Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
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Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
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Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
#2I kind of noped out of the fighting game craze when they descended on the arcades in the 90's (?). To my eye they had abandoned the twitchy interactivity I had come to expect playing standard arcade games like Tempest, etc. Rather than a fire button and a spinner you had a joystick plus what amounted to a numpad of buttons. It seemed like maybe a game accountants or payroll managers would enjoy.
(To this day, though I have built close to a dozen MAME cabinets, I have never included the numpad of buttons you would need to play fighting games. Besides never getting into the genre, I think they clutter up the console and create confusion for other games: Metal Slug as an example, which of these six buttons is the grenade button?)
Reading this article gives me a new appreciation for the fighting game genre. I had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering. (Still not sure it's my kind of game though.)
Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
#3One thing that's very tricky about these kind of simplified visual explanations of fighting game mechanics is that you don't capture all the strategic implications of move properties.
The visualizations make simple scenarios clear, for example if you block a sweep point blank (or whatever a highly punishable tekken equivalent would be, a snake edge or a hellsweep or whatever), then you are at advantage and can land a strong punish.
But many moves that are highly disadvantageous on block are not punishable when used at their furthest effective range, because the opponent does not have a far reaching & fast enough move to punish it.
At higher levels of play, this kind of knowledge of move properties is actually used against you. There are characters who have uninterruptable block strings that ends in a disadvantageous move, but the string has significant pushback on block.
Players will use these strings to push the opponent to a deliberate spacing where it looks like they can land a long range normal to punish the last move of the blockstring. But the string is designed to place the opponent just outside of the range of that normal, where it looks like it will connect, but it it will not. In this situation, the person who did the "unsafe" blockstring can watch their opponent's character model, visually confirm the startup animation of the attempted punish, and punish _that_ move's recovery on reaction. Tricky tricky!
Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
#4This is pretty interesting.
I play a lot of games, but never got into fighting games.
Seeing the strategy "laid out" might be a useful way to understand the mechanics rather than figuring them out with trial and error.
Trial an error can be fun (e.g Zelda), but it's always been something that stopped me getting too far with this genre.
Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
#5I have no previous introduction to this kind of graphing, so I find this to be very very cool! I'm glad we're mapping out these odd, sort of "combine-able abstractions" like timing coupled with input and previous state, in a visual way. I don't know if this is actually useful for anything, but I certainly hope so! And, if not, it at least seems translatable to some really neat artwork. I'd definitely put up a poster of something that described, say, the hadoken, if it were well designed.
Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
#6Back in the day me and my buddy spent ages playing Mortal Combat on a PC. I decided to learn all the combos (crazy fast keyboard patterns). The combos gave you disproportional damage wielding power.
I spent hours and hours practicing it when we were playing. My buddy won pretty much every single game, while laughing at my combo attempts.
Then I mastered it one day. I won every single game. Buddy said this combo shit wasn't fair and refused to play the game ever again!
Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
#7As far as a visualization and alternate means of teaching, at least at a getting started level, this is awesome.
As someone who has picked up many fighting games and been immediately overwhelmed by having no clue what's going on or even where to start, I just mash buttons. Even just seeing what's possible, how to access it, and basics of how it works is really neat.
I guarantee you if someone was trying to teach me a fighting game and had this handy, it would go about twice as well as them saying "push these buttons to do this" which is the usual means.
I love alternate visualizations and unorthodox teaching aids. This ticks all those boxes.
Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
#8This is pretty interesting. I play a lot of games, but never got into fighting games. Seeing the strategy "laid out" might be a useful way to understand the mechanics rather than figuring them out with trial and error. Trial an error can be fun (e.g Zelda), but it's always been something that stopped me getting too far with this genre.
If you want to give it a try, Street Fighter 6 is really, really good. Aside from just being an amazingly well thought-out fighting game[1], it's also got a big player base so you'll have plenty of other noobs to play with in the ranked matchmaking mode, and the networking code is perfect[2] so you can just hop on and start having fun.
If you do decide to jump in, just remember that you will be terrible at the start. Everyone is. No, you don't have to understand frame data and have a bunch of sick combos and understand all of the mechanics to play online. Just hop in, the game will match you against players that are about at your level. SF6 is my first fighting game, I started at the very bottom of the ranked ladder (like literally, the very bottom) and now I've played more than 80 hours this year and I've just now started breaking into the "good" ranks (Platinum). In the lower ranks I had no combos and never used the super gauge at all and still won and had a great time. Don't stress too much about your rank, just think of it as a way to match you with good quality opponents.
Anyway. Can't recommend it highly enough.
[1] Here's a very in-depth overview: https://words.infil.net/w04-sf6review.html
[2] They use rollback networking, which is the gold standard for online multiplayer games https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/explaining-how-fighti...
Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
#9One thing that's very tricky about these kind of simplified visual explanations of fighting game mechanics is that you don't capture all the strategic implications of move properties. The visualizations make simple scenarios clear, for example if you block a sweep point blank (or whatever a highly punishable tekken equivalent would be, a snake edge or a hellsweep or whatever), then you are at advantage and can land a…
I think I follow the gist of what you're talking about and it doesn't sound all that advanced at all. Deliberately missing out getting blocked to make the opponent think they have an opening is not a particularly high level play in other games. It still baffles me that traditional 2D fighting games and Tekken in particular are so complex and that it is so hard to even pull off a specific move due to control schemes that are maximally unergonomic.
Compare this with the simplicity of Mount & Blade Warband which achieves greater depth, in 3D, with a very simple and intuitive control scheme.
Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
#10I kind of noped out of the fighting game craze when they descended on the arcades in the 90's (?). To my eye they had abandoned the twitchy interactivity I had come to expect playing standard arcade games like Tempest, etc. Rather than a fire button and a spinner you had a joystick plus what amounted to a numpad of buttons. It seemed like maybe a game accountants or payroll managers would enjoy. (To this day, though…
Maybe try something like Yomi which removes the twitchiness from it while trying to capture the ability to read the opponent.
(It's a card game from a street fighter dev)