Patch Ideas to Fix Melee Weirdness

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Have you ever done a post on what system-wide mechanical changes you would do to Melee if you could?

I’m pretty sure I did that already, but I have more ideas, so I’ll do it again.

My changes would be extremely minor, like increasing leniency on backdash, increasing the range on the controller that is registered as a dash, increasing the shorthop window, remove reduced jump height for frame 1 attacks, allow canceling IASA frames with airdodge or B moves, allow reverse grab boxes to grab at the end of up B moves, fade out portraits and % when they overlap characters. Plus incorporate all 20XX TE changes for convenience. If I want a balance mod on top of this, I’d go with SD Remix. And add more neutral/counterpick stages as appropriate. Continue reading →

Interaction: The Key to Depth?

Celia Wagar1 Comment

You’ve talked a lot about depth and complexity in regards to game design, but what about interaction between mechanics? How does it relate to depth and complexity? Any examples done well/poorly?

Alright, if game quality was purely tied to the number of states possible then the scale would not be linear. It would be exponential or logarithmic, like decibels. A strictly linear addition of states does not create a big jump in quality.

For a mechanic to significantly improve the game it must interact with the other mechanics, multiplying or exponentiating the number of possible states. Continue reading →

Co-op Game Thoughts

Celia WagarLeave a comment

what do you think about co-op games?

Okay, I honestly don’t play that many Co-op games. Lets see, I remember Tales of Symphonia, New Super Mario Bros Wii, Alien Swarm, Dark Souls, L4D, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, and Smash Bros Brawl.

I think that a lot of the basic design applied to single player games overlaps into co-op ones easily. The big troubles are camera controls, griefing, overwhelming enemies, and giving players interesting simultaneous tasks. Continue reading →

Input Movement Metaphors (QCF and More)

Celia WagarLeave a comment

I absolutely adore Platinum’s stuff but absolutely cannot find anything to like in fighters. What differences between the two do you think causes this?

I can only guess, dude. That’s on you.

My guesses would be that fighting games have a very different control scheme from platinum games. I can only think of Ramlethal in GG Xrd who has chain combos of the same style as your average platinum game. Apart from that, the control schemes are extremely different, and fighting games are even different from normal 2D games in many ways.

And that fighting games aren’t really fun until you “get” them. It’s tricky to really understand what’s going on until it clicks for you, and before that it can seem like degenerate button mashing.

And that fighting games are a lot harder than platinum games. They have way more complex systems, more difficult commands to input moves, and tighter input windows for successful actions. Continue reading →

Competitive Games Without Patches

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Do you think the immutability of Melee and other classic vs. games is bad? What is your stance on the constant patching that esports games undergo?

I think there’s a tradeoff in patching. There’s a lot of tradeoffs actually. When you patch, obviously you can make the game better. You can bring it closer to perfect balance. The downside is, you upset the meta every single time you patch. If you patch really frequently, then performing well at your game is just about finding what everyone else is suffering against. Too many patches too fast will literally kill a game competitively, both because people can’t keep up, and because it’s impossible to observe how your changes perform if you’re constantly patching and never playtesting.

This happened with Brawl+. They updated nightly, and people couldn’t keep up, so everyone quit giving a fuck. Continue reading →

People Aren’t Random

Celia Wagar1 Comment

You’ve criticized randomness in games because it gives uninteresting variation, and can be unfair, making competition not about who is best, but about who lucked out. You’ve also criticized the “solution” to this as seen in poker, where many games even out the random variance to pick the best but even in deterministic sports (or as deterministic as real life can be assumed to be) there’s a significant randomness to determining who’s best. These made me think about this: https://twitter.com/nothings/status/762769777819398145 Googled for the source but couldn’t find it. Thoughts?

The short of this seems to be that people are random therefore game’s outcomes are random. I’d personally rebut by saying that people are inconsistent, you could say “chaotic”, not necessarily random. We’ve gone over how people are bad RNGs before, but performance is a bit less in our control.

I’ve actually heard about streaks in sports just being clumps in random distributions, and that more or less baseballers and basketballers follow their average performance most of the time, even when you think they’re “hot” or performing well. Radiolab did an episode on this actually. Continue reading →

Bullet Sponges

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of the phrase “bullet-sponge” enemies? Is it a valid complaint?

Yes actually. It’s a weird matter of pacing to have an enemy you just keep hitting that won’t die. This is also tied into poor feedback, about how much health enemies have left. I have some old notes and ruminations I wrote on this that were never really completed, but I’ll share it here:
http://www.evernote.com/l/AMxyBLzLcbhHDKl0oIkN2IDHTqbxXns-MtU/

I think this is why some enemies use multiple health bars, because feedback about how much damage you’re doing is more clear to the player when the bar moves more each hit. Continue reading →

Air Gear Game Design Ideas

Celia Wagar5 Comments

Which mango series do you think would have some great material to be used in a videogame?

Air Gear, no doubt.

I’ve been rereading it recently and just going, holy crap this would make such an amazing game, but it would be so impossible.

It just has this amazingly rich system it built for skating. It was inspired by Jet Set Radio, but took the concept a lot further and made it more into its own thing, focusing less on graffiti and more on turf wars + the powered skates themselves.

It has this core concept of powered inline skates, these can be customized with different parts and there are different types, riders that operate in teams and compete over turf in different competitions that are varied within each category, progression from simpler tricks to harder ones, different styles of tricks that different riders specialize in, the 8 roads that categorize the different styles of tricks and 8 kings who are the masters of each road, and even tuners who help repair and “tune” the different skates to perform their best.

Here’s a few wiki entries explaining things, there are unmarked spoilers for the biggest twist in the series, so be warned.
http://airgear.wikia.com/wiki/Air_Trecks
http://airgear.wikia.com/wiki/Parts_War
http://airgear.wikia.com/wiki/Kings_and_Roads
http://airgear.wikia.com/wiki/Regalias

And imagining a game of this is awesome, because it has this incredible hero’s journey thing going on with it. The main character starts out barely being able to walk in air trek skates, to riding up flagpoles, to being able to go up walls, to eventually riding on pure air. Other characters learn to shoot fire from their skates, freeze time, and shoot layers of wind at their opponents. There’s a lot of assorted powers throughout the series, but the key is there’s this sense that characters learn them through effort and experimentation. Naturally, having played fighting games and speedrunning mirror’s edge, I have a good idea what this could feel like. When I first learned to kick glitch in mirror’s edge, it was a world opened up to me. It was magical. One of the core themes of Air Gear is this magic of pulling off a neat trick.

The trouble, the part where it’s impossible is, how do you allow players to do all these moves? How do you allow players to learn these moves? How do you pack all these tricks and moves into a system which is naturally designed to have this progression from normal skating to grinding to wallriding to flying across buildings and eventually flying through the air? How do you make players steadily go through these stages?

Part of the reason there can’t ever be a game of Air Gear that lives up to the source is any normal game designer would solve this effortlessly by just making a stat system. Okay, you’ve done 30 dashes, your speed levels up. 30 wallrides, now you can wallride a bit higher. Your overall trick level is 20, now you have access to elemental tricks, all of which are one-button that you can bind to whatever face button or trigger you want.

What I’d really like to see is a control system that somehow emulates the way characters learn tricks. You can take some cues from fighting games, speedrun tricks, mirror’s edge and of course Skate for this.

But how do you feasibly build that, introduce new concepts to the player over time, and avoid players accidentally riding on sheer air by buttonmashing? I don’t honestly know. Is it even possible on current controllers?

Maybe you could have leveling up for the styles and tuning just to keep the insane number of possible tricks you could do reasonable?

The perfect inspiration for air gear tricks is super metroid tricks. The walljump, shine spark, space jump. They’re all really nice design inspirations for low affordance tech. There could be RPG systems that actively change how easy the inputs are to do, like lengthening the windows or even changing the read algorithms to add extra shortcuts.

It’s not a style of game that really conforms to the types of game design that is common nowadays. You’d have to work out how the environments would work, all the things players could trick off of, how to combine tricks, a lot of things.

But damn, it could be awesome. I might write up a design doc if I get any good ideas for it.

So why do you like Air Gear so much? Genuinely curious.

It’s hard to explain without spoiling it. The anime is a good adaptation in terms of just having a better intro, building up the beef between Ikki and the Skull Saders better, as well as introducing the world of the storm riders a bit better, but after that it doesn’t really do the manga justice, and unfortunately a lot of the early arcs aren’t so great, especially behemoth, which is practically just anime fighting instead of inline skating.

What I like about it and what got me into it is, it builds up this world with a real mythic force behind it. There’s this sense of the whole stormrider culture of competition and mutual cooperative self improvement through competition, which is something I personally identify strongly with. Then in the background, there’s the Kings, and the Roads, and the Regalia, and a lot of it is kept vague early on. Early on Ikki sees the Wing Road, and it’s not portrayed as a literal element of magic, but there’s still this sense of manifest destiny that he’s going to climb to the top and learn how to fly. Having the crowd in the anime version of the Devil’s 30/30 was a great touch, and not showing his final attempt was probably the best wrap-up they could have given that limited part they were able to adapt.

Then he starts learning wind road stuff directly from Sora and you have that whole hero’s journey mentor thing going on, with it further cementing manifest destiny because Sora is someone who was nearly crowned the wind king, but he got too high and came crashing down, which is related to the initial fears that Ikki should be kept away from the stormrider world, and his journey to become strong so he can do what he loves. And then you learn that the tower of tropheaum isn’t some metaphor but is a real thing controlled by none other than the people he was brought up with, but because of his path to become the wind king, he’s destined to fight them, even though Ringo is in love with him and they’ve been close ever since they were kids.

And here’s where the big spoilers come in:

And then you find out that ALL OF THAT IS BULLSHIT! His Mentor, Sora planted ALL THIS STUFF ON THE INTERNET to create the entire stormrider mythology. He trained Ikki to be the wind king and set up Genesis in the first place as a monumental distraction for everyone so he and his twin brother could swoop in at the last moment, steal the wind regalia that was stolen and hidden from him years beforehand, as well as a special Toul Tool To tuner. You get this massive betrayal by the mentor character mid-story when it seems like Ikki was finally gearing up to take down Sleeping Forest. From there all kinds of shit gets fucked up, and Ikki finds out the real truth about the Tower of Trophaeum. But kind of the genius of it is that because it’s a comic, because it’s a story, the manifest destiny and mythology stuff is still true in a way, by it’s own merits rather than in-universe urban legend, you still have this hero’s journey arc and the ending is positively insane.

Infinite Continues & Checkpoints in General

Celia Wagar1 Comment

How do you feel about infinite continues? If it’s more complex than “yay or nay”, can you name some games where they work and some where they don’t?

I’m fine with infinite continues. Castlevania 3 has infinite continues, whereas Contra or Curse of Issyos doesn’t, to provide an example. Infinite continues (in an arcade game context) just means that the furthest you can fall back is to the beginning of a stage instead of the beginning of a game. It’s subdividing the checkpointing system a bit more. So you have say tier 1 checkpoints, midway points through the level, and you return to those when health is depleted (costing you a life), then you have tier 2 checkpoints, the beginnings of levels, which you return to when your lives are depleted (costing you a continue), then there’s tier 3 checkpoints, the beginning of the game, which you return to when your continues are depleted. You could honestly make these systems any way you want, not just conforming to this type of structure, and many games do, like modern games that only have tier 1 checkpoints and never cost you lives or continues, never sending you back further than the last checkpoint. There’s games that allow you to optionally enable checkpoints or not, games that allow you to destroy checkpoints for a reward (shovelknight), and more.

I think the question here is, is it fair to send the player all the way back to the very beginning of the game? That depends on the game. Games with limited continues are pretty much invariably arcade style games, which also means games that are maybe 30 minutes long at the most, averaging between 15 and 20 minutes usually from beginning to end. These games typically also don’t have persistent character customization or rigorous item collection, things that take up a lot of time and effort which players would hate to lose. Castlevania 3 from beginning to end for the average player takes more than 30 minutes. It’s much longer than the original game and that’s probably why it moved to infinite continues (assuming the original castlevania didn’t, I honestly don’t remember).

Curse of Issyos, which I’m still playing (got to path of scylla’s boss), can be completed in about 15 minutes from beginning to end, so it’s very reasonable to start from the beginning. Same deal for Contra, which I beat recently.

Dark Souls by comparison is nearly impossible without checkpoints. There is a special reward in dark souls 2 for not using bonfires, but notably you’re allowed to light them, but not sit at them. This means you can enable them as checkpoints and still continue on your journey. In a game that can run for a hundred hours like dark souls, erasing everything if you die too much is tantamount to cruelty.

An interesting game idea might be a game like dark souls, except you have a limited number of lives to continue from bonfires, and if you run out you restart the game with all your items and stats intact. So you need to clear the whole game on a limited number of lives/continues, but you grow stronger as you progress further, making the early areas trivial. Some game has probably done that before.

Is it possible to add depth to grinding?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Uhhhhhh, that’s complicated. Technically grinding has whatever depth the base game has, just players intentionally repeat one part that they know they can beat.

The problem of grinding is more one of human psychology. We try to find the fastest lowest effort way of getting the results we want, even if it makes us bored.

I’d say the solution is to minimize or prevent grinding, force the player to move between content in order to improve. Otherwise they’ll stake out the one place with the highest EXP return and closest to whatever respawns the monsters. This can be done by having monsters refuse to drop EXP after being killed a certain number of times, forcing you to move on, by adding points of no return, by making encounters not respawn, etc.

Alternative solutions would be to speed grinding up by offering choices in how to grind. Actually, TWEWY is a great example here. TWEWY’s random encounters are opt-in, so you never get encounters by accident and you don’t need to go running around in a field until one pops up on you. The cool thing about them is also that you can chain the encounters for bigger rewards, so you can chain up to like 10 battles in a row, which you need to beat without healing.

So the idea is, allow players who want to grind to get access to battles instantly, and give them the option of facing something super hard to get a ton of EXP in one go.

People want to get to the end result, you might as well give it to them quick, but don’t give it to them for free or you’re writing them a blank check to wreck the game balance.

As for actual ways to vary grinding, you can have things like EV training in pokemon, which was trivialized in later games with good reason in my opinion. In Tales of Symphonia, every character has a Technical vs Strike meter that changes based on their equipped EX-Skills through combat, and grants access to different moves.