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.

Making A Good Video Game Secret

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think makes a good videogame secret?

This is complicated. Like, a lot of games such as Doom, Quake, Metroid, Dark Souls, these have a mix of secrets. A lot of the secrets in these games are intended to be found however. The trick is, there’s a “secret language” that the developers establish to convey that there are secrets in various places (you should always check under stairs, and bomb off-color blocks for example). There’s a lot of possible tricks you can do for these. Dark Souls always has illusory walls be a bit inset versus the areas around it. Or they show you what’s beyond the wall so you suspect where there might be one. Or they have that boulder wall that needs all the boulders lined up to be broken, which you can figure out on your first try if you’re clever.
Continue reading →

What Would An FPS Game by Platinum Look Like?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What would a FPS made by Platinum look like? Assuming it was made for a mouse in mind unlike Vanquish

Funny, I was thinking about how to build an FPS combo system this morning. I don’t think they’d ever make something like my idea though (involves a lot of subtle manipulation of hitstun values in a weird way no other game does). Suibriel, the Desync Dev, suggested it would be like Painkiller + Vanquish, which makes a lot of sense (though I didn’t play Pankiller yet, but I know it’s about fighting waves of enemies in arenas, much like platinum games).
Continue reading →

Dynamic Difficulty

Celia Wagar3 Comments

Thoughts on this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB84uBc68QE

The video is excessively pessimistic about difficulty levels. Difficulty levels work fine in a lot of games. The big issue with them most commonly cited is that players don’t know what the difficulty levels are like before they try them, so they can accidentally get slotted with the wrong one. I played Nier on hard and it was a shitty experience. I for some reason chose to play Metroid Prime 3 on easy, I still don’t know why, and that was entirely too easy. Players are basically being asked to be mind readers about which of your difficulty settings is right for them.

I’m a bit conflicted on how exactly difficulty should be handled here because I’ve accrued some beliefs that don’t totally line up.
Continue reading →

Making Team Shooter Healers Interesting

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of videogame characters who specialize in healing other team mates like Mercy, or the Medic?

I mean, this only really applies to Overwatch and TF2. Other games like Dota and MMOs have healers, but they don’t really overlap with the things I have to say about healers in those particular team shooters.

Basically, Mercy and the Medic, characters like them (with an auto-lock heal beam) in these team based shooters have a tendency to be really powerful. Medic was the most powerful character in TF2, and Mercy has been at or close to the top frequently. Lucio is actually better than Mercy and has been top tier consistently throughout overwatch’s life cycle. These characters serve a valuable function that all the other characters need, because these games have a slow pace of movement, and a low time to kill, factors which compound on each other. You basically always need and always want a healer rather than another damage dealer or support. They’re that essential to winning.

What kind of sucks about them though is, they’re not terribly interesting characters (except perhaps Lucio). They generally get to move faster than other characters, but their input on the battle is basically holding M1 and avoiding getting shot. Mercy is kind of interesting, because she can dash to the target she’s healing (and otherwise moves slower than the other characters), glide along in the air, and resurrect everyone on her team within a certain radius.

TF2 put an interesting spin on the medic with the vaccinator: https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Vaccinator A weapon which allows the medic to select a resistance for their heal target, between bullets, explosive, and fire, making the process of healing the target slightly more involved, but overall is still kinda just, hold the button and stay close, but don’t get hit.

Making a character that is more interesting than that in a healing role is kinda tricky and I don’t have any good ideas off the top of my head. Making it so healing characters aren’t as necessary to a team means making a game where you don’t always fight battles of attrition, but rather more rock paper scissors oriented fights. Right now you can’t avoid losing damage, so you need a way to heal it or you can’t have a sustained map presence. Also making the game faster helps, but also makes it harder to maintain a defensive perimeter.

Is CS:GO good?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Is CS:GO good? Do you know of any better multiplayer FPSs on PC that are worth sinking 1,000 hours into?

Reflex? Quake Live? Unreal Tournament? Tribes? Overwatch?

I mean, most of those have dead communities, but it happens.

I think CS:GO is good. It’s kind of the baseline for a better than average multiplayer FPS.

Defuse is a good game mode, the maps are generally really good for the style of game it is. They’re hallways punctuated by wider spaces with decent saturation of cover of varying types. Some cover can even be shot through.

Defuse is nice because there’s a fair amount of situations that can go on just based on the game mode, you can have Terrorists plant at bomb site A or B. The bomb can go off successfully, the bomb can be defused. All the terrorists can be killed, all the counter terrorists can be killed. The bomb can be passed between multiple terrorists as they each die.

Flashbangs are cool, smoke grenades are cool, molotovs are cool, fake grenades are cute. All of these control space in different ways which is nice. And people work out crazy precise setups to throw them to specific spots on the map from specific spots, so you can hit people in remote places to fuck them over.

The gun bullet spray patterns are largely deterministic, making CS way more fair than other shooters. You can point at the opponent and click on them to shoot them. It’s a revolution. The size of the spread and recoil increases as you are moving faster, so slowing down is helpful, but not totally necessary. There’s still a tiny bit of randomized bullet spread on top of the deterministic spread and recoil patterns.
http://twowordbird.com/articles/csgo-recoil-mechanics/

So it’s a game where you can run around, shoot people, have some tactical encounters with a fair amount of variety, without the baggage of regen health, iron sights, or randomized bullet spray. It’s kind of simple, but it does what it does better than its competitors and it’s kinda neat. It’s not my favorite game, but I’d say it comes out as good.

Simple Actions with a lot of Depth

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What are some simple actions in games that actually have lots of deph? I’d say Mario’s jump is a good example due to the level of control you have over it. Got any others?

Double Jumping
My goto example a lot of the time. You can jump at many different points during your first jump to get a variety of combined effects, meaning that between both your jumps there is a lot of depth.

Weaving through projectiles (shmups)

Wavedashing (smash)
Different angles give you different lengths, you can jump up through platforms and do it, and as you land. Can also get you off platforms and be done out of shield and other actions.

Edge canceling (smash)
Can be done at any point in a move and off of many moves for varied effect

Strafejumping (Quake and derivatives)
Lots of variance possible on each frame, lots of variance possible in the overall arc and trajectory.

Kick Glitching (Mirror’s Edge)
Is modulated based on input speed, look angle into the wall, and time you kick off the wall. Allows different followups too

Side Boosting (ME)
You get different amounts of speed off it based on how cleanly you do the motion, both turning to set it up, and turning when exiting the boost.

Pointing and shooting while moving (especially rockets)
Pretty obvious, you can aim in a lot of directions, move in a lot of directions. Rockets and other projectiles you need to lead are really interesting too. Aiming is fundamentally tricky and has a lot of possible places your cursor can pass through and become active on.

Skiing (Tribes)
Activating the jetpack and going up and down the right hills to gain speed requires good timing and reading of the environment.

Drifting
Depending on the game this requires good prediction ability for where to start drifting and how long to drift, as well as what direction to hold during it, such as to get the right angle.

A lot of Micro stuff in Starcraft Brood War
Moving units around and having varied results for different formations is fundamentally deep. Like pulling weakened units off the front line and having them assist from the back, or using tighter or wider or shaped formations versus certain other enemy types.

Directional Influence (smash)
I’m kinda cheating with this one, DI is deep because of a lot of assisting mechanics too. Actually trying to control your trajectory in the moment is kind of simple, just point the stick perpendicularly to the angle of knockback.

Tossing objects with gravity.
Getting parabolas right is tricky. Humans have natural physics simulating mechanisms that assist us with this.

Attacking in Chivalry
The sword moves and you can look to control it as it moves. Control over these two simultaneous elements means there’s a lot of different trajectories you can send your sword in. You can delay your swing in place by rotating your view the opposite direction, or spin wildly to slash everywhere and potentially around blocks.

Rebounding off a corner or incline
Judging angles of reflection is tricky, and can go a lot of different ways. Can quickly become too chaotic for humans to easily judge though.

Shooting an object that bounces off surfaces
Same as the above, but an object instead of you.

Staying atop an object moving under you.
Not quite the same as balancing below, this is more about

Balancing
Walking the Slack Line taught me that there’s a lot involved with balancing properly. Even in the Tony Hawk games, trying to balance on a fine line has a fair amount of complexity, even if it’s a simple action overall, and being good at it can be tricky.

Trying to get maximum coverage of many objects with a limited area or set of areas.
This is a pure math thing. It’s the knapsack problem basically. A lot of math problems like this are inherently deep, like the traveling salesman problem. They require the use of heuristics to properly analyze. Actions like placing sentries, towers, or AOEs typically fall under this category.

Getting an object that is attracted to you gravitationally to orbit you, or redirecting it in general.
Lots of variables operate in synchronicity in these cases and you can get a lot of different results out of them with careful movement.

Bashgliding (Ori)
This one is cool primarily because you kind of need to balance the direction you bash with how much velocity you want to get off of it. Also the input is cool, you literally release the stick at the moment you bash. Then you can glide and double jump, and as long as you don’t press the stick, you’ll keep all the bash momentum. It’s possible before you gain the ability to glide to do this, but it’s obviously not as effective, and you definitely need double and triple jumps to really make it useful.

Divekicking (divekick)
All the divekicks and different styles of divekick in that game are so expressive. Like The Baz deserves a special shoutout for both versions of his divekick, the original one where he could jump straight up and then press and hold kick to choose an angle to fire, and he had to draw a line behind him that would be what actually hurt people, as well as the new one where he presses and holds in the air to extend a rope further or shorter, to determine the radius of the arc he will swing in, then he can do this again off the first swing. The fact this works SO WELL with the existing divekick characters is fucking incredible. It has a totally different type of counterplay where you need to basically kick him in the crotch, into his body, rather than at him the same way as the other characters, yet every character counterplays against this great.

Shielding (smash)
It has variable density, depending on how hard you hold down the trigger, which can have variably more pushback/shieldstun/damage taken when you hold it lighter, and it can even be tilted to cover different parts of the body. So truly effective use of the shield can be really nuanced.

Palmbombing (psychonauts)
It’s like the reflection examples and tribes skiing above, you can use the palm bomb to reflect off a surface, then redirect this velocity elsewhere. Helped by the fact that bunnyhopping conserves momentum in psychonauts.

Damage boosting
This one goes back to Quake, but involves a lot of games. There’s many forms of this, from rocket jumping, to grenade jumping, to getting hit by enemies to abuse mercy invincibility, to getting hit by enemies to get boosted forwards faster, to many other things. It can vary by position, by angle, by when you jump, many factors. Usually has incredible depth.

Canceling an animation with variable velocity over the course of the animation to keep the velocity.
There’s a lot of examples of this in different games, but one of my favorites is the DACUS in Smash bros. You can cancel dash attack into grab or up smash and keep the momentum of the dash attack (which for most characters boosts them forward rather quickly).

Dash cancel to keep invincibility (Slayer in Guilty Gear)
You can do this to add iframes to moves like bloodsucking universe to make them function like pseudo DPs. You can combine this with all of your specials and to jump forward invincibly whenever you want.

Divekick canceling (faust in guilty gear)
You can divekick (like dhalsim’s yoga spear) with Faust, then cancel with faultless defense, then do another aerial at any point in your jump to change your jumping trajectory and do aerials lower to the ground. It’s amazing to see in action and gives Faust amazing air to air and air to ground abilities.

Roman Canceling (guilty gear)
You can do this at any point in a move (after it hits) to instantly cancel the move. The Xrd implementation is even more deep because it can be before or after the move hits, vastly opening up the range of options. You can whiff cancel fireballs to act simultaneously to them, you can extend blockstrings at the cost of meter (I love Kusoru at Final Round XV roman canceling two sweeps in a row to set up a tick wild throw, that’s fucking incredibly cool). You can also YRC moves that put you in the air to do quick aerials, like YRC Bandit Bringer, or Millia’s 6K.

Movement on Ice
It’s tricky, you have a few variables going at once, and you need to judge how much movement will be enough to get you to a place, and how much is overboard. Sometimes you need to move fast, sometimes you can afford to move slow. You need to think into the future about the effect of friction to approximate where you will end up. The range of different speeds and attempts to affect your speed more or less create depth.

Tried to keep this limited to single mechanics, but couldn’t in all cases. Left off a lot of things that were obviously combinations of a lot of mechanics working together, or being decided between.

Drawing the Line on Trial and Error

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Is it considered bad game design if it involves some trial and error. For example, on the Koei wiki page on Nioh, “The game is specifically designed for trial and error. Developers expect players to retry segments multiple times.” Is trial and error acceptable if minimal?

I think we need to draw a line here on Trial and Error.

There’s like, I Wanna Be The Guy trial and error, then there’s regular hard game Trial and Error.

Here’s someone who has never played the game before playing IWBTG. This is a trial and error game. It sets you up in situations where it will kill you in a way that you almost never can see coming. (Bonus: The game over music is from guilty gear.)

IWBTG is bullshit. It’s alright in a game where you accept that premise and are willing to invest tons of time into dying over and over again. Nioh and the Souls games are not like IWBTG. They have occasional traps. They have occasional death traps. But they give hints about these traps in advance, and never decide to hit you with anything that cannot be beaten by human reaction time unless you place yourself in that situation. That and a lot of traps in those games will not kill you instantly. They allow you to fail without instant death.

Nioh and the Souls games have an element of trial and error in that it is not always clear how enemies work, or what is the best way to clear a stage. In the process of beating a stage, you are expected to try many times, because it is hard, and try many different ways. They expect you to try things out, like approaches, like attacks, and die or get hurt trying, because it’s hard, and then try different things. You are given clues, you are shown an adequate amount of information. If you’re good, you can beat whole stages without dying that you’ve never seen before, but that is unlikely. In IWBTG, that is impossible.

And on a broader level, all games consist of trial and error. It’s connected to the nature of games. You mess up, you try again. It’s just not always blind guesswork.

And the other thing to ask is, is the game still fun when all the surprises are revealed? If someone knows about every trick? In the case of IWBTG, it’s still fairly challenging. I don’t think I’d totally call it fun, for much the same reason as super meat boy, but it’s still a functioning game with a decent challenge.

On the subject of trial and error, do you think it’s reasonable for there to always be a sweet spot for, say, a Souls boss, where they’re totally beatable on a first try but still difficult on a tenth? That seems like a tighter balancing act than it’s worth.

Apparently the way Dark Souls bosses are balanced, the best playtester has to beat them without taking damage, then they’re considered fair. I think this is a bit overboard personally. I don’t think you need to go so far to ensure bosses are beatable on the first try honestly. You just need to avoid instantly killing the player for anything that isn’t totally obviously an instant kill (Bed of Chaos obviously breaks this rule).

How to Improve at Mind Games

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How can someone become good at playing mind games with their opponent in fighting games?

By practicing it deliberately.

See Also: How to Read a Book: Reads in Competitive Games

Specifically you should watch your opponent’s patterns. What do they keep doing and how can you exploit that? Watch what they do in each situation, get a feeling for their tempo and reaction time. If their reaction time is better than yours, then you need to beat them by acting on the tempo. If they do not adhere to the tempo, then you need to figure out by how much, and either act first to interrupt their options, or act second to punish them.

Watch for common player behaviors and keep a mental record of those. One example of this is, as Marth, I like to run through my opponent, then run cancel with a crouch, and fsmash back at the opponent I passed by. This is because when you run through, many people think they’re safe and do an option out of shield. However this is not foolproof. Players with good reaction time can grab me out of shield before I run through them. Players who are smart can recognize my pattern and either jump out of shield earlier, or hold onto their shield so my fsmash does nothing. At which point the correct response from me is to notice they are doing this and instead do run through, cactaur dash (run cancel and dash opposite direction), grab, because I’ve conditioned them to stay in shield.

Think about how everything you do conditions a response from your opponent and other things you can do instead that beat that response. If you do something that is exploitable, change it up in expectation of your opponent catching on. Watch what you do before you do an action, because that might give it away. Similarly watch for that in your opponent.

Getting good at mindgames is about studying other people, and finding 50/50 scenarios.

Also read this guide.
http://sonichurricane.com/?page_id=1702

Here’s 3 other guides on it as it applies specifically to smash bros (though you can extend these lessons outside of those games too)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=273tHua4wGc

And here’s a paper on people’s patterns in Rock Paper Scissors and a basic guide to winning:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.5199v1.pdf
(The short is, winners tend to stick with their choice more often, losers tend to switch more often, and continue switching to unused options.)

Think about what the opponent is actually doing. Remember their responses to scenarios, and keep updating to do the thing that will beat their current pattern. If you have found a pattern that keeps winning, keep doing it, or if it’s just a pure mixup, switch after 2-3 reps, because that’s when your opponent is likely to switch, unless they’re bad and don’t understand the counterplay of the different options.

Of course also look for scenarios in which you can cover all or most of your opponent’s options on reaction and just setplay them. Then you don’t need to guess.

The beauty of competitive games is that there’s a complicated web of counters to different options in different scenarios, with one covering many in many cases, and different ones changing in utility based on the scenario. But to exploit these, you really need to think and pay attention, or you’ll get played.

Don’t Get Mad, Get Good.

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of Spherax’ salty rage quit on Rising Thunder? Does he have somewhat of a valid point beside how bitch he sounds?

This was the MOST HILARIOUS FUCKING THING EVER when it happened. I even told the guy on his twitter to neutral jump the fucking fireballs. Rising thunder was a game that made neutral jumps over fireballs REALLY FUCKING GOOD too! Because all moves were on cooldown, if you neutral jumped a fireball, not only were you not allowed to shoot another until it went offscreen, they had to wait for the whole cooldown to finish!

It also lead to interesting things like if your opponent wasted an anti-air, then you could jump in all you wanted without fear until the cooldown finished.

Also I loved how Chel in that game could cancel sweeps into fireballs. Almost no game does that except Super Turbo.

Like the ironic thing about his whining was, he was playing the best character in the game, Crow. Crow had absolutely ridiculous okizeme pressure, and pressure in general. If he got in close, he could attack, cancel to short ring toss, jump over, crossup, attack high or low, then ring toss again, and so on, then confirm into a combo, into super. Crow was some cool shit, but also evil shit.

In short, No. He does not have a point. All of his whining is completely invalid. He is a bad player who has trouble with a simple low-level playstyle. Chel was not overpowered or broken. Ryu is not overpowered in SF4. Dude got beaten, claims the other player is bad and using a broken character to salvage his ego. It’s as simple as that.

When you get beaten, you need to acknowledge WHY you are getting beaten. You need to understand the faults in YOURSELF. It doesn’t matter if your opponent is using a broken character, you can pick that character too. It doesn’t matter if your opponent is a scrub. You’re a worse scrub for losing to them and being salty about it. If you cannot purge yourself of this mindset then you cannot improve. Developing a mindset like this makes you worse against players you should be beating the most easily.

I played a friend recently who played EXACTLY like this. He’d shoryuken out of everything I did to him after blocking the first hit, be mashing shoryuken in the middle of all my combos in case I dropped. This is a scrubby terrible behavior. I was tired at the time and fucking livid that he was seriously pulling this dumb shit when I was in a mindset where my ability to adapt was slowed down. So I began tapping him once, letting him shoryuken, and doing the crush counter combo. I then did something I don’t do often in SFV and switched characters. I chose a bunch of random characters I never play and beat him with almost all of them (rip zangief). I was annoyed, but I controlled myself enough to not lose to an opponent doing a basic (but bad) strategy.

Zoning is interesting. There’s a lot of ways to zone well, and a lot of ways to get around zoning. If you can’t figure all this out, if you can’t see what’s interesting about it, you’re in a bad mental place.