Nioh’s Ki Pulse and Stances

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What makes execution barriers like Ki Bursting fun?

It depends on the action. It’s different for every one.

Ki bursting is fun to me because it means being very mindful during fights of my stamina, and the state of the enemy. Beyond that it means being mindful of the stance I’m in, and the stance I want to go to. Ki Bursting means I need to absolutely not miss the window of time during which Ki fills, or I wait even longer for stamina to regen. Ki bursting also introduces decisions, like do I want to cancel my attack and instantly gain back a little stamina so at minimum I’m safe and haven’t lose all the stamina I just spent? Do I want to commit to a combo while I have the opportunity to attack and potentially get hit, but also be able to regenerate almost all the Ki, or wait and see if the enemy is still vulnerable after attacking to do another attack at the expense of the Ki I spent? Do I want to attack once at a time and burst each time to regenerate the Ki back to where I had it, or commit to several attacks for more damage, but at the cost of some of the maximum ki I’ll regenerate with each attack? Do I want to do a super powered dodge instead of Ki burst? Do I want to block and sacrifice the ki burst completely? Do I want to switch stances in order to regain more Ki? Which stance do I want to change to, and what is the left over stance that I need to switch through to get the maximum boost? Continue reading →

What Makes a Dynamic Platformer?

Celia Wagar1 Comment

You’ve criticized the shallowness of super meatboy for basically being an execution challenge, but where would you say a pure platformer can get depth from, If there isn’t a dynamic element that responds to player input, such as enemies? multiple paths don’t really add dynamism necessary for a game.

Okay, so a lot of this depends on your definition of “pure platformer”. Is Mario a pure platformer? Is Mirror’s Edge a pure platformer? Castlevania and Megaman probably are not. Is Ori and the Blind Forest? It kind of straddles the middle, but also not really.

Mario has dynamic elements that respond to player input. Mirror’s Edge does not in most parts of the game. Super Meat Boy has a few (like the homing worms, and disappearing blocks, which you’ll notice aren’t duplicated in replays).

Multiple routes don’t have much dynamism, true. The idea is more routes on top of routes, on top of routes. Rather than totally distinct and separate routes, you make every little part have overlapping means of execution that have different results/tradeoffs. Continue reading →

Balancing FGs & SFV Season 2

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What is the art of balancing a multiplayer game properly, like Street Fighter for example. What is the process that goes into evaluating what needs to be nerfed and what needs a buff, and how they go about improving those characters or mechanics? Is it simple as stat changes or an animation change?

It’s a matter of figuring out what’s actually good and bad about the character. What’s supposed to be good and bad? Like all this shit with Juri: Continue reading →

Boss Design & Doing a Lot with a Little

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I remember you showed a writeup on how to design enemies from a Platinum games dev who said enemies with patterns would get too boring. Would Lil Horn from Super Meat Boy and Gelaldy from Ys Origin be good examples of that? Each attack pattern for them is exactly the same for each phase.

I feel compelled to say there’s probably exceptions to that rule. Like imagine a boss with patterns that speed up steadily over the fight, or one with patterns that are reactive to the player’s position and therefore are a bit different every time you play. Ninja Gaiden NES even had a perfectly serviceable boss who just walked left and right. Hell, a lot of old NES games had serviceable pattern bosses.

I think Lil Horn is absolutely a terrible boss fight though. Essentially you just repeat it until you memorize where to stand. Most of the boss’s attacks are designed to be unreactable, so you really just need to know in advance what will happen and the same thing will happen every time. There are some randomly spawning obstacles, but these are trivial. Continue reading →

Shark Shoals: Prepare to Dive

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What if the souls series had swimming? Would it be a good idea?

Probably not. You’d need to make a totally new set of animations and mechanics for it and it wouldn’t really emphasize what the series is established on.

Now a new game based on swimming and underwater combat in the souls style, sure, that might be interesting.

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How would you design Deep Souls/Dark Swims?

Gonna go with the title: Shark Shoals: Prepare to Dive Continue reading →

We’ve Gotta Murder Quake: Arena

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Please tell me I am not the only one who is sick and tired of every single recent or upcoming arena shooter being a Quake 3 clone (or UT clone). We have Xonotic, Nexuiz, Warsow, Open Arena (though it admits being a Q3 clone), Red Eclipse, Toxikk, and Reflex. Almost all of these rip their weapon sets directly from Quake, about half of them have quake style bunnyhopping, with Toxikk having unreal tournament type movement. Points to Red Eclipse for coming up with some more original movement methods even if it does look a bit janky overall. And of course on the horizon is Quake: Champions, which aims to do the arena thing all over again.

Lets look to the future a bit: FPS games and mouselook shooter games in general are unexplored, they’re practically infants compared to other genres in terms of mechanical development. Sure, we have open worlds, cinematic set pieces, RPG elements, physics puzzles, and so on, but not a lot of games are really considering the more basic interactions, like how people shoot, or how people move, and what they shoot and move in response to. Rather than continually copying Quake 3 like it was god’s gift to FPS games, we should be copying its example and the precedent for what it did right rather than verbatim bringing back the same weapons again. We should also be looking outside the genre for things other games did right that could be replicated in first person. Continue reading →

Gunvolt Impressions

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I’ve tried my best not to ask “opinion on X” questions, but I recently got into talking about Gunvolt and it was described as “The DMC of 2D action.” I like GV a LOT, but I don’t think it’s a good comparison. Have you played it, and if so what do you think its strongest point as an action game is?

Hmmm. I started playing it after you asked this question and I’m writing this answer as I’ve played 5 stages, the first one, the media tower, the prison, and the underwater one.

I’m not sure I’d call it the DMC of 2d action games, it doesn’t seem to fit the same mold as DMC. But wow does it do a lot of interesting things. I wasn’t so interested in the game from the footage I’d seen (but I was a little interested because I really loved Megaman Zero), it’s not very impressive to watch until you’ve tried it for yourself. Like it seemed like people just used the flash field all the time after tagging enemies and it was kind of a one-stop solution. Continue reading →

Movie-Fueled Game Design

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Where would you draw the line with developers using movies to influence game design?

I don’t think there’s a line to be drawn so much as there needs to be a methodology.

Creating games is about creating systems, and movies and other stories ostensibly chronicle the interactions of fictional systems, or the interactions of real life systems. So you can look at a movie and say, “whoa, there’s a big focus on kung-fu here, how much of that can I adapt into a game?” Continue reading →

Improving Unwinnable Boss Fights

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What do you think of unwinnable battles or battles that aren’t ment to be won like the first kishgal fight in Ys Origin, first Jetstream Sam encounter, first Vile fight from Megaman X, ect?

They’re kind of a waste of time. It’s a lot more rewarding when it’s a 1 chance battle instead of an unwinnable one.

Shoutouts to Demon’s Souls, and Ninja Gaiden Sigma for including these and giving special rewards for completing them (in NGS’s case, literally beating the game on the spot).

Shoutouts to Magination for taking this idea to its logical extreme and including a boss fight that is technically beatable, but ridiculously hard (kill 99 enemies in turn based combat hard in a game designed for only 4~ enemies per battle).

Unwinnable boss fights are better viewed as segments where the goal of the scenario is altered from other scenarios, but it’s not clearly communicated to the player. The new condition for progression is reducing HP to 0 or the equivalent, which is normally avoided. So instead of trying to kill the boss, you need to surrender as soon as possible.

Some people view them as “taking control away from the player” or “forcing the player to experience defeat.” I think this is kind of a misguided layman’s view.

This can be really bad in games where you have consumable resources which can be wasted in such a fight. If players don’t catch on that they’re not supposed to win, they might waste resources. Also bad is if players think a battle is supposed to be unwinnable, but actually isn’t. A lot of games don’t want to be honest about whether a boss fight is unwinnable or not, because they’re trying to tell a certain story and deliberately mislead you into trying your hardest and failing.

One solution might be to have a 1 chance battle, but at the end, the boss asks, “Do you give up?” and one choice progresses the plot, one choice triggers game over and you can retry from there.

Mostly I think they’re a waste of time because it’s not challenging to die, it’s inevitable, and it can be irritating to trigger the enemy to kill you, depending on how random they are (I get annoyed at this in MGR sometimes when Sam decides to just stand there).