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Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

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Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#81

Post by SliceOfWaifu »

Blackthorn wrote: post #50
SliceOfWaifu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Street fighter isn't bad at all but some games and some characters are just absurd for no particular reason. Ivy in later Soul Calibur games is a good example, she has two command throws with pointlessly arcane inputs that even have a second, better mode when you do them frame perfect. So everyone who plays Ivy just grinds and grinds until they can do it in their sleep. There's no particular balance reason for that (…

You just said yourself that doing them frame perfect yields a better version of the move. The input is difficult because of the potential reward. It's like doing perfect EWGFs in Tekken. I played Ivy in SoulCalibur II, and could do the Summon Suffering input pretty consistently if I buffered it during another attack. It led to a fun mixup since the other player would hear my joystick switches actuating as I did the motion, and crouch to avoid the throw. Instead of finishing the input, I'd hit them with her 2 A+B overhead instead. God, I love SCII. It's a shame the sequels kept trying to reinvent the wheel with the gameplay.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#82

Post by datagram »

BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #71
uncletaco wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just play Dhalsim boom you can punish the block string with a standing low kick that closes the distance. Now laugh as they call you anti fun.

I really would, but I could never land those TK teleports consistently (assuming that's still a thing in 6)

Teleport is now just 3 punches or 3 kicks (no motion), so TK teleports are actually very easy.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#83

Post by SliceOfWaifu »

rochak wrote: post #74
jncfhnb wrote: post #17

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…

Thanks for warning me on Tekken. I was really digging the character design and all in the upcoming Tekken 8 but given I possess dexterity of a 10 year old, I should probably skip it and fighting games in general.

Tekken 8 just released a free demo on PS5 (comes out on other platforms in a week). Try it out. You might end up liking the game.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#84

Post by SliceOfWaifu »

dfxm12 wrote: post #80
SliceOfWaifu wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with playing competitive games casually is that the moment one player actually bothers to learn anything about the game, it immediately ruins the experience for the other player if they're unwilling to do the same.

No game is perfectly balanced & no players are perfectly balanced either. I don't know about mortal kombat, but home versions of games had handicap features built in for situations like this. You can also do some out of game handicaps like "I get one free move" or "you can't use this special move". If nothing else, the variety keeps things interesting.

There is a difference between balance and ignorance. Handicaps don't work very well if one player has stronger fundamentals than the other. It'll just be a slippery slope of stacking handicaps until one player ragequits. Instead of trying to Harrison Bergeron the situation, your best bet is to just play a different game or find a way to motivate the other player to learn as you did.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#85

Post by datagram »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #23
jncfhnb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This makes no sense. For one, a large component of real-time games is mechanics and execution. Also, the idea of being able to mindlessly "flowchart" a real-time game at a competitive level is absurd. It assumes a non-interactive opponent. If it was true there would be no such thing as yomi. There are also a lot of other fundamental differences around resource management, opponent interaction, etc. They are only simi…

People absolutely flowchart fighting games at a high level. Combos are, unsurprisingly, completely non-interactive in most games, but there's also a term specifically for non-interactive offense: setplay https://glossary.infil.net/?t=Set%20Play

The goal of an optimal strategy in fighting games is generally to reduce the amount that you have to read your opponent as much as possible, ideally to zero. Obviously the developers don't want this to be fully possible, but players generally try to get as close as they can. Even at the highest levels, you can have rounds that go like: canned opening -> combo -> setplay -> combo -> setplay -> combo.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#86

Post by glitchc »

SliceOfWaifu wrote: post #22
jncfhnb wrote: post #17

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…

Compared to other 3D fighters like SoulCalibur, Dead or Alive, Bloody Roar, etc, Tekken is completely unintuitive for a casual button masher. Tekken, like Virtua Fighter, requires you to sit down in Training Mode for hours just to learn a single character's basic moveset, BnBs, and gameplan. Compare this to 2D fighting games, where all you gotta do is learn the basic Street Fighter 2 movelist, and you can quickly fig…

Tekken is easy to win for a button masher. Once in a while, a button masher will beat a top-tier opponent. In SF/MK, a button masher has zero chance of winning against a top tier opponent. The skill curve is much steeper.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#87

Post by grog454 »

dmonitor wrote: post #58
grog454 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

This? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=software.simpl... You think this is roughly analogous to a fighting game?

Yes. Although I'm not going to quote my exact wording. Feel free to scroll up and/or familiarize yourself with the game if you're having trouble understanding.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#88

Post by murderfs »

glitchc wrote: post #86
SliceOfWaifu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to other 3D fighters like SoulCalibur, Dead or Alive, Bloody Roar, etc, Tekken is completely unintuitive for a casual button masher. Tekken, like Virtua Fighter, requires you to sit down in Training Mode for hours just to learn a single character's basic moveset, BnBs, and gameplan. Compare this to 2D fighting games, where all you gotta do is learn the basic Street Fighter 2 movelist, and you can quickly fig…

Tekken is easy to win for a button masher. Once in a while, a button masher will beat a top-tier opponent. In SF/MK, a button masher has zero chance of winning against a top tier opponent. The skill curve is much steeper.

What are you talking about? Tekken is basically Knowledge Check: The Game, and the very first level of knowledge check (df+1) is going to be completely unbeatable for someone that doesn't know how to respond. In Street Fighter, you can guess right and jump over a fireball 6 times in a row and win.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#89

Post by Blackthorn »

SliceOfWaifu wrote: post #81
Blackthorn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Street fighter isn't bad at all but some games and some characters are just absurd for no particular reason. Ivy in later Soul Calibur games is a good example, she has two command throws with pointlessly arcane inputs that even have a second, better mode when you do them frame perfect. So everyone who plays Ivy just grinds and grinds until they can do it in their sleep. There's no particular balance reason for that (…

You just said yourself that doing them frame perfect yields a better version of the move. The input is difficult because of the potential reward. It's like doing perfect EWGFs in Tekken. I played Ivy in SoulCalibur II, and could do the Summon Suffering input pretty consistently if I buffered it during another attack. It led to a fun mixup since the other player would hear my joystick switches actuating as I did the m…

> You just said yourself that doing them frame perfect yields a better version of the move. The input is difficult because of the potential reward.

I also said the other half of that: that the result is that people grind until they can do it 100% in their sleep, and thus all it forms is a "you must be this tall to play this character" barrier.

Unlike the example in Street Fighter it actively works against having a balanced game, since now you have to nerf the move because the people who ground it frame-perfect are too strong, which wouldn't have affected anyone who didn't stick their nose to the grindstone but now they get to eat the nerf too, so the character ends up about level with other characters when you're frame-perfect, which isn't demanded of other characters. We saw this exact antipattern happen with Ivy in Soul Calibur 6.

There's an argument to be made that the arcane input provides a tell to the opponent when it's used outside of a buffered section in some other move's lag, but that same argument would work with a less pointlessly arcane input, like a double half circle.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#90

Post by reassembled »

toast0 wrote: post #43
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 think Tekken is 4 buttons, and Neo-Geo is 4 buttons, so I'm not sure your numpad rant quite applies. I've seen some Neo-Geo layouts with a 2x2 layout instead of the traditional swoosh, so I think it would be ok. Personally, I've got lots of room, so if I were a multi-cade person, I'd build out different machines for different layouts. Something for classic single joystick games with two buttons on either side (alth…

Japanese arcade cabs typically have control panels that can be swapped out with different button layouts to accommodate the particular game in the cabinet at the time. So the same cab can go from accommodating two players side-by-side playing Street Fighter with two sticks and 6 buttons per player, to a setup with three buttons and only one stick for shmups.
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