http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/ In the comments, the author asks: what *isn’t* emergence? Some people have contested his definition (or rather, his understanding of how some people define emergence).
I’m going to limit my explanation here to games, I believe emergence is a phenomena that exists. I believe it’s a phenomena that is critical to understanding depth. The quintessential engineering goal of games is to produce a large number of distinct outcomes, while keeping the apparent structural complexity of the game low.
For example, I’d cite visual novels as having a low factor of emergence, because the number of outcomes relative to the number of choices is usually 1:1 (though some of course carry over variables, and modify parts of the script based on circumstance). Point and Click adventure games similarly have a low factor, because the majority of interactions between objects are invalid, relying on you to find the valid ones.
To give a simple example, you have rock paper scissors, which has 3 essential elements, that can produce 6 possible outcomes. Interaction of elements to produce a large number of differentiated outcomes is a thing that can reliably be planned for and evaluated. A term used in a similar context is Possibility Space, referring to the range of possibilities created by a system.
The product of a sufficiently complex system is that among the outcomes that emerge from it will be outcomes you could not necessarily foresee. If a system is simple enough that the designer can foresee each individual outcome (at least those significantly differentiated from one another), then as a rule of thumb it is likely to not be a system that will hold player interest for long.
I would personally avoid conflating emergence with unpredictability. I think trying to judge a facet of an object for intention or foresight on the part of the designer is pointless, and emergence is a thing that can be engineered for by creating mechanics that affect variables inherited by or shared with other mechanics.
I actually discussed how this article from Less Wrong made me feel uneasy with a friend fairly recently. It’s primary purpose is to prevent people from using a buzzword as a substitute for a specific explanation, which is sensible. However at least in the field of video games, there is a clear delineation between things that are apparent results of the combination of mechanics (like wavedashing) and things that are arbitrarily implemented (like the properties of a Forward Smash attack). There isn’t an underlying mechanism that determines those according to a more fundamental set of laws (like the laws of muscle composition, organic chemistry, chemistry, newtonian physics, quantum physics as these all apply for a person throwing a right hook), they’re determined arbitrarily by the designer/animator and have none of those underlying rules operating behind them.
You’ve stated before that fuzzy, rather than discrete, variables in games usually make for a deeper experience, because of the range of possible outcomes. But what about when something is made discrete, so that the player has more fine control over it, and greater challenges be presented? For example, in Aban Hawkins and the 1000 (or 1001) Spikes, rather than the usual “control your jump height by holding the button”, they have a button for short, and another for long jump, which allows challenges that would be unreasonable without the precise jump control.
Something I picked up from Monaco’s developer speaking at a conference is that when you have really simple discrete states that they’re easily distinguishable, and easily selected between. That can be helpful for making things clear, having nice and obvious signals of what everything is instead of having it be fuzzy. Depends on what you’re shooting for or if people can even reasonably work with it.
When something is more discrete, it’s not that the player has more fine control over it, they have less fine control over it. It’s that they can more consistently hit the values they need to. That and it becomes less about hitting the range necessary (timing skill test), and more about choosing the right one from the options presented (decisionmaking skill test).
I don’t think I can present an overarching rule of thumb here though, it probably depends based on context.
The other thing is when you separate options discretely you can make tradeoffs that can’t be naturally communicated over a wider value range. Like jumping high versus jumping far (see mario 64), it’s tricky to program an analog system that trades off between the two, but simple with a digital one.
I haven’t played 1001 spikes. I don’t think that the challenges would necessarily be unreasonable with variable jump height. I believe it’s more that they wanted to constrain your options so you need to work around situations where it would be helpful to have a different jump height than the ones you’re fixed with. As well as place a premium on picking the correct jump height for the situation over being able to jump any height between the min and max. This is a valid approach as long as there’s a reason for it and the levels test it.
On the topic of controls, do you think certain tactics like L-cancelling should be automatic? Being manual obviously punishes weaker players, but there are already a lot of hard techniques in the game. Even just short-hopping or wavedashing require quite a bit of practice (they did for me, anyway).
I’m ambivalent on the matter. I think that “automatic L canceling” is kind of a misnomer, because it would actually be more like all the moves being made with landing animations that are half as long.
Regardless of whether L canceling is automatic or L canceling exists or not, the default standard of landing lag should be a lot shorter than in smash 4. What L canceling does is, there are essentially 4-ish speeds of landing lag, the normal 4 frame landing lag which is really short of a standard landing, 6-12 frames for L-canceled aerial attacks and the 14-24 frames for non-L canceled attacks. The big deal with these is, autocancels, float cancels, and missed L cancels (no cancel). Autocancels, such as on marth’s nair, get 4 frames of landing lag, meaning they’re plus on block or neutral, same for float cancels a la peach. This means that they’re pressure setups, much like the shine. Most L canceled aerials are negative or neutral on hit, meaning that you can never grab the other person before they can grab you, but you’re usually safe on block because their grab takes longer than your escape options. No L cancel means you’re usually unsafe on block unless you’re fucking sheik.
The key thing here is, there’s a certain amount of landing lag that is balanced and fair, and allows for combos while not making everything bullshit on shield.
Bonus round, why is it (sort of) cool to have unsafe landing lag? (and therefore, cool to be punished for not doing this tight execution thing) Because the amount of hitfreeze you get is different based on whether you miss, actually hit them, or hit their shield (the last one being the longest). Seeing as the window for L cancels is only 7 frames, you need to actually know roughly whether you’ll hit, miss, or hit shield in order to get the safe and combo-able amount of landing lag so you can capitalize on a hit or keep yourself safe from reprisal. There are plenty of stories about people who can L cancel really great on whiff, but then play people and can’t combo (because they’re not used to hitting people and L canceling).
This means there’s a light element of decision-making there, because if you shoot to L cancel for whiff, you’re really gonna get fucked if they move forward into your attack at the last millisecond and shield. However that’s still mostly a situation where there’s pure advantage and always a correct decision. What can the defender do? The defender can actually tilt their shield up or down to make you go into hitfreeze sooner, so you miss your L cancel timing when you hit the ground. It’s an extremely slight and situational element of strategy, but it is there, so that’s kinda cute. If you make the window wider, the only element of strategy inherent in L canceling disappears.
Beyond that, it feels kinda nice on a kinaesthetic level every time you do it, you get a little “flag” of when you actually land present in your mind to help you remember when you can actually act out of landing. The other thing is when you hit a tiny window and get one motion flowing faster into another that’s the type of thing that naturally feels good, like a link in Street Fighter 4, it feels totally unlike a frametrap.
Overall, I don’t think it’s right or wrong to have L canceling in the game. I think if you just had shorter landing lag, short as typical L canceled landing lag, that it’s not really that big a setback, the strategic element is extremely small, and it’s not really that big a deal to have something like that in the game considering it almost never comes up. The thing which I honestly really hate is when indie developers try to make it easier rather than just outright removing it. It’s missing the tiny tangible benefit of even having it, just so they can pay lip service to melee fans that are used to it. They don’t know why it feels nice that it’s there or what it even adds to the game, as insignificant an addition it is, so they trivialize it, yet leave it as a vestige. It’s dumb business.
What do you think of people asking for advanced techs like SHFFLS and wavedashing to be put back in Smash 5 but have them bound to a button? e.g. hold LB and if you jump you shorthop, continuing to hold it causes a fast fall, flick the Lsick with LB held does an air attack. L cancelling would be left as is though. another e.g Holding LB and then pressing left or right along with shield causes a wavedash, etc…
Seems like it would be awkward, counterintuitive, and missing the point. Project M making those things easier is contentious enough, outright changing the inputs, especially to introduce a new macro modifier button, is over the line. Shorthopping, fast falling, and l canceling are all individual actions that can be performed independently. If you change the input then the metaphor for shorthopping breaks down, same for fast falling. If you change the left stick to attack when modified by left trigger instead of move the character then you remove the utility of the move almost entirely versus grounded attacks. A key component of shffls is you can move forward or back while doing them.
Really, don’t reinvent the wheel, just stick with what works.
Leaving L canceling as it is just makes the motion complicated in a different way.
Having a grounded wavedash function is similarly dumb, because wavedash is useful for braking during a dash dance and different angles relative to the ground travel different distances, depending on how parallel to the ground you’re traveling.
This also ignores wavelanding. When you land, you’re actually partially embedded in the ground, so you can wavedash perfectly parallel to the ground for maximum distance and speed, same when you rise up through a platform. There’s a balance there obviously, which most easy wavedash control schemes ignore.
How do you feel about auto L-cancelling being implemented as an option in the upcoming PM 3.6 ?
I haven’t gotten the chance to play it myself yet, but if it’s like 20XX’s implementation, it’s alright. In 20XX, you can set L cancel to be automatic, but pressing the button will still trigger the white flash, so you can practice getting better at the input while also practicing the correct followups from a successful L cancel.
It probably will not be allowed in tournaments, like input assist is not, so it will not affect the game at large. We have already agreed in our local scene to not use it.
Gonna repost my schpiel from facebook:
What I’ll say with L canceling is, for the most part it requires you to know whether you will whiff, hit the person, or hit their shield. If you thought you were going to whiff, then suddenly they move up and shield your aerial, you’re in for trouble. People can intentionally angle their shields higher so the hitstop delays you a bit sooner before you hit the ground. There are these situations in which the longer landing lag will come into effect, allowing for things to become punishable.
Not to mention it feels good, from a kinaesthetic perspective.
If you have L canceling, then you have this additional reminder, a “flag” you could say, of when you hit the ground, to better keep track of when you’re actionable out of landing.
L canceling isn’t something that needs to be in the game, but it’s not devoid of strategic elements.
The real point is that the amount of landing lag you get from L canceling is the amount that should be the standard, so if L canceling was removed, the length of the animations should be in the 7-15 lag frame range.
How WOULD you feel if auto L-cancelling could be toggled on a player by player basis? Kinda like a handicap.
Just don’t make it the standard.
I mean, we could potentially do this for a lot of things, why have it so short hop requires you to release the button quickly? why not allow people to bind shorthop to another button? Why not have a B-reverse/wavebounce button? Why not have it so you dash all the time? Why not add auto-sweet spotting to ledges? automatic meteor cancel? automatic perfect shield? automatic perfect pivot? Automatic multishine? How about a 10 frame buffer?
You could do all sorts of shit to make the game easier, but people don’t want that. People want to succeed and fail at these things because it is fun to succeed and fail at them. Arbitrary execution requirements are fun to have here and there. They just need to be appropriate to the action in question.
Extending the question about automatic l-cancelling, do you think wavedash should be mapped to a single button? It’s essentially just dash with awkward controls. I meant it’s just a dash when Melee is compared to other FGs like GG. I don’t see the point in the jumping input before the actual wavedash. What’s the point of awkwardly angling yourself against the ground? It’s just unnecessary inputs that make it harder than it should be.
No, because it isn’t.
Dash doesn’t have a startup time of your prejump frames + 10 more landing lag frames where you can’t act. Dash doesn’t allow you to perform ground actions that aren’t specials or dash attack, or move backwards while facing forwards. The initial dash animation doesn’t allow you to cancel into crouch until it ends.
The wavedash is essentially a short burst of speed, slower than a dash, that allows you to move in a neutral state after paying some startup time.
Not to mention that with the current control setup, you can arbitrarily wavedash any distance based on the angle of your air dodge, making it a valuable way to brake yourself during dash dance.
Because the wavedash is a jump first, it means that anything that cancels into jump also cancels into wavedash, which allows people to wavedash out of shield which can be important in some matchups, like versus marth, you can punish fsmash on shield with WD out of shield.
Because the wavedash works the way it does, there is the much harder perfect waveland command, when you waveland perfectly parallel to the ground when coming up through a platform or falling onto one. Perfect wavelands have more distance than wavedashes, which is important for some characters like ganondorf, for invincible edgedashes, and for generally adding more variety to the game. Also wavedashes can inherit speed from regular dashes because dash momentum carries over into jumpsquat.
If you change the way the wavedash command works, then you change the game.
That and honestly. It’s not that hard. I’ve sat down with a number of people who have never played smash bros melee much at all, and they asked me, “How do you wavedash?” or “What’s wavedashing?” And I show them, they try it with like Samus, Luigi, Ice Climbers, and eventually figure it out, and go, “Oh, that’s it? I thought it would be harder.”
It’s something so easy that I do it across the stage as a victory lap when I take a stock, that I’m mixing it into my dash dances, and I do it potentially risking death if I fuck up to get off the ledge. It’s easier than a clean dragon punch, and the motion to do it feels really nice to me.
The angle determines how far you will go, and you don’t always want to go the maximum distance. You jump so you can airdodge. The inputs aren’t unnecessary. If you remove the angling bit, then people can’t use wavedashing to brake themselves or control the distance the dash goes. If you remove the jumping bit, then wavedash out of shield and waveshine become impossible, not to mention that characters with long jumpsquats suddenly get way better wavedashes (when they typically rely on wavelands)
If you remove the inputs, then the functionality and flexibility of the motion is lessened. If you pare it down to a single “Wavedash” button on the L or R trigger, that you just press left or right during (and it defaults to the direction you’re facing) then you’re killing the entire functionality of the move. It’s significantly less useful. That and people will likely end up facing the wrong direction more often because they’ll press left or right on the control stick before the wavedash button is pressed. If you no longer have to angle it, then perfect wavelanding is pointless.
If they mapped wavedash to a button and designed the game around it, don’t you think it would lead to some interesting design? Combos in FGs, rocket-jumping in Quakes, and skiing in Tribes were all turned into ‘legit’ mechanics in sequels with modified, more convenient inputs.
Except what you’re describing never happened in ANY of the games you mentioned, and the phrase, “designed the game around it,” is vacuous. (I dislike vague statements like this categorically. I hear “they designed the game around X” without supporting details too often.)
Combos in fighting games are performed and operate the same way in modern fighting games as they did back in street fighter 2. They didn’t add a “Combo button” that does a combo for you. You still need to hit them with a normal, buffer directional inputs, then press another button for a special attack during the hitstop of the first normal making impact, just like you did all the way back in Street Fighter 2. The only difference is that the Kara window isn’t 5 frames anymore, it’s 1 frame, and the cancelable property for moves is determined arbitrarily by the designers now, because it’s intentionally put in there rather than being rollover frames from the kara-cancel that are extended in real time by the hitfreeze.
Rocket-Jumping in Quake and every other game that has rocket jumping is still performed by looking down at your feet and firing a rocket. If there’s a shooter with a rocket-jump button now, please inform me so I can avoid the abomination.
Skiing in Tribes is a trickier case, and arguably the only legitimate example you have here, because the original way skiing was performed was mashing jump, until players wrote a script for the original starsiege tribes that automated mashing space bar. In Tribes 2 and Tribes Vengeance (far as I’m aware, I admit that I don’t have first hand experience here), Skiing was reimplemented on the level of the physics engine, however the developers didn’t give the players a ski button, they gave them another macro button for jump. It’s only in Tribes Ascend that the engine was built from scratch and a dedicated ski function that modified your friction was implemented. However in all of these games, you ski the same damn way effective, you hold the space bar. The control method from a player perspective isn’t really any different. You still need to aim for downward slopes, and jetpack up upward slopes.
They don’t need to map wavedash to a single button, mapping it to a single button would be actively detrimental to the game. This is stupid like saying Quake needs a bunnyhop button rather than swerving to the left and right. When you change things in the name of making them simpler without very carefully considering what you’re doing, you end up removing operational constraints that players normally need to work around, and the flexibility of the option, ruining it for everyone.
It works the way it works, it’s better off being this way, get used to it.
I don’t get the appeal of post symphony of the night castlevania (granted, i haven’t played order of the ecclesia). In older castlevania games enemies took precise positioning and timing to kill, while in the metroidvania games you can slice through enemies like butter. Care to elaborate?
You’re entirely correct, a lot of the post-sotn games did feature weak enemy placement and flat-out weak enemies. I personally feel like the levelup component is almost completely pointless.
The appeal is primarily in the process of figuring out how the whole castle connects together and routing between areas. There are a number of points on the map that contain items you want to pick up, or which trigger events elsewhere, so you want to pass through those points, hitting as many of them in as short a path you can. It’s essentially the traveling salesman problem, which is fairly interesting to solve over and over again as you make treks across the castle. Sometimes you’re just exploring new unseen areas, sometimes you’re connecting new and old areas, sometimes you’re finding a way you can use a power to gain access to a new area, and with new shortcuts the map’s topology practically changes.
The other thing post-sotn games introduced was more complex/varied movement mechanics, like the wolf form, mist form, bat form (wing smash), double jump, divekick, backdash, crouch slide, super jump, and so on. And more complex/varied attacks, like the short sword that can be canceled by landing, fireballs, and a number of other things. These obviously add interest by giving people things that they can master, and which are tricky to use, introducing interesting choices and additional considerations into simple movement.
I felt like Order of Ecclesia was the strongest of the post-sotn games personally, it had a very solid combat system like the others, but generally more linear level design. This arguably lead to it having very solid enemy placement, with enemies that actually blocked your path forward and couldn’t be bypassed very easily. Nice bosses too. I 100%’d the game, and beat locked level 1 hard mode, without death ring.
I feel like there isn’t much preventing metroidvanias from having good enemy placement, except as Egoraptor pointed out, once you get through a tough enemy placement, do you really want to have to redo that every time you go through the area? This is actually where levelups come in. By having levelups, you can make earlier enemies that are previously tough a lot easier. If you can beat enemies in one hit, then it doesn’t really matter if from an execution standpoint they’re really tricky to dodge, damage, or bypass.
Obviously this leads to balance problems, you can get overleveled, underleveled, need to grind, or feel like grinding and just ruin things. The post-SOTN games generally have good level curves that have you at the right level at all times, I honestly haven’t needed to grind once in them except to grab rare drops, which I think are an issue in their own right.
As an alternative to this, I propose that when you grab an orb from a boss, instead of you getting stronger, all the monsters in the area that boss governed get weaker (same thing honestly). This means you can enter ANY AREA and always have the enemies be the appropriate difficulty for that area, and getting through enemies you’ve already beaten is easy. For bonus points, have it scale based on the number of boss orbs you’ve gotten.
I once asked you about reaching the end of creative possibilities and you responded that there is still so much not being done. You used the example of palette swapping a small picture and receding spikes in a IWBTG mod. Ignoring the fact that that mechanic has been used in Mario games…
I didn’t say palette swap, I was talking about every single possible 100×100 picture. It was a metaphor. Think about it. Every picture you’ve ever saved has a thumbnail, about 100×100 big. You can frequently identify pictures just by their thumbnail. There are a tremendous number of pictures possible that are still identifiable from their thumbnail. Math says there’s a massive number of possible 100×100 thumbnails. The concept I was trying to get across was that if there are so many visually distinct thumbnails, then surely the number of visually distinct full size pictures is many orders of magnitude bigger. The number of different possible thumbnails is so large that it’s impossible for them all to simultaneously exist in the same universe (more permutations than particles in the universe by several orders of magnitude for something as small as a 100×100 picture).
The implication here is that if something that small can have such variation that we’ll never exhaust all the possible permutations of it, then surely something more complex like games won’t run out any time soon.
You got me on the Mario games, I forgot that there were those platforms that switch when you jump. I could be picky and say, “but it’s not spikes,” but that would be dumb. I’ll include a new mechanic in the next post, I thought a game idea up recently that hinged on a mechanical idea.
(and probably other games), I don’t see how you those are proper examples. The picture might have millions of different colour combinations, but at the end of the day, it’s a simple picture and the only combinations that will matter are those that are very distinct (e.g. a red pic vs a blue pic), but being a different shade of red of blue won’t separate it from the original red and blue version of the picture. Similarly, some platforming gimmick that is done slightly differently than another platform gimmick isn’t a very strong example of creativity.
As said, it was a metaphor. There’s a billion ways you could code something, I’m pretty sure we haven’t made up every possible mechanic yet.
Here’s one that I’m pretty sure has never been done before:
I had a thought for an antigravity racing game recently. What if there were 3 thrust modes, regular, one that had you suspended low off the track, and one that had you suspended high off the track? And these thrust modes would change the handling/top speed of the vehicle. And when you switch between the thrust modes from a lower to a higher one, you’d get a jump proportional to the change in thrust. So low thrust to normal thrust would be a small hop, normal thrust to high would be an average jump, and low directly to high would be a big jump.
Courses could have obstacles you can jump/hover over/under and of course crash into, so players need to use their thrust modes wisely to avoid trouble and of course go fast. Beyond that, if you move onto higher elevation terrain just as you jump, it could boost the jump even further, sort of like the same effect in dark souls and bloodborne, adding another skill component.
In low thrust mode I imagine you have better handling, maybe switching into low thrust as you do a turn lets you drift. In high thrust mode you could have a higher top speed, but worse handling since you’re so far off the ground. So if you want to go fast, high thrust is the way to go, but of course in high thrust mode, you can’t jump without going to a lower thrust mode and back first. Naturally obstacles like high rises could be put in the way that need to be gone under in low thrust mode or jumped high over so people who go high thrust all the time crash.
My thought was that racing games have courses that are fairly easy to clear by themselves, leaving the real challenge to time trial. If you had more hazardous courses and more means of traversal then maybe you’d end up with a more interesting single player experience, or maybe just a more interesting game overall.
I don’t have any new platforming gimmicks on me right now, but well, how many games are similar to Gimmick!? You can create stars that bounce and ride on them.
or Fire n Ice? Where you can create and destroy ice blocks, but only downwards diagonally.
or Bio Miracle? where you inflate enemies to use as platforms or projectiles that you push.
Obviously, as the work in question gets more complex, the potential for creativity increases (a simple picture will exhaust its creative potential long before a game will), but there is still a finite space for ‘meaningful’ creativity. And this goes for settings as well, not just mechanics.
Sure, there’s a finite space, but that space is larger than there is room to express using the entire universe as a canvas. Realistically speaking, there’s no limits on creativity relevant to humans.
How often have you seen settings with a hindu or buddhist influence? Or anything eastern that isn’t japanese? What about aboriginal? African? We’ve only had a few instances of arabian, including like prince of persia. If you’re limited to only recombining the world’s existing cultures, you still have a wide-ass palette.
If a simple 100×100 picture can have so many different possible variations that we literally cannot express them all, then what have we to worry about games or art?
What’s the difference between X fantasy setting and Y fantasy setting? So obviously, at some point humanity will enter a stasis until a great cataclysm wipes out almost everything and we have to start over. Or we can keep playing Melee.
What’s the difference between Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga (which actually does use hinduism as an influence)? Between those and Persona or Strange Journey? How different are Kingdom Hearts, The World Ends With You, American McGee’s Alice, Bloodborne, and Final Fantasy 7?
Looking back further, you have a ton of different D&D campaign settings, forgotten realms, eberron, spell jammer, dark sun, ghostwalk, ravenloft, and planescape.
There’s tons of variation possible. I’m working on a setting that I think is fairly unique for a tabletop RPG I’m developing. People just need to get creative.
Do you think 3D is more complex than 2D (or that 2D will be exhausted before 3D)?
There’s a lot of things limiting 3D that tends to keep the complexity about the same. When you’re constrained to a 2d plane, and have gravity pulling down on you, it tends to allow for certain interactions that don’t work as well in 3d. Like fireballs in 2d fighters. In 3d, you can strafe around that shit. That’s why the souls games have projectiles home slightly.
The other thing is, 3d is limited by our controllers. Most of the best 3d games tend to format the game to 2d in a way, then add in subtle 3d interactions. I’m sure you’ve seen the bloodborne video that makes it play from a top down perspective. Of course you can’t play the game the best that way, but it almost works. You could easily flatten a souls game and have something almost as good that would work without the jank (like if you flattened the hitboxes so nothing could go over or under anything else, much like hotline miami or GTA), except they definitely have some z-action going on in the original game, so you lose a bit.
Devil May Cry is sort of like this too, then they add jumping and things with height, but the fixed camera angles help show the game from a semi-top down perspective, almost isometric (except obviously not orthographic).
Also, this is why mortal kombat 9 can feel a bit janky with the hits. The hitboxes are in 3d and at the angle it’s portrayed at, it’s not easy to tell what the hell is going on.
In my opinion, 2d will never die
I’m kind of confused now, are we talking about mechanics or aesthetics? a picture is aesthetic. the way it looks can be infinite, but the painting technique is finite. likewise, ok, I guess there can technically be infinite settings, but mechanics will have to be finite (or infinite, but with negligible differences). there are people who claim that games will culminate in first-person VR, but that idea hinges on genres (i.e. mechanics) exhausting and then all that will be left if the aesthetic. but while you provided many different fantasy games, all of those settings have been done before in literature, film, or visual art. it’s only new for games because games are a new medium. and many of them are not really ‘original’ per se. DMC did Bloodborne first, KH is a crossover, SMT games all have thematic/aesthetic similarities, TWEWY is pop Japan with fantasy. like don’t get me wrong, I do think that there is tons of untapped potential. but then is it mechanical or aesthetic? like D&D has incredible lore, but that’s b/c there are a ton of games and they’ve developed everything so much.
Both. I was using pictures and aesthetics as a parallel.
I don’t think mechanics have a finite number of permutations then they’re kaput. At least none in close sight. Look at all these different abstract strategy games for example.
Only 2 fighting games (that I can think of off the top of my head) have normals that pull opponents in (for the grappler characters), Potemkin in Guilty Gear, and Big Band in Guilty Gear. Lucario (PM) and Slayer (guilty gear) both have teleports that make them invincible which can be canceled to retain the invincibility period.
Are these not different enough for you, or are they only negligibly different and you want wholecloth creation practically? Mechanics are going to be about as diverse as your ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers as well as any derivative thereof. They’re going to be as diverse as your ability to define cross-sections of space and their ability to change over time. Going to be as diverse as the states defined for objects and what conditions will change or modify those states.
Those people who place such trust in VR as an ultimate solution are stupid. I don’t think the idea of eventually exhausting genres hinges on that, I think the idea is ignorant of mechanics. It’s like a form of blindness, to not recognize that you can’t get the same possibility space in an FPS game as an RTS or a 2d platformer.
The primary reason games have similar mechanics is because AAA doesn’t know how to innovate. EA admitted they have no idea how to innovate or roll out a new IP. We continually see the use of Batman Arkham style combat or QTEs because those things can encompass nearly any action from an aesthetic perspective. People don’t have a mind for modeling representational simulations, people don’t have a mind for how to construct a system that tests a particular skill. People don’t have a mind for what skills they can test in the first place or how to create a system of strategy between those skill tests that creates a large number of equally weighted possibilities, which is the real killer.
Far as the settings I mentioned go, I’m pretty sure TWEWY is rather original. Everything we know of fantasy had its basis in something. Invention is the recombination of information. Where else has japanese hip hop graffiti spiritualism happened? Same for the Vortex world of SMT3, literally Tokyo wrapped inside a sphere with a spirit sun at the center, and the Hindu Junkyard of Digital Devil Saga, even if the same artist was behind both looks.
Similar for Star Wars too in my opinion. Where the hell did Jedi come from? They seem like an archetype with no natural origin. As a sci-fi universe, the Star Wars universe always stood out to me.
And as I said, there are a ton of cultures and religions that have not really been explored in games or in media very much and I’m sure there are a ton of ways to twist them.
All the different tabletop RPG settings are like that honestly. Look at White Wolf RPGs. The recent Demon The Descent rulebook outlines a rather unique setting all by itself. It’s not a product of just time alone, they know what they’re doing. Most of the settings I mentioned last post are underdeveloped compared to their more mainstream settings.
When you say D&D has incredible lore, all I can say is, which setting? They all have different lore, and some of them are really out there too, like spelljammer.
I’m using the aesthetic potential out there as a parallel for the mechanical. I know there’s potential in both.
If you think that 2D has so many possibilities even compared to 3D (though that might be because games aren’t designed very much with 3d interactions in mind…), would you say that even… 1D has many unexplored possibilities, that haven’t even been considered? I’m being serious here.
There’s probably a fair amount you can do with 1d. A lot of 2d games could be represented in 1d, like karate champ, or berzerk (old game, think of flatland here). A few 3d games could probably be represented in 1d, like a lot of the Dragon Ball Z fighting games, especially the split screen ones, and the more recent naruto fighting games (kidding here, they aren’t actually one dimensional). There was Senor Footsies a while back which was essentially 1d. I’d say rock paper scissors is basically 1d, or nondimensional. What would Poker be?
I don’t see nearly as much potential for 1d though. I bet there’s a lot we haven’t done, but I don’t see as much we could do with that harsh a limitation. Like, you need to have a few variables that can be varied in some way, otherwise you end up with no means of differentiating options from one another, there’s no tradeoff.
Also also, line wobbler is an actually 1d game (not 2d with 1d vision), though I don’t know if it’s too interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ_5ol_kyL4 I guess more interesting concepts could be explored in 1d, if anyone tried.
That’s cool. Definitely goes to show some stuff can be done in 1d, but as said, I think a lot of what’s possible in 2d just isn’t in 1d, you’ll be a lot more constrained than even the transition between 3d and 2d, because you need a certain minimum number of variables to get a decent sized possibility space.
Also related to that 1d question, there was this 2d first person game (so a 1d display) ages ago on the web, from a 7dfps, but I can’t find it, though I did find this seven dimensions one that displays in a series of one dimension lines (and a point) http://www.marries.nl/games/seven-dimensions/
Ah yeah, that’s like flatland. Cool stuff. I honestly can’t make sense of it from just the video.
How should developers handle balancing in fighting games?
Prior to first release, it’s almost impossible to put out something balanced. The best you can do is playtest internally with skilled players. Try to set a baseline level of power on the character that is felt to be the one most representative of the spirit of the game, like Ryu in Street Fighter 2. Sirlin has a number of good balance related articles:
Beyond that, it’s about identifying which characters are the most or least powerful. This is tricky, because frequently you’ll find that noobs determine one thing is overpowered that isn’t really overpowered, like Ike in Brawl, Little Mac in Smash 4, all sorts of things. Having a bunch of experienced players try to make up a tier list from playing the game a lot with different characters is as good a start as you can get, then beyond that to focus on each individual matchup and why one character wins over the other, altering the characters so they will fight evenly in that matchup without screwing up the rest, like a gordian knot. On the flip side, they will all be a bit biased by their choice in character and try to influence you to do things that help their character. Probably. Pro players have a conflicting motivation from the game designer, they want to win more frequently.
Another key thing that I see a lot is, when an unintended exploit or something comes up, what most frequently happens is it gets nerfed into the ground, or removed outright. What I’d like to see more of is trying to preserve that type of thing, but make it fit into the ecosystem. The key thing to emphasize is that all the parts of the character have a use for something and they all get used, and they’re all distinct from one another. On a larger level, all the characters should be good at something, and they should all be used, and they should all be distinct from one another.
An easy way to balance is to homogenize the characters by nerfing their strengths. The battle in balance is to create diversity. If you have a bunch of totally radically different characters, then one of them is likely to beat most of the others, so low diversity overall. Your job is to ensure that all the characters and all the options are being used, but it’s also to ensure that they all are distinct and unique. If something is underutilized, you need to give it more utility, or nerf the things that block its utility.
Project M and Guilty Gear are perhaps the two most successful examples of balance I’ve seen yet, with Project M currently having all the characters viable except Olimar and Ice Climbers, and those only inviable because of some minor faults, and very open about it.
I was reading your “BAM A HUM YAM” article (or whatever the fuck its called) and while I agree with most of it (srsly put that thing on GYP) I still think that even a game whose combat system is supposed to make you: “feel like batman” can have difficulty and depth if you have lots of options which can all take out bad guys easily but some are more effective on various enemy types than others. Add a time trial mode kinda like MGS2’s VR missions (but with longer maps) AND BAM? Would that be a good game?
I’ll consider putting it up.
“Feel like batman” doesn’t mean anything. That’s a problem up front. There’s a bunch of different interpretations of batman, the animated series had an episode titled, “Legends of the Dark Night” http://dcanimated.wikia.com/wiki/Legends_of_the_Dark_Knight That was specifically about the different interpretations of the batman character. If you want a character that feels invincible and can easily crush the opposition, then where is the difficulty coming from? Where is the fear of failure coming from?
Much as I hype up game modes about optimization (speed runs and score attacks), I don’t think they should be what a game’s difficulty is built around, because people don’t know how to intentionally design them, and they tend to be more interesting when they emerge from a system built to be complex for a different purpose. (that and the existing batman arkham games have pretty alright speedruns honestly, though I won’t say it saves them as games) I frankly don’t tolerate games that are good speedruns but not good games to just play (which is why even though I encourage you to watch the speedruns for the 3d zelda games, I still criticize them as the worst of the series).
And it’s called BAM A HAM YUM because I didn’t play BAM HAM CITY.
Trouble here is, that idea’s too vague. As in the prior post, what’s the failure condition? Being ground into a pulp? Being seen? not being fast enough? not getting enough bad guy beat-up points?
Not to mention there just aren’t enough details there for me to really work with. The existing batman arkham games have attacks that are more effective on various enemy types than others. The trouble is they chose a really weak differentiation between the enemy types.
How do you reconcile weak non-threatening enemies that you can speedily eliminate? Don’t think it’s really possible.
Perhaps the best route to take is to focus on the stealth sections, and traversal rather than the thug combat outright?
Rather than give him moves that are more or less effective on different enemy types, give him moves that let him move around space differently and take out enemies while moving differently. Focus on the dynamic between armed thugs and unarmed ones. Armed are lethal, unarmed are generally nonlethal. Unarmed search better, can climb better, armed try to oversee the unarmed, and occupy locations where they can see the most things. Getting seen is fine, but you’ll soon get shot, because the armed thugs have ranged superiority and are highly lethal. It’s about walking on the razor’s edge, much like Hotline Miami.
Instead of regular thugs doing HP damage to you, their role is to stun you so the armed thugs can take you down. When armed thugs are all taken out, unarmed thugs prioritize becoming armed. The core dynamic is essentially the unarmed thugs seeking you out so you get wrecked by the armed ones. Playing on this would of course be things that draw attention to a spot (like noise emitters), block line of sight (smoke grenades), burst movement with attack options (batman kick!), stealth takedowns, probably which require commitment for a period of time (charge your ability to knock them out before doing it), a dodge or quick evade option of some kind, multilayer multithreaded level design, no hiding spots or safe zones.
I dunno. That’s all that’s at the top of my head and I don’t want to do a full redesign of their combat system because I dunno where to even go with it. Most of the combat systems I come up with try to play on more specific ideas and Batman’s is just generic in the scheme of things.
What do you think of the stealth in the Arkham games?
It was the only part worth saving in any respect. It created a simple dynamic, you can’t stand up to dudes with guns at a distance, and you need to eliminate enemies quickly before their friends with guns are called over. That’s the heart of the game. It played with it by having enemies stand back to back so you couldn’t stealth kill them, and with the noise collars to bring other enemies over. But other than that, it didn’t really do much. This is why I said that if I were to redo it and couldn’t make a combat system that didn’t suck, I’d focus on that stealth element, because it’s all the game had going for it.
Deus Ex or DXHR? I’ve hardly ever seen you mention the original.
DXHR. I played the original prior to DXHR’s announcement, and predicted DXHR would be a complete failure prior to the leak. The leak changed my mind on it, and in time since I think DXHR is actually the better game despite its more narrow focus.
My primary issues with the original Deus Ex are that the gunplay isn’t good, enemies aren’t interesting, the stealth isn’t good, the hacking/lockpicking are one dimensional, there isn’t a significant platforming/area traversal element. Dialogue basically never constitutes a good gameplay challenge, and Deus Ex isn’t an exception there.
On the level of simply the game living up to what it. The game doesn’t really care if you go lethal or nonlethal in any of the missions (after the third one it stops tracking the difference completely). The overall story arc is completely linear, you always have to betray unatco, you always get captured by gunther, you always break out of unatco, go to hong kong, infiltrate versalife, etc, etc. There are tons of invincible NPCs in many of the levels, especially the early ones. You’re required to kill multiple NPCs to proceed (even if there are clever workarounds for all but one of them).
I went into Deus Ex thinking, “Wow, I can do anything.” After successive playthroughs and learning more about the game, I realized, “Wow, I can’t do anything.” My opinion on the game changed over time as my opinions about what made a good game or not became more refined. Deus Ex is complex, but it isn’t deep. There’s a lot going on, but none of it is interconnected, meaningful, or challenging. This is what lead to my change in opinion.
DXHR, it fell flat in a number of areas, lacking features of the original (melee weapons) and having smaller more constrained levels generally, but it had stronger stealth, better gunplay, an actually involved process for hacking, and did pretty alright with the level design in of including multiple paths/approaches, and goodies hidden around. Kinda sucks that the entire world wasn’t like detroit and that SO MUCH CONTENT was cut (upper heng sha, montreal, india).
Plus I’ve speedrun both of them, DXHR is an awesome challenge, Deus Ex is boring cheese. Deus Ex is one of the easiest speedruns I’ve done yet (primarily about memorization of the order you have to do things in and not forgetting steps), DXHR has hard tricks, is a super fast stealth run (one of the rare stealth games to actually have a speedrun about being stealthy instead of just running through every blockade), and it’s tricky to avoid enemies while trying to pass through them ASAP on low/no resources.
Deus Ex still has a crazy complex system, which made for good fun in Illiterate Child’s Glitchy Walk Through, but none of the game is designed to be particularly challenging or mentally involved, so a lot of that ad hoc complexity goes to waste.
When creating a remake of a game with sequence breaking glitches, do you think the glitches should be removed because the people who appreciate these things can play the original if they want to or do you think they should be kept in, potentially ruining a new players first playthrough on the remake?
I don’t see how the glitches are ruining people’s playthroughs in the first place, unless they’re easily triggered and can prevent you from completing the game. My big thing is, you should treat glitches like they’re just another feature.
Toggle Escape in Dark Souls is done by mashing to switch your weapon, it can cancel stunlock and let you escape when you might otherwise die. Of course if you roll then that can be punished and you might lose ground, so it’s not without risk. This is something the developers probably should have considered when they made the game in the first place, a way to escape stunlock. Poise was already a measure in that direction because stunlock was such a problem in demon’s souls. Meanwhile, the infinite dragon head duplication glitch that let you infinite dragon roar or spit an infinite number of knives or sparkling stones to lag the game to hell, definitely something that should be patched, because it’s broken and there’s no fixing it.
Cancels in Street Fighter 2 aren’t good because the developers decided to include it in future games, they were kept in because they were a good mechanic. This isn’t something determined by the developers, because someone can entirely deliberately make a game that is stupid and horrible. Someone can also intend to make a great game and it ends up stupid and horrible because they have no vision or understanding.
We need to stop thinking of glitches as some alien thing outside the game, glitches occur in board games too. Sometimes the rules read as written resulting in a funny interaction, Magic the Gathering is full of this type of thing, it’s practically how the game is played at this point. Not to mention the yata-lock in yugioh or peasant railgun or Pun Pun in D&D 3.5. When you have a system of rules, there are going to be some interactions that are strange and can’t realistically be predicted in advance, which is why every TCG has a ban list (though I am impressed with how short cardfight vanguard’s is). And video games are about as complicated systems of rules as you get in games.
The primary question should be, is this something that is realistically likely to ruin someone’s experience or make the game impossible to complete? The second question should be, does this overshadow other aspects of the game so nobody uses those other things? Do you gain more in the main active decision-making part of your game from having it or losing it? Alternatively, take the example of Wind Waker HD, by patching out storage and making zombie hover useless, a lot of other tactics suddenly came into prominence, making it a different glitchy experience from the original (the WR is even 2 minutes faster).
Consider glitch patching like any other piece of game design. Would you patch out save states in Half Life 1? You should.
Okay rephrase, Lets say there is a glitch that can be performed that allows the player to travel into an area they aren’t supposed to be in yet. This area requires the games “HI-JUMP item” to get through but if a speedrunner takes a very careful route then they can avoid falling down pits that need the “HI-JUMP” to get out of. This glitch could create interesting routes for speedrunners and could add depth to the game by allowing you to get certain weapons early for example, but if someone playing through the first time were to trigger it and accidentally save the game, their playthrough is potentially ruined. Should such a glitch be patched out in a re-release, on the chance it could ruin someone’s playthrough or should it be kept in as it makes the game more interesting to play for some players? Would the difficulty of executing the glitch change your opinion on this matter?
I answered this in the original ask actually, you should under no circumstances allow the player to create a state that makes progression impossible.
In such a game, the pits should either have exits that lead back out to areas where the player can get the high jump to progress normally, or the player should have a function to warp back to a prior point, a la the souls games where you have homeward bones and the like, so even if you do get stuck out of bounds or some business you can always warp out.
In the rerelease the route shouldn’t be patched out, the way it makes progression impossible should be. This of course means that it’s still open for speedrunners without impeding ordinary players.
Actually I think there is a case like this in La Mulana, if you save in the Temple of the Moon without picking up the holy grail that allows you to warp between checkpoints then you’re screwed. I think this is true in both the original and the remake.
You have repeatedly used the example of the interesting aspects of trading card games and unintended use of certain cards to argue for glitches in video games. This is an opinion i agree with but thanks to you I stumbled upon this in a google search: (http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/legally-rip-your-opponents-cards-to-pieces/) . How do you feel about something like that? Would you say this is interesting enough to keep in the game, as nearly all opponents will concede when you start performing this combo, on top of the fact it would still practically be a guaranteed win if you replaced “rip up” with “send to the discard pile”. Alternatively, do you think it crosses the line of an unintended mechanic actively harming other players enjoyment of the game?
That’s really hysterical. I’m really surprised that they would print a card that has an effect where you tear it up, but significantly less surprised that there is a way to transfer the effect to other cards. Of course, it’s only natural that it came from the set Unglued.
What I’d say in this case is, rules are formed by the consent of the players. It’s us who agree to play with the rules presented on the cards in the first place, or with cards of those dimensions and so on. You should probably discuss it with the person you’re playing with before you play, unless you want to be a huge dick. Also I doubt this is among the legal sets allowed in tournaments.
It does raise the question of what I guess you could call implicit versus explicit rules (or formal versus informal, there’s no agreed upon term for this far as I know). Rules in a video game are almost all implicit, regulated by the physical structure of the device, much like the physical game snafu, or ball & cup. In the case of video games, a lot of how we play them are explicit rules actually, things we agree upon, like the goal, map pool, or other modifiers. The goal of a game is always an explicit rule, something that the player(s) accept and agree to play by, where the programming is an “embedded rule,” much like the form of the baseball bat, or that card games are played with cards instead of round chips or kept in memory. This means they work a certain way and serve the game in a certain way. Just something worth considering.
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