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.

Halo 1’s Unique Success at the 2 Weapon Limit

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Where do you think Halo 1 succeeds with the two weapon limit system where Bioshock Infinite and other games fail?

Actually, I think Halo 2 fails at the 2 weapon system for similar reasons to other games, which I’ll discuss in that review (which is mostly done, I just want to comment on each level a bit).

Overall, I think if you limit a game to 2 weapons at a time, then it creates a situation where you can’t have a wide weapon diversity, and all weapons need to be good at all ranges, with more situational weapons only vended out for specific sections (like that one sniper section in BS:I where you have a barrel with a sniper rifle in it right before like 3 snipers). 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 Fine Line Between Depth and Approachability

Celia WagarLeave a comment

For a developer, in your eyes, is it a necessary evil to sacrifice the complexity that translate to depth, in order to prevent alienating their target audience? It is a dilemna I struggle with. I want my game to be deep, which comes from complexity, but not if it means people won’t play it.

I think there’s ways of getting both, and I’d cite Smash Bros Melee for this. It was a commercial success, but it’s also tremendously complex and deep. It was able to accomplish this because the majority of people who played the game have no actual fucking idea how to play it, or what most of the functions are. It has a very simple foothold for people getting into the game. You move around like a platformer, you attack in the direction of your opponent and it usually works. Super simple.

Making a game deep but understandable is about connecting with what your audience actually wants and actually can understand. The key is building a low “skill floor”, the minimum level of skill necessary to functionally play the game.

Street Fighter has a very high skill floor in comparison to Smash Bros. To play on a basic level, you need to know a LOT more and be competent at a lot more, otherwise you can’t even make real decisions.

I think this is what holds back a lot of action games, they have these complex move lists and people take one look at that and go, “like fuck I’m gonna remember all that” or they just mash buttons and it usually works, so they call it a button mashing game.

A ton of really complex games are extremely successful, like league of legends, but they do that by making the players’ most basic means of interaction with the game really simple. You can move, you can shoot, you have like 4 abilities. A lot of the other stuff is more advanced and you don’t need to know immediately. You can feel like you actually understand the game well enough to play fairly quickly. Similar deal with Pokemon, which has hundreds of actual pokemon, hundreds of moves, abilities, and weird other shit, but kids don’t need to know all that just to play.

I think the key is layered complexity, and introducing things one at a time, while not holding advanced players back. It’s a fine line to walk.

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.

How to Talk About the Feel of a Game’s Controls

Celia WagarLeave a comment

When I play Project M I often think “these controls feel so good”. But how do I describe any game’s controls being good without using buzzwords like precise, tight, feels right etc?
Note that by controls I’m not only talking about buttons, but what makes what’s happening on-screen fun to see and satisfying to play. In PM/Melee’s case, for example, how the high gravity and the crunchy (here goes another one) sound effects make pummeling an opponent with repeated Marth’s utilt and uair feel so goddamn good. You probably know what I’m talking about, but how do I explain stuff like that in tangible terms?

First, you could try reading Steve Swink’s Game Feel. Second, try looking up the 12 principles of animation. Third, compare and contrast with similar examples that don’t feel as good, and figure out what the actual differences between them are. Fourth, consider how animations flow into one another, where the point where you’re allowed to input is, where each animation cancels.

It’s a lot of subtle things. Someone had a story once about a friend of his who made a side scrolling game where a dude shoots fireballs. Something about the fireball throw felt lame, but nobody could put their finger on it. Then the friend made it so the fireball was spawned a bit further in front of the character, and suddenly it felt great. Hearing this, I knew on the spot that it’s because there was a greater change between the frames, so it would feel like there was more force being applied in that moment.

In PM and Melee, when you attack in the air, your bottom collision point changes, so that you will collide with the ground further up into your body. In Brawl and Smash 4, this is not the case, so collisions with the ground feel abrupt and weak. In The Animator’s Survival Kit, Richard Williams points out that you can make a collision feel more impactful by adding a frame where the character is touching the surface before the collision happens.

You gotta watch for this sort of stuff. Another guy just linked me a Bloodborne review where the guy complains that attacks in Lords of the Fallen are so slow, but honestly they can be about as long in length or startup as a dark souls attack. The issue with them is that the weapon moves at a consistent speed through the whole animation, unlike dark souls where there’s that same “merihari” that Capcom described having to teach Ninja Theory, which Americans would know as slow in and slow out or easing. Basically, the actual active swing time of attacks in dark souls is really short, where in lords of the fallen it’s really long, even though the full animation is the same length overall.

Sound effects are not my forte, I’m generally a bit weaker when it comes to sound, but listen to what they actually are, compare with worse alternatives, look up some words people use to describe sound, like high pitched or low, tinny or bassy, etc. Do your best.

Though identifying this stuff is probably harder if you’re not an animator, because it’s harder to look for it if you don’t know what to look for.