Stage Hazards

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of stage hazards in fighting games? I don’t like them but I don’t know why. I might just be a scrub.

I am fine with them as long as they are predictable and don’t make the entire game about them.

Much as it may surprise you, I played smash bros casually for many many years before becoming competitive. I played on stages with hazards a lot. I even played with items on at one time in both melee and brawl.

Among the stages with hazards/gimmicks I liked Mute City, Port Town Aero Drive, Brinstar & Brinstar Depths, Pokefloats, Fourside, Big Blue, Onett, Peach’s Castle, Green Greens, Shadow Moses, Delfino Plaza, Mario Kart, Eldin Bridge, Norfair, Frigate Orpheon, Halberd, New Pork City, Skyworld, and Castle Siege. I liked that most of these telegraphed what was going to happen before it did. I liked playing around the unique difficulties of each stage. It was fun.

I don’t think stage hazards work as well in traditional fighting games because things like platforming don’t work as well in them. Smash Bros has a separate jump button. It has air control. It has a robust movement system on the air and ground that traditional fighters don’t. Also you’re allowed to walk through opponents in smash, and side switching happens a lot more often. Characters are smaller proportionally. It’s just better overall.

Over time, the stage hazard systems get less interesting to me, due in large part to how much they interfere with the normal flow of the match, the part I want to explore and improve at. Also most of these stages had serious balance issues, which is the real reason I don’t play on them anymore, that and I just don’t tolerate as much jank anymore. I didn’t like the slightly reworked versions of Skyworld or Temple: M that appeared in Project M while they were legal. I don’t like a lot of the technically legal stages that are in the top row of the PM netplay build. Making a stage that really feels totally right to me now is a lot harder.

The other issue is, a lot of stages with hazards suck. Like Distant Planet has lame hazards. And Summit. Stuff can come out of nowhere and occasionally you just get wrecked.

I liked how PSASBR allowed you to turn off hazards. I didn’t like how all the stages would go through the hazards just once in sequence and never repeat them ever again.

In Injustice I think it’s some cancerous shit.

Fitting Fighting Game Mechanics into a Shooter?

Celia Wagar2 Comments

What elements of fighting games do you think could work in shooters?

Okay, I have a lot of these ideas actually.

For one, the round structure. You could have a 1v1 fight with life refills for both players when one of them dies. Reset the match. I think Quake Live had a mode that worked like this actually.

Supers are an obvious one that Overwatch implemented (the ults both charge up over time and as you deal damage or healing to other players).

A more nuanced idea is having projectiles that disappear if one player is hit. Not only does this actually appear in some fighting games, but it would help FPS games emulate the rock/paper/scissors nature of fighting games. Currently FPS games are all about trading hits and trying to hit your opponent more consistently with a higher DPS weapon from a position of advantage. You kill your opponent if you can DPS more efficiently rather than necessarily counter their actions. A big part of the reason the same doesn’t happen in fighting games is the way hitstun interrupts attacks during startup. So imagine faster/slower shots, shorter/longer ranges, shot startup time, blocking, reasons to not shoot constantly.

Bigger projectiles, shooting large swaths of projectiles, and having them move slower. The idea here is space control, denying space to your opponent by laying down the fire. Slow projectiles are a big deal in fighting games because you can operate alongside them. They can serve this same role on FPS games. They need to be bigger because FPS characters have a wider space to move across. Having a wave of projectiles, grouped together like a larger projectile, could avoid the problem of the whole thing fizzling on touching a wall. The projectiles in one shot could be programmed to all disappear when hitting a player, and individually disappear on hitting environment geometry.

Using more buttons on the mouse. Currently FPS games get attack variety in by separating out the attacks among a bunch of weapons that the player switches between. This is slow, this is clumsy. Unless mapped efficiently, across relatively few keys, players can’t switch weapons very efficiently without sacrificing access to the movement keys for a few seconds. Basically, make less weapons, give them more diverse functions, map them to more buttons on the mouse. A gaming mouse has like 5 buttons on it. That’s plenty. 2 is too few. You might lose some people due to not owning a gaming mouse, but you can double bind those functions to the keyboard. On that note, the number of keys used should probably be reduced. You can get more functionalities out of the mouse buttons by having charge functions and tap versus press functions too.

Juggle Combos. These can get really dynamic in some fighting games. They can work off projectiles exclusively with some characters.

Projectile variety. Fighting games have amazing projectile variety. There’s no FPS projectile as versatile as Link’s Bombs in Melee in any FPS game. Part of it is also the way the 2d space constrains movement and keeps it clear what’s going on

Intro to Megaman

Celia WagarLeave a comment

I’m a little intimidated by how many games there are in the Megaman series. What games would you personally recommend, or how would you help someone new to Megaman?

Okay, I think the best starting point is probably the classic megaman series. It’s the simplest, and if you start there you won’t miss the features from the later games. From the original series I’d recommend 1, 2, 3, and 9, plus Rockman and Forte. 2 is a good starting point because the USA version is fairly easy, they smoothed it out compared to megaman 1, and it has nice variety. 1 is kinda rough around the edges, has a weird scoring system, kinda janky level design at times, but it’s still pretty great. 3 is supposed to be really good, harder than 2, but I haven’t played it yet. 9 is my favorite of the classic series. It’s super smooth, has great bosses, great enemies, great levels. Rockman and Forte is on my list to play. I love the speedrun. Icewall is broken as fuck.

From there it’s probably best to move onto the X series, after you’ve played at least one classic game. X1, X2, and X3 are the best. I’ve heard negative things about every game from X4 onwards. X1 is the only one I’ve beaten of those, it sets the pace really well, adds new abilities to megaman’s repertoire, generally a solid game. X2 and X3 is where it starts to get technical, because there’s more movement abilities, like air dashes, grapples, and frame perfect double jumps off charge shots.

The Zero and ZX series can be played interchangeably. I’ve beaten Zero 4, ZX, and ZX Advent. The Zero series was weird and had a kind of shaky foundation. It tried to change things up by adding a mission structure where you were allowed (and where it was even optimal) to fail missions. It also has leveling up to gain new abilities and Cyber Elves, which had 1 time use effects. By Zero 4 they worked a lot of these elements out or toned them down to be less janky. I don’t know how good the series is overall, and I haven’t heard much. I’d recommend it anyway.

ZX is a bit harder than Advent. Both use a Metroidvania structure for the world with areas unlocking as you get new biometals or boss forms. In ZX, you fight various bosses of 4 different types to gain their biometal, giving you access to a new form. If you avoid hitting their weakpoint the biometal gets stronger. The different Biometals have unique abilities, like airdashing, shooting in paths defined by a grid on the touch screen, detecting hidden items, etc.

ZX Advent is the conclusion, and the main character has the power to copy the form of all the bosses you fight. So you can literally turn into the boss, and use their powers. These are of course used as metroidvania style keys. The bosses have very different physiques, with some being large, some being small, etc. You can also copy the biometals from the previous game later on, and there’s a faster way to switch between forms from the touch screen in this one.

Megaman Battle Network is the weirdest spinoff. Dunno which one to recommend. It plays completely differently, but has a really creative realtime RPG grid battle setup with a deck of chips that have different attacks.

Favorite Glitches and Advanced Techniques

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What are your favorite unintentional advanced techniques in videogames?

Aw man, there’s a ton.

Kick Glitching has to be up there, it’s really beautiful. There’s just a ton you can do with it. You can influence it’s trajectory based on a ton of factors, and even do different jumps off it.

Rocket Jumping and damage boosting in general is a classic.

Skiing in Tribes was the perfect trick for a game with maps and weapons like it has. Too Perfect.

The butterfly cancel in Gunz was amazing. Totally opened up the movement system.

Toggle escape and the toggle fallbreak glitch were great in Dark Souls. Parrywalking and Binoboost were great in dark souls 2, especially binoboosting.

I like how you can save your jump in metroid prime hunters then jump in the air if you didn’t previously. Scandashing is also great in Prime 1 (NTSC).

Not unintentional, but shine sparking is just great. Walljumping is implemented in a pretty neat way in that game too.

The sky high cancel in MGR felt great to pull off, but it was kind of shitty in that it was the most damage efficient option.

The 2in1 cancel in SF2 started a revolution. It was the perfect thing.

The item underflow “Soft Gameshark” glitch in Pokemon Red, Blue, and Green is hilarious.

Strafejumping is a perpetual classic.

Accelerated Backhopping in the new source engine is a new-age classic.

Ori’s extended glides off bash if you release the control stick are great. Also like everything in that game. Infinite bash jumping is great too.

The ability to put away your sword in dishonored is small, but neat. (and makes you move faster) Also being able to abuse the vaulting mechanic to boost up certain walls.

Jump canceling is totally intentional in DMC, but whatever, it’s too cool. Sword Hangers are neat with vergil.

Backwards long jump in Mario 64 is great.

Bomb rodding in Link Between Worlds is neat.

Landing cancel in post-sotn castlevania games.

Snaking in Mario Kart DS and F-zero GX.

Frame 1 double jump during an airdash if you release a shot in MMX3.

cloning in starcraft, also patrolling with vultures to allow them to attack while moving.
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Micro_Tips

Palm bomb jumping in Psychonauts.

LAM jumping in Deus Ex is cool as fuck, also pointless once you get the speed upgrade.

The MGR super jump is fun once you learn how to do it (and bind L3 + R3 to a single button)

The sword boost in Dark Messiah, coupled with bhopping, is cool as fuck.

all the icewall clips in rockman and forte

everything cool in Vanquish

And that’s all I got.

Fighting Game Alignment Chart

Celia Wagar1 Comment

How would you break down the many different fighting game playstyles such as rushdown, turtling, zoning, or any others you can think of?

A friend of mine (ClarenceMage) came up with a really brilliant way of separating it out actually.

fighting game alignment chart.png

The idea is you have these two scales: Horizontally, you have a scale between Game Knowledge (left) and Player Knowledge (right). Vertically, you have a scale between Safe Guaranteed Play (top), and Risky Unpredictable Play (bottom).

Setplay revolves around setting up situations and capitalizing off of them. Setplay is highly reliant on game knowledge, it’s all about knowing the game better than your opponent. Examples of setplay players would include Armada (Honest Setplay) and Marn (Dog Setplay).

Buttons is about winning the footsie neutral game. It’s player knowledge, part game knowledge, so it falls somewhere between setplay and reads. You gotta know a bit of what your opponent is thinking, but also a bit of how to use your options best to win. Examples of Buttons players would be Hungrybox (Honest Buttons), PPMD (Opportunistic Buttons), and Infiltration (Dog Buttons)

Reads is about knowing your opponent’s tendencies. It’s about attacking at just the right time in just the right place. It relies heavily on player knowledge. Examples of Reads would be Snake Eyez (Honest Reads), Mango (Dog Reads) and Daigo (also Dog Reads).

Playing Honest is about sticking to guaranteed setups with a small chance of failure. Honest players tend to mix in a variety of approaches instead of pursuing a single gimmick and play according to what has the best odds of success. Honest players are the ones that almost always block low on wakeup or tech neutral. Honest players can have this tendency towards safety taken advantage of, but tend to have very consistent performance to make up for it.

Playing Dog is about going for what works and throwing caution to the wind. It’s about dogged persistence to win the way you want to win. Dog players tend to go for high risk high reward options or get killed trying. Dog players will ultra on wakeup, shoryuken in your face, charge the fsmash in the direction you’re about to roll, go offstage for the gimp.

Playing Opportunistic is a mix of Honest and Dog, trying to adapt to how the opponent is playing at that moment, seizing opportunities to grab just a bit more advantage where you can, but sticking to what you know works when the going gets tough. Opportunistic players are flexible, but can psych themselves out trying to follow their opponent’s patterns and be in the wrong mode at the wrong time.

Of course, there are a lot of ways to divide playstyles or categorize them. If you want to get deep down, it comes down to the player’s tendencies to use some options over others and the frequency of that option use, and you can’t totally quantify that.

Every Great Alien Fight in Half-Life

Celia Wagar2 Comments

I went back to Half-life, and I cannot agree that it’s anywhere near great. The base systems are though–the movement system makes for a great speedrun, and the weapon variety plus that makes for great multiplayer–but encounter design is severely lacking. As you mentioned, some fights are interesting due to level design, but those are few and far between, and the most interesting encounters are always against soldiers or assassins, which are the hitscan enemies, though their occassional use of grenades makes them a bit more interesting. The rest of the enemies are never used in interesting ways, which is a complete waste of potential.

Hmm, I have some counter examples, but it’s tricky to link to specific youtube timestamps on ask.fm. Someone just sent in a combat montage, albeit mostly against soldiers, which I’ll be posting alongside this. I mean, I can’t deny that the soldier encounters have good encounter design, helped by the diverse weapons and the fact that soldiers take hitstun, it’s just kind of a shame about the hitscan.

Early black mesa has a lot of headcrab encounters that aren’t the hardest thing in the world, but are reasonably stimulating. They combine these with vorts, zombies, and houndeyes rather frequently.

The elevator ride down where the headcrabs ambush you at 10:30 is rather interesting and tricky. Then they have a bunch of headcrabs at the bottom and a houndeye in a box. It’s not the most threatening, because they can’t hurt you much, but it’s a rather dynamic aiming, shooting, moving challenge. Not a lot of other games have things like this.

There’s a good arrangement of rooms at 11:50 onwards with some vorts, some headcrabs, etc. They ambush you, they have room to chase you, you have room for cover. (also this guy is playing on easy I think, but I’m really just using him since he’s bound to run through a lot of rooms)

Also kinda cool is the turret at 18:10 with the headcrabs under it.

At the start here you have the bullsquid in the lower area, and the vort that teleports in behind you. Unfortunately this guy does not go into that area. Then there’s a combination of 2 bullsquids and headcrabs in the freezer room at 3:30, which is a rather interesting room.

bullsquids and houndeyes in a curving hallway at 11:00 Works for those enemy types. You can ignore them with the tram though.

17:30 has a bunch of houndeyes, bullsquid can snipe from afar, headcrab is waiting far side of the bridge.

The tentacle encounter is a thing. Use grenades to draw it away, try to get to the ladders.

On a Rail has a bunch of interesting encounters, like the one before the moat into the next area. That has a bullsquid and houndeye and I think turret too.

1:20 onwards. And a combination encounter of vorts and soldiers at 12:00

vorts at 9:40

The first ichthysaur encounter is kinda cool.

Cool encounter with barnacles and a vort at 14:20, guy shows off why perfectly.

starts with 2 cool encounters. headcrabs, vorts, cold room. The 2 vorts in the hallway after is neat too.

questionable ethics starts you in the middle of a bunch of houndeyes. Has a ton of great fights all around.

cool encounter from the get-go here.

5:00 has an awesome encounter from that point to the end of the level. This one gave me some trouble.

The Lambda Complex at 6:40 onwards is entirely aliens and it’s pretty cool.

Great encounter before the warp into Xen at 5:00 and everything from Xen onwards is aliens.

I feel like the alien factory from 5:35 onwards is worth highlighting, it’s a ton of great encounters.

You are kind of right, they did underutilize their aliens. Many of their uses in the early game are strategic in ways that are kind of tricky to deal with, but don’t open up as many possibilities as many of the soldier fights due to simpler terrain. One of, or both, the expansions, Blue Shift, and Opposing Force, makes a lot more use of the aliens, even introducing the Race X aliens which are unique.

I don’t think I’m willing to say the game isn’t great because of this underutilization. It still has great weapon variety, some solid platforming, great enemy variety overall, and the soldier fights are still pretty good, but you make a fair point that it could have been better than it was.

Metal Gear Souls

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How would souls work if it had MGS style stealth as opposed to combat, but still had the same fundamentals for everything else?

That’s a weird combination, but I started thinking about it, and maybe it’s not a bad idea.

My first thought is limit the player character to just fist and dagger weapons. Leave enemies with the same moveset design as in the souls series to begin with, so they’re already tough to deal with. Another thought is instead of backstabbing, have backtapping, where you like tap the enemy from behind, and they do a little animation of turning around to face you that takes like half a second or so, during which they face their head down as a part of the turn and disable their vision cone. Have it so if you hold the button, you stab them in the stomach when they turn around. Enemies could be divided into classes, with the lightest class instantly dying, medium taking 90% damage, heavy taking 75% damage, super-heavy taking 50% damage. Stronger daggers could move increase this percentage, or take out medium/heavy enemies entirely. Naturally makes a sound, about the size/range of sprinting.

Okay, so armor can affect visibility and weight. Maybe it could be schemed based on the general area, and have an effect similar to levels of darkness in thief, except in how much it matches the color. Weight can affect both the movement speed and the amount of noise the armor gives off. Being naked means you’re very high visibility, and lower visibility armors can be heavier (also probably defend you better.)

Walking can probably be made completely silent (except with the heaviest armors), running should have about half the sound range as it currently does, sprinting could have a 1.5 times larger range than running currently does. dodge rolling should be updated to work more or less how it does in MGS3, where it can go over obstacles, knock people down, smoothly land from reasonably higher heights (where you’d normally get a heavy fall animation but still survive, instead halve damage and significantly shorter recovery).

There’s a surprising amount of items from souls that are naturally suited to a stealth game. Pebbles (lure enemy to sound), Firebombs (could temporarily make flames on the ground that enemies don’t want to pass through unless they’re on alert), Alluring Skulls (fascinate certain enemy types for a while), poison daggers (makes a sound on a faraway spot, and could tranq slowly over time), Prism stones (screech if dropped far enough to kill you, which makes noise of course, could also serve as a weak lure, like a weaker alluring skull, draws enemies over to it, but they become disinterested once they pass close enough), young white branch, the fucking chameleon and hidden body spells (chameleon is cardboard box), something like lloyd’s talisman except it makes an enemy blind or deaf, shaman bone blade.

You could use the undead theme so enemies revive after being killed after a certain amount of time. Some beastial enemies could have a sense of smell, which causes them to patrol near you. Chameleon could hide you better near similar objects.

Ranking the Soulsborne Games

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Now that all dark souls/demon’s souls/bloodborne games are out (for the foreseeable future?), how would you rank them all, and why? what strengths and weaknesses give them that rank for you?

I don’t know if I can totally rank them, it’s hard for me to remember demon’s souls at this point, and it’s tricky for me to say which game is best, just that dark souls 2 is worst, albeit still very good.

Demon’s Souls had the shrine of storms, the prison of hope, firelurker, maneaters, false king allant, some of the fastest movement, the least broken PvP matchmaking system. Great enemies like all the different skeletons, gargoyles that can actually fly.

Dark Souls had the best world design, sen’s fortress, blighttown, anor londo, painted world, the best tutorial, the best secrets, kalameet, artorias, oreo and smores, kellog, sif, lmao4king. black knights.

Dark Souls 2 had good combination encounters, forced you to fight enemies instead of just skip them or put more effort into skipping them, good use of ranged enemies, shrine of amana, black gulch, undead keep, drangleic castle, and relatively few major screwups. executioner’s chariot, looking glass knight, ruin sentinels, twin dragonriders.

Bloodborne did away with shields, did away with backstabs, had lots of enemy mixup attacks, aggressive enemies, variable hitstun and poise, enemy patrol patterns, almost nonlinear design, great hunter encounters. Ludwig, Maria, gehrman, logarius, shadow of yharnam, ebrietas, mergo’s wet nurse.

Dark Souls 3 has a difficulty curve, tons of great enemy designs that are threatening into the lategame, good use of nonlinear areas and shortcuts, even though it has the most linear progression path overall in the series. Best implementation of backstabbing in my opinion, best enemy AI, best enemy designs. Cathedral of the Deep, Irithyll, farron keep, grand archives, pontiff sulyvahn, champion gundyr, aldritch, dancer of the boreal valley, lothric & lorian, nameless king, soul of cinder.

Dark Souls 1 will always be my favorite, but there’s something to be said for all of them.

How I’d Design a Horror Game

Celia Wagar1 Comment

You’ve talked about how to design a horror game but it doesn’t seem like you like horror games. How would you design a horror game that YOU would play as in, what the gameplay be like (actiony, stealth, puzzle, etc.)

I’d aim for somewhere between action and stealth. A lot of horror games use puzzles as filler between the horror bits, but they don’t put a lot of effort into the puzzles, and I don’t think puzzle solving meshes well with horror. You essentially need an excuse to wander a large area, and puzzles can be used to that end by ferrying pieces back and forth, but that means people can’t see the whole puzzle at once, and it delays a lot of the feedback of getting stuff right or wrong which by itself would be irritating, and it gets compounded by the spook factor, so I don’t think it’s totally the best idea.

The trouble with horror is that you need a lot of not-horror to make it work, or people condition themselves and become desensitized.

Maybe the Queen Vanessa levels from A Hat In Time might be a good angle to work from.

Basically you’re set up with a bunch of essentially chores to do, then it makes a loud noise and HOLYSHITOHGODGETAWAYFROMME. You could get the enemy to come in on cycles, patrol around, you have hints it’s getting near, so you gotta hurry up while you have time. Then something that increases your risk factor, or something that requires you to take certain risks, something that alters the enemy’s scheduling a little to shake things up. Imagine that when the enemy is directly in your room, you can’t just hide the whole time, you NEED to move because it will eventually check your hiding spot. So imagine it’s like playing Perfection combined with Operation (the board games), you have this time limit you’re working against but you’re also really tense from trying to not screw up.

Couple that with a bit more potentially risky but seemingly empty traversal, a bit more randomness, a few more enemy types that have different behaviors, sections where you can’t always perceive the enemy, or know whether there is an enemy or not, and it could work.

Good Ideas from Bad Games

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What are some good ideas from bad games that you would like to see more dev’s implement in the future?

I called Nier good overall, but something I loved about it was the way that killing an enemy grunt would cause it to drop blood, which refilled your magic. This meant that you could kill grunts during boss battles to get ammo to fight the boss back, or even kill them right before you started charging so it could overcharge your magic meter, allowing you to shoot more than your maximum of dark lances or dark hands. Also the regenerating health unless you hit a timed weak spot was a pretty good idea, and bullets you can shoot down integrated with ones you can’t.

Batman Arkham Asylum. Having the guards go back to back was a really great idea. Bombing the gargoyles wasn’t a terrible idea.

Dishonored, basically all the powers, especially blink.

Legacy of Kain, getting shunted to the spectral realm when you die.

Psychonauts, levitate, palm bomb jumping. Great abilities.

Zeno Clash, that fucking strong punch’s momentum. That was godlike.

Mighty No 9, weakening enemies to a certain point, then hitting them with a special attack (the dash) right there, and being careful not to hit them past the point where they’re weakened. (trying to just barely push them over the point of weakening and not one hit further)

Planescape Torment, best meme.

Thi4f, swooping.