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Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

janezhang.ca

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Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#11

Post by ZephyrBlu »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #2

I 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 had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering

Very confused how you got that impression from this article. The cards are a just a way to visualize information. Fighting games don't play like a fast-paced card game, they are fundamentally different.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#12

Post by jncfhnb »

cultureswitch wrote: post #9
BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #3

One 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 t…

Pulling off moves is very easy. Pulling off specific sequences of moves is not.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#13

Post by jncfhnb »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #11
JKCalhoun wrote: post #2

I 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 had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering Very confused how you got that impression from this article. The cards are a just a way to visualize information. Fighting games don't play like a fast-paced card game, they are fundamentally different.

Hmm no they kind of do. The basic insight with most fighting games is that once you are competent you know everything that opponent can do and the list of viable options is discrete and small with fairly standard flowcharts.

Tekken is a bit more nebulous than this.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#14

Post by BaculumMeumEst »

cultureswitch wrote: post #9
BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #3

One 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 t…

It is a simple concept, but I'm calling it "advanced" in the sense that people don't really do stuff like that except in the higher ranks of ranked play, because its effectiveness depends on your opponent actually being aware that they "should" be pushing a button in a certain situation.

In lower ranks, people are more concerned with the other strategic aspects of the game; there is a lot of stuff going on all at the same time.

> 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.

The mechanical difficulty of certain actions is a deliberate design choice. The game tests not only your strategic decision making, but also your ability to execute difficult inputs, both under pressure, all at once.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#15

Post by lukaszkorecki »

coldpie wrote: post #8
yaseer wrote: post #4

This 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.…

To add to it - the frame meter in SF6 training mode is an equivalent of the cards presented in the article, but built into the game.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#17

Post by jncfhnb »

Tekken feels particularly bad to play if you don’t know what you’re doing imo. It’s the least approachable.

Unexpected shoutout to Thems Fighting Herds, the mlp fan spinoff turned OC quadruped fighting game. Regardless of your care for the aesthetics, the single player story was extremely good imo.

Enemies were NOT just random CPUs but unique characters with formulaic strategies. Wolf that just does crouching attacks so you need to learn to block and prefer crouches. Snake that zones with projectiles so you need to learn to approach. Grapple bear so you need to learn to zone and avoid grabs. Something else with mixups so you need to learn to standing block sometimes.

And the enemies are pretty merciless. If you button mash without doing a combo they punish you hard from level 1. It is immediately taught that you must be trying to learn the game and not cheese your way to victory with lucky spammy shit or random attacks.

The bosses are cool too. Giant non standard shaped enemies with interesting attacks that all respect your usual defensive options while also being vulnerable to hit stun. A lot of fighting game bosses decide to crank up the bullshit rather than making them teaching moments.

Idk, I thought it was cool

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#18

Post by SliceOfWaifu »

cultureswitch wrote: post #9
BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #3

One 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 t…

Motion inputs aren't arbitrarily difficult. They're intrinsically tied to the game's balance. Basic special uppercut moves like the Shoryuken use the forward->down->downforward motion to ensure the player cannot hold back to block during the motion. The player must commit to use their strong special uppercut move frames before they've actually unleashed it. Guile's Sonic Boom projectile requires the player to "charge" the move by holding back for a couple of seconds before being able to unleash it. This creates a risk factor, since the opponent is then incentivized to cross up Guile to make him lose his charge. However, this is where Guile's special uppercut, the Flash Kick, comes into play. The Flash Kick can be simultaneously charged along with the Sonic Boom, to disincentivize the opponent from attempting to jump over Guile. Mapping any of these moves to a single button press is a balancing nightmare. Street Fighter 6 has a "Modern" controls option that does exactly this, and it comes at the cost of a big chunk of the character's available movelist. Even with that huge tradeoff, the Modern versions of several characters are still considered high tier. Even then, you hardly see any Modern control players in the upper echelons of Ranked matchmaking because, ultimately, it's way easier to learn the motion inputs than it is to have a solid gameplan.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#19

Post by grog454 »

coldpie wrote: post #8
yaseer wrote: post #4

This 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.…

The second article mentions delay based and rollback both of which seem to be appropriate for peer to peer graphs, but there is a third option: server authority. I created a game with mechanics very roughly analogous to fighting games (nebulous.io) where there is no client side prediction, no rollback, and a 20hz update loop. Clients just render what the server reports (with some smoothing). I never get complaints about fairness, and players can quickly learn to adapt to their latency to servers located in different regions. Its as well now as it did in 2015, when a significant portion of players used 3g or worse cellular connections.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#20

Post by haste410 »

jncfhnb wrote: post #13
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering Very confused how you got that impression from this article. The cards are a just a way to visualize information. Fighting games don't play like a fast-paced card game, they are fundamentally different.

Hmm no they kind of do. The basic insight with most fighting games is that once you are competent you know everything that opponent can do and the list of viable options is discrete and small with fairly standard flowcharts. Tekken is a bit more nebulous than this.

That's not something unique to fighting games. That's the concept of playing the metagame.
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