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

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

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.

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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.

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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

Monday, October 20, 2008

First Day / Design Thoughts

My first day of work at Big Huge Games just completed and I came off with the impression that this job will be pretty fun. I'm still learning a lot of things about the game (not that I could really say much about it on a public blog due to NDA) and I'm looking forward to working on it. Unfortunately I got very little sleep the night before due to my air mattress getting a hole in it and me spending half the night trying to find, and then fix it. Sometimes I feel like have very awkward luck.

I had a conversation with my lead near the end of the day that I wanted to expand on a bit. It comes from the idea about making games easier for players to complete. In general I think that games (with the exception of a lot of MMOs and the notable Ninja Gaiden series) have been lowering the difficulty scale so that it becomes accessible to more people.

Back in the day of the arcade, games were made difficult on purpose to get the player to keep shelling out more quarters, but the idea that was presented here was that nowadays when a player buys a game he is giving the designer all his quarters up front. So he's entitled to beat the game.

... Honestly I don't agree with this.

Now I understand that yes the player is paying money for the experience and entertainment of playing the game. Further, if the game is too difficult for them and they cannot complete it, there is a chance that they will feel that they didn't get their money's worth.

I look at it a little differently though. First of all I don't think that purchasing a game should entitle the player to experience 100% of it. Certainly 100% of the game should be available to the player, but to believe that the game designers should try and please every player is absurd. If you pay to watch a movie and then don't like it, you can't get your money back, if you buy a basketball court that doesn't mean you can suddenly become an NBA player and putting money into a slot machine sure as heck doesn't mean you're gonna get a jackpot. In the end though, people still enjoy movies, basketball and gambling.

I believe that part of being a game designer is being able to anticipate the needs of the player, and that good design is one that takes a challenging, but not adversarial relationship with the player. (I'll talk about YANPA in my next blog entry.) The designer shouldn't be a person who tries to frustrate or foil the player, but I don't think that he should be a person that sacrifices the challenge that defines video games for the sake of reaching a few extra people.

Labels: arcade games, big huge games, design philosophy, entitlement, YANPA

posted by Saikyo at 4:58 PM