Frame Trainer Tool & How Long Are Frames?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

A lot of people ask me how long a frame is. I reflexively measure timings in games using frames (assuming 60fps), and I have a rather good sense of it. This comes both from being an animator, and experience with games in general.

So I had the idea, why not make a tool that helps show how long a frame can be by giving people an interactive example? So I got into flash, putz’d around for a bit, and ended up with this.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nt7dbdu6hg56tcu/Frame%20Trainer.swf?dl=1

https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html (download the flash player projector and drag the swf from the zip file above to use the frame trainer, since flash is deprecated on every platform ever now.)

To operate it, click the Go button to start the arrow moving from left to right. Press any key, or click the stop button to stop the arrow. The goal is to stop the arrow when it’s yellow, just before it hits the end.

You can configure how long it takes to get from the beginning to the end by changing the Frame Total text box on the left. And you can change how long it turns yellow with the Frame Window text box on the right.

By changing frame total, you can give yourself more or less waiting time before it turns yellow. By changing the frame window, you make it turn yellow for longer.

If you stop it while it’s green, you did it too early. If you stop it while it’s red, you did it too late. Use the arrow getting close to the end as your visual cue.

By default I set it to 40 frames total (to give you a decent amount of reaction time before you gotta press the button) and a window of 7 frames, which is the window for parries in 3rd strike and L Cancels in Melee. Try setting it to all different periods and trying it out. Try setting it for different periods of time just to see how long they are, like 60 frames is 1 second, 30 is half a second, 20 is a third of a second, 10 is a sixth, 5 is a twentieth.

For reference, here’s some other frame windows from various games and my description of how easy/hard they are.

1 frame: Reversal window in Super Turbo and Guilty Gear before Xrd. Kick Glitch Window in Mirror’s Edge. 1 frame link timing. This is the hardest possible single input in a 60FPS game. Obviously combination inputs can be harder. Coincidentally, I had to jerry rig the setup to allow this window (it would otherwise show red on the last frame), and I managed to test it was working successfully on the 3rd try.

2 frames: Reversal window in 3rd strike, power shield window in Melee, throw tech window in guilty gear. Boost Smash/DACUS window in PM. This input is almost perfect, allowing just enough leniency that people can feasibly get consistent at it.

3 frames: Smallest possible window for a link in SFV, reversal window in SFV and GG Xrd, common window for links across fighting games. This one has a tight timing, you’ll feel that it’s really tight. It’s practically the exact moment that the thing hits, except significantly more lenient than 1 or 2 frames. I can do these consistently in SFV. Any mediocre fighting game player can do these in their sleep.

4 frames: Perfect Shield window in Brawl. Slightly less tight, but still enough to be difficult.

5 frames: Reversal Window in SFIV, parry window in DMC3/4. This is where the window becomes wide enough to let you get the input even if you mashed it (unless of course there’s a lockout period to dissuade mashers, like the DMC parry has)

7 Frames: 3s Parry Timing, L Cancel Timing in Melee. There’s a bit of wiggle room here. You’re no longer pressing the button just as you reach the end, just as the fireball is about to hit you, or you’re about to hit the ground. If you do it a bit early, you are forgiven.

15 frames: Average human reaction time. Throw Tech Window in Blazblue.

20 Frames: The Tech Roll window in Melee. This window is so wide, there should be no reason to miss it if you see it coming, it’s completely outside average human reaction time.

30 frames: Half a second. Blazblue has a 27 frame throw break window for throws during hitstun/blockstun. The Parry Window in Metal Gear Rising is this long. The parry window in Rivals of Aether is this long.

50 frames: Seth Killian once said that the counter window in Batman Arkham Whatever is like 40-50 frames. This is so long that it’s practically impossible to miss.

By the way, if anyone wants me to make a 20 fps or 30 fps version of this tool, then I can do so easily. I tried to add another box that let you change the framerate manually, but it didn’t work.

The Cooldown Effect

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What do you think of some games that have special moves with cooldowns?

I don’t really like cooldowns. Cooldowns tend to promote play based on rotations. Cooldowns tend to promote abilities that aren’t designed very interestingly. I’ve spoken on this before, how I dislike the way RTS games and the genres influenced by them tend to have “abilities” instead of “moves”. Like a move or action in a traditional game has different periods of timing, it moves through space in an interesting way. There’s startup, active, recovery. “Abilities” tend to function instantly and ignore all the physical elements of how the action could function. They don’t feel grounded.

Compare a Moba to a 2d Zelda game and how different the items and attacks feel.

The other thing is, when abilities are designed with cooldowns in mind, generally the design ignores things like drawbacks to those abilities. Think of how many cooldown abilities in various games would be broken if you could spam them over and over again. What stops you from doing the same in say bloodborne, a fighting game, a first person shooter? Recovery time, ammo limits, reloading. There’s risks associated with these actions that make you not want to perform them all the time. In “ability oriented” games with cooldowns, if you could you would mash all your abilities at once usually.

So what’s the drawback to not using an ability? If you use it now, you can’t use it later. The real cost is opportunity cost, which is sensible, but kinda lame if you ask me. This leads to rotation based play, such as seen in MMOs, because when one is cooling down, you use the next one, then the next one, then loop around to the first one as it comes off. In some cases, there’s a good order to do these in that each boost one another for maximum efficiency, so you follow the rotation. Leads to very efficiency race styled play, because there’s no drawbacks to the moves that would make them counterable.

Rising Thunder made abilities work a bit better, but also those abilities were designed like Moves, they had the solid grounding in mechanic design that abilities don’t tend to have. Notice how all the Overwatch abilities tend to function instantly, where something like say, Mirror’s Edge (to use another first person example) has a bit more kinaesthetic sensation in its moves.

Thiefer’s Edge

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How would you design a game with stealth elements from the Thief series, mixed with the parkour system with all of it’s advanced techniques found in Mirror’s Edge?

Interesting idea. I wasn’t sure how this could work at first, but I think I might have an idea based on an older concept I thought up, of a stealth game based on speed. The idea is that as you go faster, you’re less visible/audible, so stealth is about trying to keep up speed and not let it drop. Keep on moving, don’t get tripped up.

Mirror’s edge has a system that supports this, a lot of the game is about avoiding getting tripped up. Many things like climbing up ledges or over fences have varying standards of success. Do it higher and more smoothly and make less noise, and go faster. This could also be applied to fall damage. Landing without a heavy fall is optimal, rolling is less optimal, then two levels of fall damage that make less and more noise. More perfect sideboosting could create less noise too.

A basic thought is, how do you inform the player that they’re being loud or quiet? One idea is that loud sounds can be lower pitched and more bassy where the quiet sounds can be higher pitched, softer in tone, and less bassy, so players can clearly distinguish them, yet still receive auditory feedback.

It would make sense to have footstep sounds change radius at different speed thresholds, so that things like wallboosts and the like can temporarily push you over the normal speed threshold, making you quieter until you slow down. It would also make sense to add a sound for hitting a wall at high speeds.

There should be a more mundane stealth system based on going slow on top of this, because it’s hard to go fast without knowing the level layouts. So you have the high level, gottagofast stealth, then the low level stuff. The low level could function more like thief, the high level more like mirror’s edge. Throw leaning on Q and E, move use onto F. Implement the fancy lighting system. Add a blackjack that can disable guards who don’t detect you.

The hard part is the level designs, the enemy AI. To make something suited for this would be difficult. You need to design around the fact that the player doesn’t know where stuff is in advance. How do you plan guard patrol paths that players zip by without getting a chance to study them for flaws? You could give players wallhack vision like everything does these days, show guard vision cones too. Whatever.

The levels probably make more sense being linear than open if speed is the focus, but you gotta provide a lot of paths to get around guards, otherwise the game doesn’t really make sense. I dunno what the final product would look like, would require a lot of thought to put together, maybe research into similar games, if any exist.

Stunning Detail: Hitstun in Depth

Celia Wagar1 Comment

Not sure if there’s much to talk about on this subject, but care to do a writeup on hitstun in videogames?

Hmmmm, yeah, there’s actually a bunch that could be talked about I think.

The big factors are interrupting attacks, advantage time, and pushback. Other things are knockdown, juggles, counter hits, meaties & multihits, special hitstun states, dizzy, recovery options out of hitstun, control during hitstun, hitfreeze, super armor, no hitstun, and blockstun.

The single biggest thing hitstun does to a game is it allows one character’s attacks to interrupt another character’s. This means a lot. It means that the first person to attack will win, which means you don’t always want to throw out an attack because your opponent might be attacking first. It also means you can’t just attack repeatedly, because eventually your opponent will interrupt you, assuming you can’t infinite them.

Advantage time or frame advantage is basically the difference between when you recover from your attack, and your opponent recovers from hitstun. If you recover first, then you are said to be plus on hit. This is noted as +# where the number is the amount of frames you’re up on your opponent. If you recover second, you’re minus on hit, noted as -#. Being plus means you get to act first, minus means you get to act second. The more plus you are, the sooner you can act, which means you have a higher chance of winning if both of you attack at the same time, and you can afford to throw slower moves since they effectively have less startup time relative to your opponent. If you’re minus then it means your opponent can act that way towards you. Going minus means surrendering initiative to your opponent. If you’re minus enough then it is even possible that you could be hit back by your opponent. Personally I consider it a flaw to allow a move to be minus enough on hit that you can be punished by your opponent. This is fine on block, but on hit it’s unacceptable. If you’re plus enough on hit to have enough advantage time to fit the startup of another move in, then that’s a combo. If you’re plus enough on hit or block to deny your opponent enough time to start up any of their moves, then that’s a frametrap.

Next up is pushback. Pushback is related to frame advantage because if you push something far away enough, then frame disadvantage becomes safe. I suggested with a theoretical 3d zelda that it should have low hitstun and high pushback, so you’re giving initiative to the monsters with each successful attack, but you’re never unsafe to their attacks. The more pushback there is, similarly it becomes harder to follow up when you get frame advantage. This can help keep combo systems in check.

A basic example of this is the smash bros knockback/hitstun system. In Smash Bros, attacks do a certain amount of knockback based on the attack strength and percent. The number of frames of hitstun is the knockback value times 0.4. This means you’re gaining more advantage as you push opponents further away. Eventually you have a ton of advantage time, but can’t catch up with them.

The exception to the rule in Smash Bros is meteors or spikes into the stage. These knock off 20% of the knockback, but keep the hitstun the same. So in Smash the general key to building combos is to at first hit opponents with attacks that have a quick recovery at low percent, then ones with good knockback and good recovery at mid percent, then ones with weak knockback to keep opponents close to you at high percents, then kill them with something really strong.

Knockdown isn’t generally considered a state of hitstun, but it’s pretty similar in a lot of ways. Players or enemies aren’t allowed to act during this state, and it’s generally harder to attack them. In some games they’re entirely invincible until they get up (dark souls, most fighting games). In some games they can be hit, but they take less damage and aren’t sent into a new stun state, effectively having super armor. In some games they can be combo’d off the ground by certain moves, which may have penalties to combo damage or generally be less convenient. In some games the attacking player is allowed to perform special finisher moves on knocked down opponents. In some games the player (or enemy) who is knocked down has multiple options for getting up, like rolls, or getup attacks. Knockdown generally serves as a longer special state of hitstun where opponents can’t do as much, and you can use them being knocked down as setup time to hit them when they get up.

Meaties are when you hit someone with the late part of an attack on purpose. In most games, attacks do the same amount of hitstun no matter what part of them hits, so hitting with a later frame of the attack means you get more advantage time. This is especially noticeable with rushing attacks where a character moves across space with a hitbox out. By hitting with the late portion of an attack, it’s possible to do new combos, or make attacks safe on block with good timing or spacing. Slow moving projectiles can have an effect similar to meaties at a range by allowing the user to recover and move up behind the fireball before it hits.

Multihits are related to meaties, because they’re kind of the opposite of them. Multihit attacks hit with many hitboxes over a period, each one dealing its own hitstun. Multihit moves get a consistent amount of hitstun no matter what part of the attack hits, but they keep the opponent locked down for their duration. This means multihit moves can never be unsafe by hitting with an early portion of the attack, and they usually go on long enough to give the player time to confirm they’re hitting. Fox’s dair versus falco’s dair is a good comparison for meaty versus multihit, except that Falco’s dair is one of the rare examples of a hitbox that stays out for a long period that actually decreases in hitstun the longer it stays out. Jigglypuff’s pound might be a better example.

Some games have special states for hitstun, like in some fighting games such as guilty gear, skullgirls, and third strike, you can hit your opponent reeling back, which makes them vulnerable to throws and command throws, which they normally aren’t during hitstun. Another example would be the dizzy state, where upon hitting an opponent enough, a meter fills up that when full causes the opponent to enter a prolonged state of hitstun, giving you enough time to set up whatever attack you want before they recover. If the opponent is player controlled, then usually they’re allowed to mash to speed this animation up. In Dark Souls, some bosses have special states similar to dizzy once they take enough damage, like the iron golem who can be knocked off balance, or a bunch of bloodborne bosses who will let you visceral attack them once hit enough. Some bosses also have tails that can be cut, triggering a special hitstun when they are. Guard Crush is similar, except it’s triggered when an opponent guards too many attacks, or has a specific guard breaking attack performed on them. This sometimes also awards bonus damage to the attacker (like in dark souls 1) or allows a special followup (dark souls 2 and 3). In the Souls games, The Last Blade 2, Nioh, Soul Calibur 1, and Guilty Gear Xrd you can parry your opponent to put them into a special parried state, which sometimes allows specific followups and in the case of Soul Calibur 1 and Xrd, they can parry you back during this state, at risk of being punished. Guilty Gear has a couple more special hitstun states in the form of the ground slide and wall stick. In some games you can set up special hitstun states that make the enemy weak to certain attacks, like freezing an enemy in metroid prime, then shattering them with a missile.

By far the best known type of special state for hitstun is juggles. Juggles are like an extended state of hitstun, except they have more timing involved than normal hitstun because you gotta time your attacks to hit the enemy on their way down. Juggles can be affected by enemy weight, gravity, or air drift. Juggles can have a lot of different potential trajectories and make use of things like ground bounces or wall bounces. Characters can even follow those being juggled into the air in some games to wail on them up there. The dynamics of a juggle are typically that you need to keep them in the air, or they simply fall into a knockdown or ukemi. Juggles are limited in some games by the natural ending of combos and progressive gravity. In some games characters are capable of “air teching” juggles to return to a neutral state. In God Hand, enemies will flip out of juggles at a slightly randomized angle.

Recovery options out of hitstun are relatively unexplored for most single player games except for the god hand example above. In a number of fighting games (smash, darkstalkers, marvel, blazblue, SFV) you can tech knockdowns to get up faster or roll in different directions. These typically have different amounts of invincibility associated with them. In God Hand, enemies can also block during normal hitstun, but cannot during counterhit/guard break hitstun.

In Bayonetta, enemies are allowed to attack directly out of hitstun, unless it’s a juggle or witch time. In many action games it’s possible to tech the landing or do a getup attack when you’re knocked down. The more recent soulsborne games let you roll out of knockdown, but have less invincibility on knockdown in general. Arc Sys games allow players to air tech from juggles, but the combo can continue if they don’t as an invalid combo. The Smash Bros example is interesting, because it’s possible to beat every option on reaction in what’s called the reaction tech chase. The option your opponent will go for is clear on frame 19 of the animation, allowing you to jab reset if they missed the tech, grab on neutral tech, and dash left or right and grab if they rolled. This might be an interesting avenue for a single player game to pursue in their hitstun design, allowing enemies different ways out of hitstun that sit at the periphery of human reaction time, so you can follow up your combos if you react perfectly. This could keep combos more active and engaging. Some attacks in some games can deal “hard knockdown” which is untechable.

Hitfreeze or hitstop, or hitpause is a short delay that happens at the moment of impact to both the attacker and target before hitstun plays out. In most games this isn’t very serious. In Smash bros you can actually jiggle and move yourself around during this period. In a lot of older games hitfreeze is applied instead of hitstun and only to the damaged enemy. Meaning that hitting an enemy will temporarily freeze it, but will not interrupt what they were doing. This can have a hitstun-like effect, but since it does not interrupt the enemy’s action, you are more vulnerable to what they do. This works well in older games and ones styled like older games because they were more about enemy movement patterns with collision damage on touching you rather than telegraphed attacks, so you can attack them to freeze them temporarily and hold off their assault for a bit in something like a pseudo-combo. The bottle in Castlevania 3 inflicts so much hitfreeze it can stunlock enemies.

Super armor allows characters to ignore hitstun, especially if it’s only for one hit, or below a certain threshold. In most fighting games, super armor works per-hit, so you absorb a certain number of hits before taking hitstun. Skullgirls is a notable exception, as well as smash bros which has multiple types of super armor that all do not follow the per-hit rule, knockback threshold and knockback subtraction armor. Armor that can take an infinite number of hits is called heavy armor. The souls series came up with their own concept of armor called poise, turning hitstun into something similar to a dizzy meter. Once the invisible poise meter is depleted, the target will take hitstun until the meter refills, and the combo ends.

Some attacks, particularly ranged attacks, deal no hitstun, like fox’s lasers and FANG’s poison ball. This is kind of interesting for low startup low damage attacks in systems that normally have hitstun (unlike say FPS games which do this, but don’t normally have hitstun, so there’s no contrast there).

In some games, like most modern fighters after SF3, counterhits, meaning attacks that interrupt an enemy’s startup or active frames, deal extra frames of hitstun. This means that new combo options open up if you can interrupt an opponent’s attack. This is primarily useful for frametrap strings, because the intent is to catch the opponent mashing buttons during the string, at which point the frametrap suddenly becomes a combo and it can serve as a confirm into a longer sequence. In God hand, counter hits carry special hitstun and juggle properties depending on the move. In SFV, certain normals can crush counter opponent’s attacks for bigger combo damage. In Souls games counter hits have no special effect on hitstun, but deal more damage. In Blazblue there are Fatal Counters and Counter Hit Carries. Fatal Counters add 3 frames of hitstun to every subsequent attack in the combo, making comboing off any move more easily. Counter Hit Carries are a property of most multihitting moves, making every single hit of the multihit a combo so there’s frame advantage at the end of the multihit sequence on the last hit, making it more easy to combo off that. In SFIV the level 1 focus attack will cause crumple on counterhit (another special extended hitstun state).

Blockstun is like hitstun except obviously you block the attack. A lot of the same rules of frame advantage apply, though the rules for what you can do out of block may be different per game, like in Smash it takes 15 frames to drop a shield, however you can grab out of it or jump out of it immediately, and your opponent is almost always negative, so the different options out of shield can be a big deal. In games like dark souls, different shields have different amounts of deflection, inflicting special recovery animations on opponents who attack. This is also found in Last Blade 2 for sword attacks versus punches or kicks. In some fighting games there are special blocks like instant blocks in guilty gear which reduce the amount of blockstun taken so attacks can be more readily punished on block, or faultless defense which increases the amount of blockstun along with pushback and prevents chip damage. Smash has similar to the faultless defense with its light shields that increase blockstun and pushback, also its perfect shields which can be canceled directly into actions or in later smash games negate shield drop time.

I think that’s everything I can say on hitstun. All of these are different factors that can be tweaked, tuned, combined, or experimented with to make different effects.

Saurian Dash did an amazing exposition on hitstun states for Transformers Devastation that shows some of how this information can be applied practically to a game. He calls these hit reactions, and later refers to “hitstun” as a special type of hitstun, akin to dizzy in fighting games.

This video shows how hitstun states can be varied between enemies to give them variety.

Favorite Difficulty Modes

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What are your favorite hardest difficulty modes from the games you’ve played and why?

Thief’s Expert Mode (made the AI smarter and added more objectives), and I guess DMC4’s Legendary Dark Knight (also heaven and hell, and hell and hell)? Revengeance might count too (I prefer Very Hard personally, but Revengeance had 1000% enemy aggression, plus powered up perfect parries). I remember Order of Ecclesia’s hard, locked to level 1 mode to be really fun (NG+, enemies had more health). European Extreme in MGS3. Crysis’s “Delta” difficulty deserves a shout-out for the soldiers speaking in Korean. God Hard in Vanquish is also cool, but really I just love the name.

One of my favorites though is one I was developing for Dark Souls 1. I called it, “Hokuto No Souls”. I made it by combining the enemy aggression mods, the permanent gravelord mod, NG+7, and a mod I made that edited your fist damage to kill any enemy instantly. I was going to edit the weapon swap mod to force you to only use fists (and a claw in your offhand, both for variety and because lefthanded punches are really fast). This would be packaged in addition to a God Hand hud that I made by ripping graphics from God Hand. I also wanted to edit the damage of the weapon so it would scale with level so I could have it so bosses need to be hit a couple times before dying, and later areas wouldn’t totally outclass you.

So the idea is that everything kills you in one hit. You kill everything in one hit. You have only your fists. There are more enemies, and they’re all aggressive.

I planned on doing an LP of that when I finished it, but I never got around to it due to not knowing enough about coding in Cheat Engine.

I love it when games do something creative with their difficulty levels. Imagine a game that had a slightly different gimmick on each difficulty level, so you actually wanted to replay them all.

Definitions: Fairness and Challenge

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You’ve got a solid definition for “depth.” Can you give similar definitions for “fairness” and “challenge”?

Sure thing.

Fairness is perceptual, people have differing standards of fairness. In single player games fairness is typically a matter of accurately communicating to the player what they’re engaged in, preventing them from getting blindsided, or letting them know that they may get blindsided and how to prevent it. Fairness is typically perceived as a matter of clarity. For that purpose many single player games even overcorrect, adding extra buffers or leniencies to tilt things in the player’s favor, because player perception is not always perfect, and they can miss an input in the space of a frame or two and think they got it when they didn’t. Many games make enemy hurtboxes smaller for this purpose.

In multiplayer games, there’s a similar impetus on communicability for fairness, but more than that it comes down to fairness between players and there’s even more widely varied standards there. This is typically a matter of balance, but players can perceive a lot of things as unfair, leading to scrub mentality. They can get hung up on individual moves that they think are unfair. They can get hung up on other players being better than them. They can get hung up on which characters are good or bad. It’s a mess. Is it fair that players can master certain techniques and win way more consistently? Is it fair to use unintended tricks? Is it fair to use unreactable mixups? Is it fair to have randomness affect the outcome of a match? Is it fair for a player who puts in less time to beat someone who puts in more time? Is it fair that some characters are better than others? A lot of these questions will be answered differently by different people.

Fairness means treating players without bias and preventing injustice. In Singleplayer contexts, preventing injustice is a matter of figuring out what players perceive as injust or imposing your definition of just upon them (“average human reaction time is about 15 frames, if this move’s startup is 15 frames long, you have no right to complain”). Ultimately you’re working to satisfy your players, so you need to be in tune with their perceptions to make them feel like the game is fair.

Challenge is a lot simpler. It’s a task that one is inconsistent at completing, where consistency is dependent on the individual’s skill. It may be used to refer to a specific instance of a difficult task in a game (eg. a reaction challenge).

Games for Learning about Depth

Celia Wagar21 Comments

What games would you recommend for learning game design and depth in different genres (games for FPS, Action, Fighting, Strategy, Puzzle, RPG, etc.)

I think you gotta play a little of everything, good and bad. It pays to see games that screw up too. I think analyzing Nier was interesting in part because it’s so clearly flawed.

FPS:
Doom (great enemy variety, great level design, alright weapons), Blood (one of the best doom derivatives), Quake (3d successor to doom, awesome movement, so-so weapons and enemy variety, but still good compared to modern shooters), Unreal (I dunno, supposed to be good), Serious Sam 1 & 3 (good enemy design in the absence of good level design), Tribes (cool movement system, amazing emphasis on large maps), Desync (great enemy/weapon variety, very focused on combat encounters, weapon combos), Crysis Warhead (best in the series, nice suit abilities, nice levels, decent enemy AI)

Fighting:
SF2, SF3, SFV, KoF 98, 2002, XIV, Garou, Last Blade 2, Guilty Gear AC+R, GG Xrd, Marvel 2/3, Skullgirls, Vampire Savior, Melee, Divekick,

RPG:
Pokemon (lots of configurable parts, every monster you encounter is made from commonly accessible parts), Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne/Digital Devil Saga (press turn system is brilliant, strong emphasis of buffs/debuffs), All the Mario RPG games (Timed Hits yo, and a couple other nice things), TWEWY (alternative approach to RPGs from the the ground up, tons of interlinking systems), Penny Arcade RPG (unique approach to ATB systems and realtime action queuing), Zeboyd Games RPGs (interesting choices at every step), Tales of Symphonia/Abyss (I think these are the best in the series, I don’t really know, action combat with a fighting game inspiration), Megaman Battle Network (deck building, unique grid based combat system)

RTS/tactics: (I’m weak in this category and haven’t played a lot of the games I’m recommending)
Starcraft Brood War/Starcraft 2 (I recommend brood war because it’s good, though unless you have someone who knows how to play that you can springboard off of, you won’t get much out of it, 2 for contrast and because it’s also good, but less so), Supreme Commander Forged Alliance (I believe this is the best version of supcom, I’m currently playing this), Company of Heroes 2, Dawn of War, Dungeon Keeper, Warcraft 3, Warcraft 2 (for contrast, the two games are significantly different), Age of Empires 2, Homeworld, Command and Conquer (Red Alert 2 or Generals), X-COM, a fire emblem game, advance wars.

Stealth:
Thief 1 & 2 (great emphasis on lighting levels and floor surfaces, great level design, slightly collectathon-like regrettably), Metal Gear Solid 3 (the deepest stealth game), Mark of the Ninja (one of the most versatile stealth games around, second deepest perhaps), Monaco (gets the interesting part of running away from guards completely right, does alright at everything else), Hitman (disguises), Splinter Cell (I dunno).

Platformer:
Mario 64 (has a ton of different options for movement and levels that allow you to take advantage of them), Mario Sunshine (Same, but slightly different), all the mainline Super Mario Bros games (1, Lost Levels, 3, World, NSMBW) Yoshi’s island, Kirby Canvas Curse (unique as hell, one of the best kirby games), Ducktales, STREEMERZ, Bubble Bobble, Sonic (pick one), a donkey kong country game, Megaman 2, 3, 9 (solid design), Megaman X1, 2, 3, Megaman Zero (I don’t know which to recommend), Castlevania 1/3 (great level design with simplistic limitations), Order of Ecclesia (nonlinearity and complex melee platformer combat), Ninja Gaiden 1-3 (great simple fast design), Cave Story, Kero Blaster, Demon’s Crest, Metal Slug, Contra, probably a dozen NES and SNES games.

Metroidvania:
Metroid, Super Metroid, Metroid Zero Mission, AM2R, Ori and the Blind Forest (tons of movement mechanics that all have interaction with each other), La Mulana, Battle Kid 2, Megaman ZX, ZX Advent.

Top down 2d action:
Zelda, Link to the Past, Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Seasons, Ys Origin (like a 3d zelda), Ys 1 & 2 (Bump system!), Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (tons of unexpectedly 3d object interactions), Hotline Miami (stealth and mixed action),

Beat Em Up:
Devil May Cry 3/4 (command moves for days, tons of recombineable moves), Bayonetta (Dodge offset, great enemy designs), Ninja Gaiden Black/Sigma/2 (enemies that want to kill you so hard, great use of blocking and dodging in one system), Transformers Devastation (culmination of everything platinum, 3rd person shooting, unique vehicle dodge system and vehicle attacks),

Racing:
Mario Kart DS (my favorite mario kart, best physics), F-Zero GX (deepest racing game), Wipeout, Trackmania, Need For Speed (dunno which one)

Puzzle:
Antichamber (metroidvania puzzler with a funky layout, and nice unique puzzle mechanics), Portal 1 (lets you place portals in a ton of places, has multiple solutions to every puzzle, great speed tech), Professor Layton (just a ton of nice puzzles of all different varieties, not really deep necessarily), The Witness (interesting approach to puzzles even if it doesn’t work out all the time)

That’s all I can think of. Notably this is not just a “my favorite games” list.

Hitscan Solutions and Drawbacks

Celia Wagar3 Comments

How do you make hitscan enemies both fun and fair to fight against in a game where you don’t have regenerating health?

I think I’ve answered this before in a question regarding Vanquish. I think the answer is to mark the spots that enemies are targeting, then have you dodge the reticules (or laser sights obviously). Another very fair hitscan enemy is the Vortigaunts in Half Life because they have a very distinct audio and visual cue for when they’re about to fire and appear in environments with cover nearby. Not to mention they can be stunned by gunshots before they fire.

The idea is, you need to provide a reasonable method for the player to avoid taking damage. This means the sources of damage must move predictably, detectably, and within reaction time.

I don’t think your solution to hitscan is very interesting, it becomes the same as projectiles, only that lamer, as they don’t fill space and time. Hitscan as it’s usually implemented promotes spacial awareness–you need to know where enemies are and move perpendicular to their line of sight– and it promotes taking cover. They may not be very interesting in themselves, but they serve a different function from projectiles, and making them totally predictable eliminates that difference.

Becomes the same as a laser beam or a contact damage enemy really instead of continuous damage anywhere in sight of the enemy (imagine if an enemy emitted light that damaged you if you weren’t in shadow, it would have a very similar effect to common implementations of hitscan if you think about it. Someone should make a prototype of this. The hit detection would be easy to cheat with raycasts as long as you could get dynamic light sources and shadows working).

I mean, if we could have projectiles in every game, that would be fine. We use hitscan because it’s realistic, not because it’s necessarily good. My solution is just trying to preserve the theming in a way that’s fair.

Every form of projectile promotes spatial awareness. Every attack does. Moving perpendicular to their line of sight (circle strafing them) doesn’t affect hitscan enemies except at extremely close ranges. Unless they’re human that is, then it can be effective. It has no effect on AI enemies, which is where hitscan damage is actually harmful.

I don’t think hitscan bullets promote very much spatial awareness, because circle strafing and moving in general isn’t a very good strategy against them. A good strategy is killing whatever’s about to shoot at you before they can, and popping out of cover occasionally to take a potshot before going back into cover. Also occasionally moving up.

It certainly promotes taking cover, but that’s about it. It makes it so you continuously take damage when out of cover, which necessitates either extremely careful healthpack placement or regenerating health, the latter of which causes all sorts of other problems. Cover is useful versus Vortigaunts too and those are more fair than your average FPS enemy.

Maybe my solution isn’t the most interesting thing in the world, maybe there are better solutions, however we’ve only arrived at a fair implementation of hitscan enemies in modern shooters by sacrificing everything else. The design space of the game is limited by this element. It becomes more difficult to implement a wider range of options because of this element and its dependencies. Yeah, maybe it creates a unique dynamic unto itself, but we’ve had dozens and dozens of games that have explored this dynamic already.

Can puzzles have depth?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

They can, but they usually don’t, and that’s usually not the point of puzzles. I think puzzles and puzzle design is a step removed from game design, even though they’re seen on similar terms by most people. Puzzles tend to emphasize singular solutions over dynamic challenges. Games like Catherine or Tetris have more possible solutions and are more freeform in a gamey type of way, which is why I think Tetris isn’t really a puzzle game at all (I haven’t played Catherine, but I know some sections emphasize specific solutions and there’s a more free-form versus mode).

I think Puzzles should be judged by their own standards separate from the standards used to judge games because there’s definitely something different going on with them, and it’s not really my interest to figure out what or try to come up with some type of cohesive framework for that medium.

Personally I’d encourage game designers to avoid puzzle-like design in their games unless they’re making a puzzle game or are using it for content framing purposes, to organize blocks of content with some overarching light puzzle structure.

The primary difference between games and puzzles is that on hearing the solution to a puzzle, it’s usually trivial to complete the puzzle, but static solutions don’t exist nearly as often for games. There’s a spoiler effect. Once you know it, the challenge disappears. Puzzles don’t generate inconsistency in individual players like games do, they block success, then cease to block thereafter (unless you forget the solution). In a game, you might succeed 1 time out of 10, but it takes another 10 tries until you can succeed again at the same challenge.

This recent claim of yours (you never said it before?) that puzzles are almost not really games is weird. They certainly deserve the title more than pure execution skill games, with nearly no choice making–at least they showcase high-level possibilities within a complex system. They’re different from action games in that they’re expository, rather than combinatoric, so they can be spoiled as you say, but someone who reads a puzzle solution can be said to be playing the game as much as someone who is being told each move in a board game. The actual game is understanding the system. They may not actively challenge on subsequent playthroughs, but the thought process they entail is similar as that required by action games. Ostensibly, any puzzle game could be turned into an action game by making some tweaks here and there, so that it becomes combinatoric.

You’re right, I’m flipflopping on this one. It’s just that puzzles clearly share different characteristics from games and can’t be readily understood in the same ways. If you want to go by a strict definition, related to succeeding at things inconsistently, at overcoming challenges, they definitely fit in the same family. I’m just hesitant to call them games outright. Something seems off about that.

I don’t think the same can be said of pure execution skill games, though other academics have previously separated these into a category they call, “contests,” rather than games. I’m more inclined to call pure execution skill games as such because of the lack of the spoiler effect and because they do have a state space, even if it’s a small one.

I don’t think you can turn every puzzle game into an action game, like for example, Antichamber and Professor Layton.

My base point is more that to understand puzzle games, it would require very different thinking than for regular games, which is outside my scope personally.

Best Souls Healing System

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Which of the Souls games do you think had the most successful (PvE) healing system overall, and why?

I think Dark Souls 3, all things considered.

Demon’s Souls is out because grass had to be farmed, could be stocked up really high and had a fast healing animation.

Dark Souls 1 is a strong contender because it invented the Estus system which is a really good healing system overall. Let you improve how much was healed with rare items, only 6 of which were in a given playthrough, and increase the number of heals in a way that was tied to each bonfire by expending resources, which carried over across playthroughs. However it allowed infinite, albeit slow, healing through Humanities, and limited per playthrough healing that was fast via elizabeth’s mushroom and divine blessings.

Dark Souls 2 is right out. Starts off with a gimped estus flask that eventually gets better, and pours lifestones in your face, which can be grinded for and bought, and regenerate health slowly. Lifestones weren’t strictly bad as far as healing systems go in general, better than Demon’s Souls’ grass, but still a low point for the series.

Bloodborne imposed a hard cap on the number of heals you got, they scale based on your max health, and can be increased with runes. Downside is you need to grind for them from time to time. The healing animation is fast, but if you’re shot during it then you’re put in a parry state. The system isn’t as unchecked as Demon’s Souls, but the grinding to restore blood vials is still a pain in the ass, even if Joseph Anderson made a decent case for it.

Dark Souls 3 starts you off with a weakened estus flask, but not completely gimped, lets you upgrade how much it heals and how many times. Far as I’m aware, there’s no other way to heal, except using embers, which can only be done once if you’re not already a host of embers. For an added dynamic, you can trade how many heals you have for FP regeneration.

I think Dark Souls 3 is the best simply because it’s the Dark Souls 1 system without any compromises. It’s good to minimize grinding, limit how much health can potentially be restored to a maximum, have that maximum grow as levels get longer, enemies do more damage and the player’s health bar gets bigger, and have the actual healing animation last a reasonably long amount of time to make it a risky option during a fight.