Design Blog

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

BlazBlue: Pushing Design Limitations Part 3

Continuing today with more drives! They just get crazier from here.

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Noel Vermilion - Chain Revolver
Noel's drive is pretty interesting in that it opens up interesting combo chains. Basically by pressing the drive button and different directions you can chain together a certain set of moves. There is one that hits overhead and one that launches and another that switches sides with the opponent. You can do up to 4 or so of them in a row but you're not allowed to do the same one twice in a row. At the end you can even do a finishing move that blows the opponent away! It allows players to mix up interesting combinations of moves all in a single sequence with just one button. This drive isn't quite as radical as some of the others but gives many more interesting options for the player with only a single button.

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Iron Tager - Voltec Battler
Tager's drive ability is basically magnetism. If he hits you with a drive move, you are temporarily magnitized for a duration dependant on the move that he hits you with. Until it wears off ALL of Tager's moves which use the drive button will pull you towards him. Add to this that Tager is BlazBlue's throw character and you've got an amazing departure from the norm. Unlike throw characters from other fighting games who try to get close to the enemy, Tager can also attempt to pull the enemy into him. Tager also has a very fast magnitizing projectile that he can fire for magnitizing enemies who try and play keepaway. This is balanced by the fact that he has to charge it up before firing (or wait a while since it chages slowly by itself). This effectively limits him to being a close range character with the option to occasionally magnitize longer range keepaway characters.

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Taokaka - Dancing Edge
Besides Tao's character design (which I'm a big fan of), she also has a pretty neat drive mechanic. Pressing the drive button plus any direction causes her to launch herself in an attack in that direction. This wouldn't be that unusual except for the amount of range the attack covers which is practically an entire screen length. Additionally she can cancel this drive move from just about any of her normal and special moves as well. The end result is a ridiculous amount of movement control over the whole screen. No other character really comes close to matching her sheer speed and movement options. Speed characters in fighting games aren't that uncommon and like most speed characters, Tao has low damage on her individual hits to make up for her longer combos. Taokaka really breaks conventions when put into practice though. The ability to transition between retreating and attacking with the press of a single button makes for some very flashy combos as well as movement control not common to any other fighting game.

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That's it for this edition, stay tuned for my favorite one next time!

Labels: arcade games, blazblue, game mechanics

posted by Saikyo at 7:08 PM

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Bionic Viking Video

Quick update. I fixed up the Bionic Viking Trailer so that it is now smaller and proportioned correctly. The new video is bigger than the old one despite being smaller in size since the old version had black bars on the tops and sides which I removed.

BIONIC VIKING! BIONIC VIKING!

Labels: update

posted by Saikyo at 2:25 PM

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Video Update

Got some new videos up today. Dead-end Freeman: Reload now has a walkthrough video. It's a fair amount larger than the others, since this map is bigger so be careful if you have a slow connection.

I also uploaded higher quality videos for all of the maps on the Big Huge Games RPG I was working on. A bit of explanation is necessary here for these videos since they are not simply higher quality videos of the small flash movies but entirely different videos of the same dungeons. I lost the higher quality versions of the small flash videos when my hard drive crashed. Since I'm not really working there anymore I had to ask someone else to take videos for me. This may result in the videos being a little jarring or fast because they had to be flythroughs. Hopefully you won't have too many problems with them.

That's it for now, gotta get back to this design test...

Labels: big huge games, update

posted by Saikyo at 8:12 PM

Friday, April 17, 2009

BlazBlue: Pushing Design Limitations Part 2

The job hunt is going about as well as can be expected and I've got my first design test to work on now. In the meantime I thought I'd continue my discussion of BlazBlue and the original game mechanics it introduces to the fighting game genre. Today is a discussion of the "Drive" system and the start of the individual character analysis.

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The Drive System

The button scheme for this game consists of 3 attack buttons of varying strength plus a 4th button called the Drive button. Now the first part isn't very unusual. Many fighting games have 3 or more attack buttons, but 3 is about the bare minimum that most games get away with currently (although Virtua Fighter only has punch and kick). Of course the problem with having less buttons is that you have to use additional button combinations and direction/button combinations to get more moves. So based on the ratio of actions the character can perform the amount of complex interactions can change.

I'm getting a little off topic here, so getting back to the drive system, the 4th button in BlazBlue is used for character specific actions. I believe in an interview someone related to the game mentioned that it is the button "that makes your character do something cool". It's an interesting button because the effect of it varies wildly percharacter. For some characters it is a separate attack, but for others it is an entirely separate mode or action that interacts with attacks. The result of this drive system is that every character has one ability that wildly differentiates them from the other characters beyond the simple special move properties common to most games.

Additionally behind each of the drive systems is a completely unique mechanic that none of the other characters really have. Some drives can be used an unlimited amount of times while others have special meters. Additionally the applications of each one are different, some have multiple moves associated with them while others only have a few.

The drive system is the crux of why I'm really attracted to this game. It screams original design and feels like a huge stretch beyond just simply giving each character a different theme. It sets them apart on an entire game mechanic level and I imagine it was incredibly difficult to balance as a result of that.

I seem to have written a lot there so I'll just do a few characters this time

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Ragna the Bloodedge
Drive - Soul Eater
Ragna is the main character and his drive allows him to steal health from the enemy. For him the drive button acts as a separate attack button. Each attack that hits using this button drains a small portion of health fromm the enemy. I found this to be a really crazy idea for a fighting game when I first heard about it. Generally ways to heal are rare in fighting games since the matches are decided based on who loses all their health first. Any way to heal is generally very difficult to pull off or has very small rewards. (In awkward contrast suicide style moves which drain the player's health tend to be much more common.) The fact that only Ragna has these types of attacks is a pretty bold move on the designer's part, since this kind of ability is one that can easily be either too powerful or too weak to be useful. So far tournament play from arcades seem to suggest that it was balanced fairly well. The drive attacks steal life and Ragna was created with lower than average health and an offensive oriented playstyle to compensate.

As a final twist Ragna also has a special mode called Blood Kain that causes him to actively lose health gradually while increasting the amount of health that his lifestealing takes. It's an interesting tradeoff though from what I've seen most players find it to be too risky to bother using.

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Jin Kisaragi
Drivce - Frostbite
Jin's drive as the name implies freezes the enemy. It's similar to Ragna in that it is done in the form of an attack and can be used indefinitely without penalty. Freezing in fact has been done before in some other fighting games and I think it's tends to fill the role of stuns in other games. Jin's is no exception, but the number of freezing attacks he has in comparison to other games seems to be much higher, but is balanced by the fact that two freezing attacks in a row will not freeze in succession.

Now as I said the actual freeze mechanic has been done before, but where it gets interesting is how its combined with another mechanic common to games. I guess I'll call it the EX mechanic. Certain special attacks, when performed with the drive button drain 25% of the player's super gauge in order to launch a more powerful or upgraded version of the attack. In addition to the freezing mechanic, this gives players a many more moves to work with when playing Jin and allow them to plan effective strategies through the use of their super bar (since the bar is also used for the roman cancel and super move).

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That's all for now, I've gotta get back to design tests and applications. I will eventually finish this segment though so stay tuned.

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

posted by Saikyo at 12:01 PM

Monday, April 13, 2009

Quick Update

So it looks like my external drive is pretty much done. I still can't believe the horrible timing of it breaking, but I'm working on getting some new videos to replace them. They won't be the same ones unfortunately, but they should at least be the same dungeon. Not sure when I'll be able to get them, but at least I should be able to get some higher quality videos at some point.

I've also been contemplating changing a few things about the website. It's been a while since I graduated from the Guildhall and I'm not sure it's clear yet from the way the front page looks. The Team Projects section seems a little vague too, I'm considering renaming it to something else.

I haven't forgotten about the BlazBlue stuff, job hunting has just been taking up a lot of my time recently. I try and hit another section of it this week.

I'm also thinking I should start another personal project but I'm not quite sure what just yet.

Labels: blazblue, guildhall, job, side projects

posted by Saikyo at 4:07 PM

Monday, April 6, 2009

Big Huge Update, Murphy's Law

I've uploaded some big changes to the Team Projects section with the addition of the Big Huge Games RPG. This section was so big it needed a separate page to hold it all. Several videos and a lot of cool screenshots are included.

Murphy's Law seems to have struck today as I was planning a larger update only to have my external hard drive abruptly stop working before I could upload the higher quality videos. I did move the high quality image sets to another computer before it died, but I only have the lower quality flash videos available right now. I'm looking into getting the data recovered but it might be too expensive for me to afford depending on the damage. I'll try to get them uploaded at a later date, but that's only if I can recover them at all.

There were also some minor fixes to the CSS scripting and to the front page although I doubt too many people really pay much attention to those things.

Labels: big huge games, update

posted by Saikyo at 8:53 PM

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Resume Updated

Did a quick update to the resume section of the site to reflect my work at Big Huge Games as well as a LinkedIn profile link. I was planning a larger update with some images of the stuff I've been working on, but I'm having to double check some procedures to make sure I'm not breaking any rules.

I'm trying to get this resolved as quickly as possible, hopefully I can add the new stuff in a few days.

Labels: big huge games, job, resume, update

posted by Saikyo at 2:04 PM