Design Blog

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Job Search Resumes

I won't say much, but I'm currently looking for a new job now. Expect some updates to this portfolio site within a week or so.

Labels: job

posted by Saikyo at 2:07 PM

Thursday, March 26, 2009

BlazBlue: Pushing Design Limitations Part 1

I mentioned before that I was looking forward to the Arc System Works game BlazBlue in an earlier post, and I wanted to take a little time to explain why I find it interesting. Now there are the obvious fanboy reasons for it, since it's made by the same team that made Guilty Gear, one of my favorite games, but from a design perspective, I find it facinating that the designers managed to set up a game that seems to have a good balance and yet also include a whole bunch of bizzare design ideas.

This first part is an introduction to the game and it's predecessor Guilty Gear and how the base game system has a lot of things that are a radical departure from how most fighting games are set up. After that I'll take a few more posts to go over each of the characters and how in their own way each of them expore a radically different playstyle and how it factors into the overall game balance. And hopefully at the end, I'll have an analysis of how the game compares to other contemporary fighting games and their systems.

Hopefully I won't bore anyone.

-----

So as a bit of background, both Guilty Gear and BlazBlue are 2D fighting games which have a unique anime-style artwork and fast-paced, heavily offensive battles. The original Guilty Gear game was released in the U.S. in 1998 for the Playstation and subsequent releases mostly came out for the PS2. Each game expanded on previous mechanics and usually added a few new characters. The series has enjoyed a fairly large tournament scene which flourished around the time of the third game, the first game being considered a cult hit and the second somewhat unrefined. By the third game, several interesting mechanics had been developed and refined to provide a unique game experience. Specifically the mechanics I'm focusing on are:

Perfect Guard - Removing Chip Damage
In both games the player can hold two buttons while blocking to activate a perfect defensive manuver which prevents them from taking block damage. This mechanic also pushes back the enemy during combo strings to create space. In Guilty Gear the penalty for using this guard was the sacrifice of your super meter. In BlazBlue, it consumes a separate meter which recharges over time automatically. The advantage of the BlazBlue system is that it allows players who are not as offensive to use the technique (super meter is gained in both games from offensive actions), however if this extra gauge is depleted the player takes additional damage until it fills up again. Thus it becomes a different type of resource that the player can manage.

BURST - Combo Breaker
This is a mechanic that allows the player to immeditely break a combo initiated by the enemy. It makes them temporarily invincible and then causes a knockback effect in a radius around them. Both BlazBlue and Guilty Gear use this mechanic although there are some small differences. Guilty Gear used a timer for the burst, and had it charge up faster as the player gets hit. This generally allowed 2 bursts in a three round match. There were two types of bursts, one used defensively which rewarded you with the gauge refilling a bit if it hit, and one used offensively which completely charged the player's super bar if it connected. In BlazBlue the burst is given to players every round and there is no longer a recharge timer, the player only gets one each round. The penalty for using the burst is that you can no longer use a perfect guard and your overall defence is lowered. This changes the mechanic from an ability that players tended to use early in Guilty Gear, to one which players tend to use late battle because of the strong negative drawback. This new tradeoff is interesting because it requires more strategical thought on the part of the player.

Roman Cancel - Custom Combo Creator
The Roman Cancel or Rapid Cancel as it is called in BlazBlue is a game system that allows players to immediately stop any action that hits the enemy and allow all normal movement options again. Both games use this mechanic to allow players to create specialized combos and unique actions that couldn't otherwise be created. This action costs 50% of a player's super meter (Guilty Gear has a special version of the roman cancel that costs 25%) and so the resulting action generally needs to be worth the amount of damage a super move would do, since those cost the same amount. It's another type of tradeoff that gives the player some new options.

Recovery - Avoiding Followups
This is actually a more common feature of fighting games than the last few, but I thought it was worth mentioning because of the way that BlazBlue handles it. If the player is hit into the air, he can recover by pressing a button and a direction to flip away from a followup attack. In some cases it is advantageous to wait before recovering in case the enemy anticipates your recovery, so it becomes a guessing game that keeps the players engaged as soon as the previous sequence which resulted in the recovery ends. BlazBlue takes it a step further by allowing the player to recover on the ground in different directions. This is actually common in 3D fighting games, although 3D fighting games generally do not include air recovery. Since the player can be hit during ground recovery in BlazBlue at certain points it opens up new combo options and a deeper overall gameplay.

Instant Kills - The Counter-Intuative Mechanic
Both games have the concept of instant kills moves (called Astral Heat in BlazBlue), these are manuvers which kill off your opponent in a flashy way. In Guilty Gear they were ridiculously difficult to do and resulted in the player sacrificing his entire super bar if it missed (which means no supers, perfect guarding, or roman canceling). Also because they were so powerful, most of them were set up to be incredibly slow and almost impossible to connect with. As a result, they were rare and a gimmick at best. BlazBlue's mechanic is a little better in that the Astral Heat moves are a little easier to hit with (at least the ones shown so far) and they do not remove the super bar if they miss. However as a tradeoff this move can only be performed when the enemy is at low health and on the last round. This changes the nature of the move to simply be a flashy finish to the round. It will likely see just as little use as the original Guilty Gear instant kill, due to it being more useful in most circumstances to use the super bar for two normal supers or roman canceling, but because they are no longer as strong, the moves can be made more useful and easier to connect with. Hopefully this will increase their usage.

-----

That's the end of part one. Next time I'll start going of the drive system and some characters.

Labels: arcade games, blazblue, design philosophy, game mechanics

posted by Saikyo at 6:28 PM

Sunday, March 22, 2009

On RPGs...

I'm working on adding the unreleased RPG that I've been working on at Big Huge Games to my resume page in the future, but before I do, I wanted to talk about some of the things I've been learning from working on one.

Now as a bit of background, I mostly played JRPGs before getting into this industry. As a bit of background, the JRPG or Japanese RPG genre is named as such because the majority of titles with this style of design come from Japan. Now there is actually a significant distinction in design between JRPGs and their counterpart Western RPGs, one which I had been aware of before starting this job, but never really took the time to explore until I started working on a Western RPG myself.

The main differnence in design between the two is that Western RPGs are traditionally drawn off of the old Dungeons and Dragons style tabletop RPGs and usually contain a high degree of character customization including having stats such as charisma, strength, or wisdom. Additionally because of this focus on the player being the character in the game, these games traditionally have more than one way to solve a given quest. If the player wants to open a special locked container, he could intimidate the person with the key, steal the key, pick the lock, or even make an acid potion to eat through the lock.

JRPGs on the contrary tend to contain fully developed characters who's stats and abilities automatically grow as the player goes through the game. These types of RPGs traditionally focus more on telling a specific and special story that is tailored to the characters given to the player to control. While there is usually some level of customization available it tends to lean more towards the aesthetic or battle influincing changes such as new clothes or a different set of fighting skills.

The difference between the two design styles of the game never really stuck me that strongly until my work on the Big Huge RPG. First of all, because I was working on a western RPG I was asked to play as many of them as I could, so I played some Neverwinter Nights, some Mass Effect and some Fallout 3, all of them well known and well reviewed RPGs. I was still playing some great JRPGs at the same time including Disgaea, Odin Sphere, and Final Fantasy, so there it became easy to compare the two RPG styles. Additionally working with quest designers to implement quests in the game also brought many other things to light that I had not previously considered while playing JRPGs.

Now just to be clear, I like both genres even though I have mostly played JRPGs in the past, I don't intend this post to be a declaration of loyalty to one genre or another, simply a design analysis of what seem to be the strong points of each and the reasons why.

The western RPG system has many positive aspects to it. The most important one that I see is replayabilty. Because there are usually multiple ways to solve any given quest over the course of a given game I found myself wanted to play games like Mass Effect multiple types in order to try more than one solution to the problem. Additionally, because the character customization allowed me to pick from six different classes, each that had a different playstyle I was encouraged to play the game more than once simply for the combat aspect (which I did). In the JRPG genre the solution to extend playtime like this usually comes in the form of a "secret" or "bonus" dungeon that has content much more difficult than the rest of the game which requires some level of grinding to complete. Even though I tend to play more JRPGs it's rare that I bother to play them more than once. The story and events don't change on the second playthrough so it doesn't seem worth it. Even though some of the events in a wester RPG will be the same on the second playthrough there is usually enough different content (usually as a result of the way I'm playing) to keep it interesting for a second time through.

Now this model has some problems as well. In a JRPG the designers know pretty much exactly how things are going to play out in terms of events and dungeon order. There are far less unknowns to deal with in quests as well which means that the designers can focus more on other aspects of the game such as the combat or item systems, or even the cinematic presentation of the levels. Western RPGs have to worry about odd scenarios such as:

- Many western RPGs are free roaming, how do you scale dungeons so the player is not overwhelmed?
- If the player can solve the quest in multiple ways, how does that affect the world and subsequent quest? Each of these scenarios might have to be built.
- How do you balance the different methods of solving problems in the game world? If a player with a high charisma score can talk his way out half the problems in the game, will he be frustrated when he is forced to fight a boss and is not strong enough?

These are all problems in the RPG style that need to be dealt with in addition to the normal tasks such as building the levels, and scripting the main storyline events. As a result of this I tend to feel that JRPGs feel more solid and cohesive overall. There seem to be more bugs and glitches in western RPGs that I've played as well, possibly as a result of the massive variation that can be spawned as a result of trying to create dynamic worlds that can respond to so many player inputs. A final problem with creating so much extra content is that not all players will experience it. While I did play Mass Effect through twice, I'm hard pressed to play it a third time, which means I've only really experienced 1/3 of the combat styles in the game, and I still haven't explored all the solutions to each quest. This happens sometimes in JRPGs as well, but the amount of alternate scenarios and bonus content is far less in general. The designers have to realize that a large chunk of the work they are doing will not ever be experienced by the majority of the player base, even if they play the game more than once.

So all in all, I can't say I have a preference between the two types of RPGs. They each have their own merits and deterimets and it's going to be up to the player which type of experience they prefer. However, as a designer I think it's worthwhile to be aware of these types of differences while working on a game in order to maximize the effectiveness of the experience provided to the player.

Labels: big huge games, design philosophy, RPGs

posted by Saikyo at 9:33 AM

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Back to the Blog

So first off, it's clear that I need to post here more often. There have been a ton of things going on recently that are highly relevant to my design work and thoughts on design.

Now that I've got that out of the way, onto the important stuff:

-----

COLOR OF DOOM WINS AT IGF

Color of Doom ended up as a winner in the 2009 Independent Games Festival Student Showcase. I'm pretty proud of this and I think it shows how much work everyone on our team put into the game. The fact that it won makes me really want to take the whole game concept further. My original concept for the game turned out very different from what our group went with, and while it obviously turned out great, I still feel like I'd like to do something more with the original concept and story.

-----

BLAZBLUE COMING TO THE U.S.

I've been really psyched up about BlazBlue recently. It's a game by the studio that did Guilty Gear and I've been a fan of their games since the first game hit the U.S. in 1998. The new game is an HD 2D fighting game for both the PS3 and XBox 360 with a simultaneous release in Japan and the U.S. on 6/25.

I've been immersing myself in the game system and videos from the arcade version that are populating youtube recently. The game has some great new characters and design systems that give it a fresh look that is both very new and different, but also keeps itself similar enough to Guilty Gear that it's easy to see relations.

This would all be a great thing, except for the part where I don't own a 360 or PS3! I'm still not sure which is better as there are many things going for each console. The 360 has the exclusive Guilty Gear 2: Oveture, but the PS3 has free online play to name a few differences. I still have a few months though, which is great, because with student loans to pay off, I need to save money in order to buy it!

I'll talk more about the game systems in another post.

-----

BIG HUGE... PROBLEM?

So it's been announced on a few websites so far about THQ closing the company I work for if a buyer is not found within a certain timeframe. Due to NDAs and the like I can't say too much about it, but it's definitely something that I think about a lot. Maybe I'll be able to talk a little more about it in the future, but for now all I'll say now is that it's a reminder that the game industry is very volitile and ever-changing.

-----

GDC A LITTLE OUT OF REACH

It makes me sad, but given my current financial outlook I won't be able to make it to GDC this year. Last year going with the Guildhall folks was a blast and I would have loved to have gone this year as well. However given the section right above this one, I felt it was better to opt out in this case. Hopefully my situation next year will be more condusive to going.

-----

There's a lot more to say to catch up for the last two months, and definitely more to say. If anything I feel like I should be updating here more than once a month.

Labels: big huge games, blazblue, color of doom, GDC, guildhall

posted by Saikyo at 5:04 PM