Since the advent of First Person Shooter games on consoles, there have been a number of design trends that have negatively influenced their development. Some of these changes to First Person Shooters were necessary to adapt them to a console setting, while others are arguably arbitrary but have nonetheless become design trends. Continue reading
Since the advent of First Person Shooter games on console systems, there have been a number of design trends that have negatively influenced the development of the FPS genre, some of these changes to first person shooters were necessary to adapt them to a console setting, while others are arguably arbitrary but have nonetheless become design trends. In brief these trends are regenerating health, iron sights, a limited weapon inventory, reduced weapon variety with a greater focus on hitscan weapons, slow pace of movement, low jump height, linear or front-focused level design, enemy homogenization, and reduced weapon accuracy. It is debatable why these trends have come to pass, from production costs to follow the leader styles of marketing, but their negative influence is undeniable. Continue reading
This video will make you chuckle, mind commenting on it? 3:56 is my favourite part.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAX4DVhRhaA Continue reading
What’s your favorite footie game from a fighting game? How about your least favorite?
I’m not totally sure about my favorite, I like a lot of them, I’m leaning on either Garou Mark of the Wolves or Street Fighter III 3rd Strike. Both of them get worse as you get better at the game unfortunately, due to parries and DP breaks/Guard Cancels, but I’m not at that level yet. I might want to get into Yatagarasu in the future because of its similarity to both of the above games, but I haven’t had an opportunity. Continue reading
How do you think Platinum could expand on the combat system of Vanquish to make it even greater for a sequel?
That’s hard.
Add a jump of some kind. Flesh out the melee attack system a little more and don’t have all the melee attacks cost the entire suit meter. More differentiated weapons, perhaps focused on moving enemies closer/further or crowd control a bit. More differentiated cannon fodder foot soldiers (they did a good job with the bigger mechs and romanovs, but those are more mini-boss-ish and I think making the cannon fodder have different types mixed in would be cool). Continue reading
What are the best aspects to God Hands combat system?
Probably the strongest aspect is the core loop. I feel really silly saying that because I generally think the method of describing gameplay as loops is kind of off-point because games mostly don’t follow such clear cut cyclical structures, they’re more like flow charts (which can have loops in them, but they are very irregular, and can frequently just go off into space). Continue reading
Are there some types of RNG you’re ok with?
Looking at my notes, yes, there is.
Enemy attacks in a TON of action games are at least partially random, but they’re designed to always be longer than 15 frames of startup, meaning you have time to react. There’s always a tell of some kind more than 15 frames away. Even if the attack startup is shorter than 15 frames, the tell can be the enemy approaching you, and knowing they’ll attack when in range. DMC3 has audio cues for every single enemy made so the game can be played practically blind with royal guard. Continue reading
What do you think of this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqA-mXFbaCM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCpLbMPcwBk
I already commented on another of their videos, quoted below. I think the movement system and combat systems don’t compliment each other at all.
I feel like the game has a really poor sense of momentum. You got a few people complaining about the speed, and you say you played Sonic a lot as a kid, so you’re not changing it. Eh. The thing about Prototype and Sonic is, both have the character accelerate in order to move quickly, and both have the character slide to a stop. The exception is if you use a trick of some sort or an environmental feature to gain speed or to stop quickly.
The attacks you have here all start abruptly, allow no movement input during them and travel in completely static patterns. Compare to DMC, Mirror’s Edge, Smash Bros, King of Fighters, Guilty Gear, Prototype. The animations and movements in this game lack oomph. You’re animating like ninja theory (I hope you remember the article where Capcom had to seriously tell them about timing and spacing in animations to give attacks a sense of impact). None of the animations flow into each other, they’re all abrupt, most of them lock you in place, they start and end suddenly.
End result is a game that’s super fast and super janky. I know you’re not going for this. You’re going for something fluid like prototype, but with combat that is worth a damn and I don’t think your current approach will get you there. Your animator and your programmer should be working together to try to blend the animations and the movement of the whole character together into a cohesive whole. All the animations seem to play mostly in place or on a completely static motion track. Consider how the acceleration builds and declines through the animation. Consider how the moves change based on directional input and facing direction, consider how they change based on the momentum of the character at the time. Consider arcs, gravity, emphasis. The teleport and rising kick animations are especially weird because of how abruptly they move in a totally different direction than you were previously headed.
That and the jump is seriously fucked up. The dude just pops up with no anticipation, so it feels like a really weird jump. There’s force but it comes from nowhere. The jumping animations themselves are really weak too and don’t reflect the massive change in acceleration.
I’m a bit biased, but I think an important inspiration here would be smash bros. Smash bros, unlike other fighting games, and very much like your game, is all about momentum. Especially aerial momentum. Players can control it all the time while they’re in the air, and on the ground they’re also dealing with momentum. They transfer momentum from the ground to the air, they need to employ various tactics to keep their options open on the ground, in the air they can use attacks that move them forward and back, while also finely controlling where they’re going at the same time. Attacks are based on doing damage, but also on pushing the enemy around. This style seems very similar to what you seem to be going for. Your combat system is currently very much about timed inputs in close quarters to locked on targets. It just doesn’t fit with the larger system. You’re exploring the wrong design space there. Try thinking up different attacks that sweep through space differently, and are affected in different ways by your momentum, or which can be leveraged in different ways by your momentum. A better angle to go than the current system might be to focus on the player avoiding attacks by weaving between them, instead of just getting away from the enemies, and to in turn try to use attacks whose paths intersect with the enemies without exposing the player in the process. Coming back to smash bros, here’s some inspiration, jigglypuff has short ranged attacks, but awesome aerial mobility, so jiggs constantly dances right outside the enemy attack range, gets them to commit to something, then slides in, pokes the guy, and slides out. It’s a constant back and forth dance in the air. Marth meanwhile is all about attacking with the very tip of his blade the instant an enemy is in range, so he tends towards finely adjusting himself to always be at that perfect distance. Other characters of course have other tactics, but everyone has different attacks that make use of space differently and have different applications from one another. Most of the ground attacks here, except those with more explicit functions, like gap closing, seem really samey. Get the game designer on board and work out attacks that use space and momentum more effectively, that’s what meshes with the movement system you’re trying to build, don’t waste it.
Also, the way the character turns is completely silly. There should be a turning animation there, but it shouldn’t change the character’s position as they turn. This makes walking around in any slightly precise way really irritating.
The combat system feels haphazardly put together, like they just chose random components for it rather than something that resembles combat. No thought about the neutral game, just punishes, and sure you can get some fast flying air combos, but the properties of the moves are so similar that linking them together doesn’t really feel that special, especially given that you have a universal cancel in the form of the auto slash, much like Vergil’s DMC4 SE air trick. Also heavy reliance on combo strings is lame.
I don’t think they really thought about how to create a system of interrelated interactions and a multitude of viable strategies, I think they were just tossing in some random combat mechanics that they thought would look cool and would function in a sort of unique way. Good on them for making a working prototype, but I don’t think the final product will have much longevity.
How do you feel about adventure games? Is there anything in them thats good or that we could learn from?
In case my prior posts haven’t made it clear, I feel negatively about adventure games. Looking abstractly, I think the structure implied of adventure games is lock and key. This is why Zelda was originally considered an Action RPG, and over time people have come to place it more in the adventure category. Adventure games are games where there are barriers placed in your way that can be opened by application of a key item retrieved from elsewhere. The more such barriers and keys you have, and the less other mechanical elements you have, the more the game matches the adventure game template.
So Doom, with its red, blue, and gold keys as well as myriad switches, has slight elements of this, but the first person shooting is much more heavily focused on, with those elements not functioning as the primary source of interaction or challenge, but rather as staging elements for the primary conflict, elements that make you sweep the level over, encountering the enemies in all sorts of different contexts, from different directions as walls open up or more are warped in to replace the ones you’ve killed already, or to surround and ambush you as you attempt to pursue objectives.
Zelda by contrast has become more and more about matching key to door over time, as almost every element in the game has become subservient to overall progression, and all of the challenges inherent in say the combat or movement systems have become funneled into using the right item on the right enemy, door, switch, or grapple point. You NEED to get Epona, not because you’d like to traverse the overworld a bit faster, or take down monsters in an alternate way that might be more effective on some monsters, but because at some point there’s going to be a gap or a wall that only Epona can jump over.
From a depth perspective, the trouble with adventure games is that none of the elements are interrelated, have much interaction with each other, have multiple uses, can be pushed for a stronger/weaker/variable effect using skill or based on the context of application, and there is little potential for alternate viable strategies, only flat solutions. You can introduce these types of things into adventure games, allowing barriers to be bypassed or unlocked in a variety of ways, improving the adventure game structure, but also making it less focused on the unlocking of barriers, but instead more general mechanical and critical thinking skills, such as in metroidvanias, which use the adventure game structure as a staging mechanism for their platform challenges, but are not usually associated closely with pure adventure games.
The ultimate trouble with adventure games is that when your only mechanic is matching keys to doors, your only means of introducing challenge and critical thought into the game is obscuring the locations of keys, the order in which they must interact with environmental objects, which environmental objects are barriers at all, and so on.
Professor Layton practically isn’t an adventure game for its structure (it still is, it just lacks a lot of their lock/barrier structure for the most part). Advancing the plot in the Layton games is primarily about going to a location, talking to someone, and solving a puzzle. Sometimes the sequence in which people must be talked to is a bit funny, but if you just talk to everyone available, you cannot avoid progressing (assuming you’re good at puzzles). The game is extremely straightforward about what is required to do next, because it’s not trying to hide any information from you, or require you to guess at anything to progress, it just uses the basic adventure game structure as a way to push you into solving a lot of puzzles, which are the core of the game. It’s ever so barely a point and click adventure game, it’s just trying to give you more options in the order you solve puzzles, and create a hint-coin finding metagame that influences how easy the puzzles are, while also creating a definite sense of progression through the game.
Psychonauts by contrast is shackled to its adventure game design. It could have been a great platforming game, instead they decided you should go around collecting all this shit scattered through the levels. You need to collect 5 arrowheads to pay off two kids to progress after basic braining, you need the oarsman badge to go learn levitation, you need the arrowhead dowser to find enough arrowheads to buy the cobweb duster (which means collecting a ton of arrowheads twice), you need to have telekinesis to complete the milkman conspiracy (which means collecting a ton of psi cards and cores, and you also need to do a whole trading sequence in this level), along with the cobweb duster (which is necessary overall to beat the whole game), you need invisibility in Gloria’s Theater (more figments, psi cards and cores). And so on.
The key items/abilities in adventure games should have a variety of uses. That’s what is the case in (good) metroidvania games. You don’t just get the morph ball bomb that can blow up specific blocks, it can also let you jump in morph ball form, depending on the game even multiple or infinite times. The ice beam is used to freeze enemies, allowing them to be used as platforms, which is really involved mechanically, as opposed to just opening ice doors. The high jump boots are cool, but you can also walljump in many places, bypassing the need for them.
Dark Souls has a strictly lock-and-key structure, no new abilities, but there are a ton of low affordance means or alternate means of reaching places. You can pick the master key at the start and go directly to blighttown, you could also go through new londo, killing ingward. You can hop into the lower burg immediately. You can fight Sif early through the back way.
Adventure games by themselves are weak.
What elements make a good horror game?
I swear I answered this a long time ago, or something like it. I was definitely involved in a podcast on it. My view is, you need to create an environment of high risk, selectively limited information about incoming threats, and rules consistent enough to get used to, but inconsistent enough to surprise you. Playing Penumbra, I wasn’t scared by the dogs, I was scared of when the dogs did something I didn’t expect. The dogs established tension, but it’s like a joke, not knowing where the punchline will come from is what creates fear and terror. I went through a wooden door early on, leaving a dog behind me, then I pushed a barrel in front of it so the dog couldn’t get through. What scared me was the dog pushing the door open along with the barrel, I never saw it coming.
So first, players need to be familiar with the threat, this is the setup. They need to know how dangerous the enemies are, they need to know how tight their chance is to escape, they need to have a sense of when they’re in trouble. A lot of horror games try to do this with dialogue, text, scenery, etc. Spray blood on the walls, it’ll be fine. I have no heart, so I don’t really care about any of this stuff. I played a horror game once that measured my heart rate, making the rooms do more and more spooky shit as my heart rate went up, and killing me if it went high enough. I never got to see any of the effects of a higher heart rate. http://store.steampowered.com/app/342260/ (here it is on steam if you care) I know nothing is really going to hurt me as long as I’m calm, even within the game world, so I’m unaffected. In-game cues of danger only work if you have an association between that thing and actual danger, so a spooky diary entry by itself doesn’t work unless the association has been built up.
I was a LOT more spooked by the Sa-X in Metroid Fusion as a kid, particularly this encounter. The Sa-X is set up in prior encounters really well, it will murder you if you step into sight, and it has a very distinct audio cue associated with it, as well as a spooky theme, so even though you haven’t dropped down to encounter it yet, you know it’s waiting for you down there.
You need to train the player to recognize cues that there is a threat, and associate those with an actual threat. Like Witches in Left4Dead. Then you need to make the cues less consistent with the presence of a threat, so that players can’t predict correctly anymore, and become scared of the cue in absence of the threat, which makes the threat itself scarier when it actually is present.
Good horror is using mechanics to make the player afraid, creating expectations and subverting them. Blindside them, and force them into threatening situations they don’t want to deal with. Use RNG to mix things up, especially when backtracking. Let them have weak tools that cannot completely halt the threat, like the ice missiles on the Sa-X. Also fuck Dead Space.
Celia Wagar's CritPoints 