better player will understand when to use each move, but a worse one will see a large movelist, say “nah, pass” and just mash it out.

Some games are designed to actually facilitate and reward this type of mashing, games with strings (a sequence of unique moves activated by pressing buttons in a specific order). By mashing the buttons, you’ll accidentally end up doing all sorts of moves, and since neither you nor your opponent has any idea what you’re about to do, that makes you unpredictable, and ironically more effective in a genre that is advanced rock paper scissors.

It’s easy for intermediate level players to shut down this sort of play by simply blocking and waiting for an unsafe move to punish, or by throwing out “knowledge check” moves that require a specific counter (you can also call this spamming). However among beginners, it can allow them to develop a surprising level of basic competency at the game. They might be throwing moves out randomly at first, but sometimes they see something cool happen, and remember the feeling in their hands when they got that, allowing them to iterate and repeat it. Also helpful is these games list the strings in the move list, so beginners can learn a string as easily as checking.

For many beginners, these strings are literally what combos are. They’ll call them “combos”, not knowing there’s a larger combo system in the game. In a way, this is really helpful for beginners, compared to other games, because strings don’t involve tight timing, and are listed right there.

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How Magic’s Mana System Divides its Design Space

Celia Wagar3 Comments

Magic the Gathering invented trading card games, and with it, resource systems in trading card games. Countless games following MTG have mimicked MTG’s 5-color mana system, because of course they did, why wouldn’t they?

In Magic The Gathering, spells and creatures cost “Mana”, a resource that regenerates every turn, and builds up over time as you play “land” cards from your hand. Mana comes in 5 colors, Green, Red Blue, White, and Black. Each of these colors has a mechanical identity associated with it, called a “Color Identity”. Mana is the primary thing that divides the design space in Magic The Gathering, to create different types of decks.

Of course, there are other things, like card types, and creature types, which have effects that reference one another to create synergies. And there are more broadly playstyles, like Aggro (try to kill the opponent before they can get their good monsters out or reach their win condition), Control (destroy your opponent’s threats and eke out a win) Mid-range (shut down aggro and outclass weak aggro threats, rush the control players), and Combo (dig through your deck to assemble exodia in your hand, then win the game instantly or near-instantly).

Mono-color decks focus entirely on a single type of mana, and usually only play a single “basic” land color. This gives them incredible consistency, because their mana supply goes up every time they play a land, but limits what they have access to in the broader card pool. A mono-color deck may lack “answers” to certain types of “threats” generated by other decks, such as red and black having a tough time getting rid of enchantment cards.

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The Hypothetical Worst Fighting Game

Celia Wagar1 Comment

I have a theory about fighting games. I think that even the worst fighting games are pretty good. We see this in the Kusoge Phenomenon, where people play “broken” “shit-games”. These games have massive combos, wacky mixups, poor regard for balance, strange damage scaling or infinite prevention, and strange attack design with cancel points and hitboxes that don’t really make sense. However people still enjoy playing them, because they’re still deep games. They’re still games with combo systems you can explore, with mixups you can try out, and with moves that have a variety of different effects. This is a mismatch between what we traditionally consider to be “good” about games, and what actually creates depth.

Street Fighter 2 created the modern fighting game, and all fighting games take from it. SF2 was such a solid template for a game that if you just implement all the features of SF2 you will have a decent fighting game, entirely by default. I’m going to list these features as:

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