Combat Design – Page 3 – Parry Everything

If Your Game Needs a ‘Skip Animations’ Button It’s Too Slow

I notice a lot of people turn off battle animations in Pokémon games. It’s kind of wild this is even something they considered right? I mean it makes sense on the surface, RPGs like Pokémon can be time consuming and people often play it on the go, or lead busy lives. But let’s take a step back here. We’re streamlining by cutting out the battles? Isn’t that, like, most of the actual game of Pokémon? To be clear I don’t think people are wrong to utilize this feature, I use it too. But why has it come to this? Why does the central gameplay mode of Pokémon have to be so time consuming it becomes tedious to the point of cutting its art assets out of the equation? I think this is really something happening within the game itself – if your game needs a ‘skip animations’ option to be playable by enough people to warrant the existence of a ‘skip animations’ option, well, the title’s right there. Options aren’t bad. It’s not that the option is there that bothers me, it’s that so many people, myself included, feel compelled to use it. Perhaps there’s a greater issue here. Pokémon games’ combat is turn-based. The player can take all the time they need to formulate a strategy each turn, but once their choice is locked in, the battle plays out before them. They aren’t directly participating so there’s no stress or pressure on the player tied in with the speed of the game… unless waiting long periods of time stresses you out.

I want to head this all off with some proposed solutions to the problem I’m about to describe in greater detail. I don’t want to come off as overly negative, but rather constructive. I love Pokémon dearly, but I feel as though it has at times struggled to meet the expectations of its own success. Personally I feel as though it is showing its age now more than ever in a number of departments. There are techniques that have been employed by Pokémon‘s contemporaries that allow combat, even turn-based combat, to be very breezy and flow seamlessly. One of my favorites is one employed by the popular Persona series of RPGs, a franchise that, lord knows, started out as a slooooow and ponderous combat experience in 1996. Lessons were learned from this, though, and by 2008, Persona 4 was establishing one of the smoothest and most appealing turn-based combat systems in the business, an advantage that would serve the explosively popular Persona 5 well eight years later.

A gray-haired Japanese high school student stands in a dreamlike space resembling both a castle and TV set, with a distorted background.

Several monsters resembling giant mouths stand before him. He crushes a crush in his hand and an ethereal samurai warrior appears before him. The warrior shoots a bolt of lightning at one of the monsters.

This scene plays out a second time, except the samurai appears much more quickly and the lightning attack resolves faster. — The saved time doesn’t seem like much, but it adds up over a full length game!

In Persona 4, whenever the player uses the same move on multiple turns in succession, the animation for that move is sped up, and the action is truncated. The player just saw this animation in its entirety seconds earlier, after all, there’s no need to run it into the ground. This simple consideration drastically eases the repetitiveness of spamming the same move in turn-based combat, something you might find yourself doing often in Pokémon. In Yakuza: Like a Dragon, when an attack fails to connect with a character, the information is conveyed visually and the action transitions very rapidly to the next step of the turn. The word ‘MISS’ is barely on screen for a second, as the game does not dwell on and minor things. I’m sure I can think of more, but techniques for keeping turn-based combat flow smoothly aside, Pokémon just really has a problem with the structure of its attack animations in general. To be clear, I mean the special effects like lightning that occurs when a move is used, not the motion of the pocket monsters themselves, though that’s its own can of worms. They just tend to be far too long, and often could communicate the same level of awe, excitement, dread, or wonder in half the time or less.

Several men and women are brawling an ubran Japanese market street. A thug takes a swing with a knife at a man in a red suit, but he stage-falls onto his back, dodging the attack. A second thug takes a swing with a baseball bat at a woman, but she backpedals and the attack misses. — What the attack missed? Okaythatscool moving on.

It occurred to me while watching The Pokémon Company’s recent animated short Bidoof’s Big Stand with a friend. How striking and appealing the (admittedly truncated) battle scenes were in this 3D animation! So much character and charm. Compare this animation for the move ‘earthquake’ in 2016’s Pokémon Sun and Moon to the same move in Bidoof’s Big Stand.

The pokémon Rhydon, a bipedal rhino made of stone roars, and the ground turns to brown cracked stone which rumbles and moves up and down. Several seconds later the rhydon's opponent, the pokémon magmortar which resembles a large, round bipedal dinosaur made of flames, flinches from the attack. — Roughly *five* seconds start to finish

The pokémon golem, resembling a bipedal lizard with a round boulder for a torso, stomps the ground with one foot, and jagged rocks jut from the ground as fiery cracks appear in the earth. The pokémon bidoof, a small beaver, then runs across the cracked earth and spins around the golem. — Roughly *five* seconds start to finish

It’s not perfect. The earthquake move in Bidoof’s Big Stand for one could probably communicate a bit more force and impact before I’d ship it in a game, but that could be accomplished without inflating its screen time, easily. The fighting in the animated short exaggerates its action in ways Pokémon games probably never could given that their battle animations must be generic and prefabricated to be used by hundreds of interchangeable creatures, but I must insist that Pokémon as a game franchise can get closer to this level of dynamism and flow. It could be as simple as a baseline speed pass for each battle animation. Maybe earthquake doesn’t need to be on screen for a full five seconds. Maybe thunder doesn’t need as much anticipation as it’s getting. Maybe the transitions between turns could be faster. Game animation has a lot of conventions of minimizing anticipation and downtime, making visuals as reactive and instant as possible, and this is for good reason. The benefits extend to all sorts of interactive systems, not just action-y or real-time ones.

In a desert environment, Mario throws his cap at a goomba, a brown mushroom monster. As his hat lands on the goomba's head, mario becomes ethereal and zooms into the goomba's form, 'capturing' it. This takes place over the course of 1.5 seconds.

A similar scene plays out as mario 'captures' a bipedal turtle and an anthropomorphic bullet. — Games have been condensing exciting visual effects into smooth, seamless transitions for decades. Mario’s ‘capture’ visuals looks just as impressive as any five-second-long pokémon move, easily.

The difference in timing between the in-game earthquake and Bidoof’s Big Stand is staggering to me. I feel as though the Bidoof’s Big Stand earthquake communicates the idea of an ‘earthquake’ just as well, if not better, than its in-game counterpart, in less than half the time! A difference of three seconds might not sound much on paper, but bear in mind that in a pokémon game, you’ll be seeing moves like this, on average, about six times per battle, at minimum. Small increments in moment-to-moment gameplay like this matter. More likely you’ll see moves like this play out repetitively dozens of times per battle, over the course of hundreds of battles that take place in your standard Pokémon game. Arceus help you if we count all the redundant narration about status and field effects that pauses the battle to re-explain itself every turn. This is so much dead air to add to a game, it’s no wonder Pokémon‘s ‘skip battle animations’ feature has become so popular. And why shouldn’t it? I know I use it. I mean, I want to enjoy Pokémon‘s battle animations, many of them are genuinely a joy to watch, but I can usually really only muscle through a chunk of the game before turning them off for long periods of time. They just hamper the flow of the game too much for me.

I believe that games are greater than the sum of their parts. Games can have great music, great writing, great animations, or even great gameplay, but it is only in the confluence of these things, in varying balances, that the true strength of games as a medium comes out. I hate having to skip Pokémon‘s battle animations to avoid feeling burnout. I want the game’s various bits of art to come together beautifully. So, it begs the question, is there something perhaps less essential than the visuals themselves that can be cut out to improve the flow of Pokémon‘s battles?

And that brings us… To the Battle Dialogue.

Pokémon‘s Battle Dialogue is one of many idiosyncrasies Pokémon has brought forward through its many generations. It’s a small window at the bottom of the screen that essentially narrates what’s going on in battle.

A pokémon will take part of an action, this action will resolve completely, and then the Battle Dialogue will narrate it, before any reaction to this move takes place. The result is an incredibly stilted and lifeless visual accompaniment to Pokémon‘s otherwise excellent battle system that so often holds it back. Take the pokémon move ‘self-destruct’ for example. It’s an old classic from the original gameboy Pokémon games. In the following scene, you will witness the literal events of a clay doll monster violently bursting into a fiery explosion, causing its opponent to become so injured it can no longer stand. See how these events are visually translated, in a way that only Pokémon can.

The pokémon claydol, a many-eyed idol-like monster is tackled by its opponent manetric, a yellow and blue canine. The claydol then uses self-destruct, causing an explosion to emanate from its body. Several seconds later, the claydol faints. Several seconds after that, the manetric faints. — What on earth did I just witness.

I hope my point is becoming clearer here. Thanks to the strange reverence held for the Battle Dialogue, which is always given visual priority, there is no sense of real presence to these creatures, no impression of cause and effect. It’s more like the pokémon are pantomiming their moves. Pokémon has, over the years, become more and more attached to the idea of making their collectible monsters and their world feel real and inviting, like a place you could actually visit. Newer Pokémon games have featured Pokémon pet simulator mini-games, wider areas of exploration, and a more complete impression of the world the games take place in. The problems with Pokémon‘s visual presentation, especially in its battles, feels utterly antithetical to this design goal to me. I know there are certainly technical and production limitations that are causing issues like this, but I felt compelled to bring it up anyway as these issues can never be fixed going forward if they aren’t given voice, and moreover perhaps us other developers can learn something from it. It’s a topic I don’t see discussed much among the *ahem* many other popular topics in Pokémon *ahem ahem* discourse.

What if, perhaps, we entertained the idea of eliminating the Battle Dialogue altogether? Now, it isn’t as though it serves no purpose. Pokémon derives much of its success from being friendly to the young and casual as well as appealing to the hardcore and diehard. The Battle Dialogue inarguably conveys information in a clear and unambiguous way, all the while reinforcing the rules of the game through its constant narration, but is it really the best and only solution for accomplishing those things? Surely, at the very least, longtime fans would woefully miss iconic phrases like “It’s super effective!”. Perhaps, but streamlining Pokémon‘s visual information could mean repackaging iconic visuals in new and exciting ways. Perhaps “It’s Super Effective!” could live on as a visual or particle effect itself, not just plain text. Yes, big changes like this may be a hard sell at first, but if Nintendo’s other recent output the likes of Breath of The Wild or Bowser’s Fury has taught me anything, is that nothing need be unassailably sacred, and sometimes fans are just waiting to fall in love with something new, even if they don’t know it yet.

When all’s said and done I don’t think my vision for a faster, breezier version of Pokémon battling is the only ‘right’ choice. But I do think Pokémon could stand to peek at its peers’ homework from time to time and modernize the way it presents itself a bit. Some of the things that greatly harm the pace of Pokémon are entirely inventions of a game designed for an 8-bit calculator of a console. Some of these things I feel the franchise has outgrown entirely, and some could be re-contextualized in a more modern way. There’s some considerations in art direction to be made too that could smooth out some of these rough edges. In this article I proposed removing or rearranging a lot of things, but honestly much of this could still remain optional. I just think it’s emblematic of an issue that could be assuaged through design rather than blunt force, if a lot of people are choosing to turn off the thousands of man-hours that went into making your game look appealing.

The pokémon pikachu, a yellow mouse, shoots lightning into the sky, which roils in the clouds before falling onto pikachu's opponent, a small brown fox-like pokémon called eevee, in a column of lightning.

The same scene plays out again, but this time edited down with bits and pieces of the animation sped up.

It runs agilely as if on wings…

Dota 2’s Dark Willow: Effective Audio-Visual Feedback, and Mechanical Synergy

Dota 2 is a game of the genre MOBA, Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. In simpler terms, it’s a team-based game with a focus on combat and strategy. It’s played from a bird’s eye view, and features a number of colorful fantasy heroes to choose from. Dark Willow, the mischievous, slightly sadistic thieving fairy is my personal favorite, and I wanted to just jot down my thoughts on how effectively her abilities are communicated through audio-visual feedback.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy glides down a pathway.

Text chat:
Someone says "usually pick turbo just to dark willow"

I respond "That was my plan" — “Let’s have some fun, shall we…”

Audio-visual feedback is as it sounds; the fairly basic concept that important information should be communicated to players implicitly through their senses, and that things like affirmations of success or confirmations of failure should be communicated in this way. For example, if a player character swings a sword, that sword swing should make a distinctly different sound whether it misses its target, strikes an enemy, or strikes a wall. It should probably look distinctly different in each of those cases as well.

Dark Willow has five abilities. Bramble Maze allows her to sprout a circle full of equally spaced bramble bushes at a distant location. Enemies will have only a narrow space to squeeze between the brambles, and if they touch one they are rooted to the spot and damaged. Shadow Realm allows Dark Willow to hide in a shadow form, immune to most attacks, then burst out with a powerful shadow attack. The longer she is hiding, the stronger the attack, so long as the ability does not wear off first. Shadow Realm can later be upgraded to fire a barrage of shadow attacks. Cursed Crown is a curse Dark Willow places on a target, causing it and nearby allies to be stunned exactly four seconds after the curse is cast. Bedlam causes Dark Willow’s wisp minion to orbit her, firing destructive magic at nearby enemies. Terrorize projects the wisp to a distant location, causing any enemies at that location to be terrified and sent running toward their base.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A number of heroes do battle in a river. A series of blue concentric circles indicates where a bush full of brambles is about to sprout. When the circles are lined up with enemy heroes, the brambles rise up and capture them. — Here you can see me line up exactly where the brambles should be placed, so I can catch multiple targets, thanks to the handy previsualization UI.

A lot of Dark Willow’s power as a hero comes from the synergy between her various ability mechanics. Bramble maze does a great deal of damage and holds foes in place, but they have to touch the brambles for this to happen. Luckily, Dark Willow has the ability to force enemy movement in the form of Terrorize, clever of use of which can cause enemies to flee in terror into her brambles. Cursed Crown is a strong stun that can disable multiple opponents but only if they are standing together, which is why Terrorize, in conjunction with Bramble Maze, is so effective at sticking enemies together. Dark Willow can dish out immense damage with Bedlam, but only if she gets close, and she is not very durable herself. Luckily, Shadow Realm renders her immune to most dangers, which she can use in conjunction with Bedlam. The fact that Shadow Realm can cap off this combo with a burst of damage is a nice compliment to the more sustained damage of Bedlam, which can be more easily reacted to.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy sneaks up from the trees on a man made of lightning. A bramble sprouts beneath him and captures him. The fairy flies up with her wisp, which tears him apart. — Clever use of synergized game mechanics can make your player very powerful

Because it is so important to coordinate your various abilities together like this, it is essential the player can develop a seamless feel for how the various timings, cast ranges, and nuances of her abilities work, without having to look at a detailed explanation. That’s where audio-visual feedback is essential for making gameplay mechanics like this synergize in an effective way that’s satisfying and fun for the player. Dark Willow’s Shadow Realm is an excellent example of this.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy is surrounded by shadows before a red circle begins to glow around her feet. It becomes more distinct over time. — The red aura around Dark willow becomes more and more distinct as the shadow realm attack becomes ‘ripe’ for unleashing.

First off, Shadow Realm is kind of a complicated ability when you break it down. When its button is pressed, Dark Willow becomes subsumed in shadow and immune to most enemy attacks, which is easy enough to understand. However, during this period Dark Willow is also charging up an attack. This shadow attack reaches the peak of its potency after 3.5 seconds of charging, but the ability itself ends after 5 seconds. So there is a period of 1.5 seconds in which it is optimal to use Shadow Realm’s attack competent. That’s a little unintuitive, or rather it would be if not for the audio and visual considerations. After 3.5 seconds of Shadow Realm, Dark Willow is surrounded by an additional visual effect: a red circular aura that surrounds her and gives the impression of peak power. As soon as Shadow Realm begins, a distinct and almost melodic humming sound begins to emanate from Dark Willow, it gives a sense of building power and changes over time. Its intensity crescendos after exactly, you guessed it, 3.5 seconds. The humming then peters out for the remaining 1.5 seconds, giving a strong impression of when the attack should be dealt.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy becomes surrounding in shadows as a wizard is caught in a bramble patch. A wisp flies around the fairy and attacks the wizard, before the fairy throws her own projectile, but it fails to kill the wizard. — Here, I crucially missed the shadow realm cue, and my attack fails to kill my target. Entirely my own misplay, but emphasizes the importance of those cues.

This sort of feedback is also helpful for those opposing Dark Willow. Without having to count, any player can get a pretty good idea of when Dark Willow is most likely to release her shadow attack. Giving easy access to this sort of information is conducive to a healthy competitive game, allowing complex strategies to form. Knowing what your opponent is capable of, if not necessarily what they intend to do, you can act and react to game events as they occur. Acting and reacting is the core of competitive gameplay. If each player doesn’t have the right information to available for them to utilize, there is no counterplay, there is no game.

Curse Crown is a very interesting example of this concept. It counts down, loudly and with a visual timer represented by four icons for each of the four seconds in the countdown, but this countdown is a strategic benefit to both Dark Willow and her victim. The victim will know that standing near allies when the countdown pops means putting those allies in danger. Dark Willow will be eagerly awaiting for her victim to become stunned and helpless, so she can unleash her most powerful offense. The strong visual feedback makes for a better experience for both the victim and user of the spell. By giving both parties this important information as a readily apparent graphic and audio cue, they can both formulate plans to deal with the respective obstacles to their goals, which is itself the fun of the game.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy sends a wisp out to scare a giant lizard man, who flees in terror. Where the lizard man stood, a zombie comes back to life, and chases the lizard man together with the fairy. — With terrorize, enemies are driven off of my allies, and with shadow realm, I can further pursue and subdue them.

As the victim is stunned, Dark Willow may try to line up a Bramble Maze on them, to further damage and disable them. Typically, you’d want to place the brambles in the enemy’s path, so they move into the bush themselves. If they are stuck in place though, one can carefully line up the bramble to appear beneath your target’s feet, thanks to a convenient target-preview interface that will shadow the Dark Willow player where exactly they brambles are going to appear. For the opponent’s part, the brambles are distinctly shaped, leaving little ambiguity as to where it is and is not safe to walk.

As you may have gleaned, Dota 2 can become fairly visually loud, with ten individual heroes all throwing out impressive and explosive spells like this. That’s why it’s so important to keep a distinct visual not only for each ability, but a distinct visual style for each hero as well. It should be unambiguous when it is Dark Willow in particular using her spells, so that enemies and allies have a fair amount of information with which to react. Dark willow’s visual effects are uniformly composed of dark violets and maroons, evocative of shadowy undergrowth and wild flowers, which is also thematically relevant to her character as a dark fairy. Big and important abilities that can completely shift the tide of battle, such as Terrorize, tend to be louder and more immediately noticeable, in proportion to their power.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A large number of heroes do battle. A fairy throws increasingly powerful projectiles at a lightning man. When the lightning man falls, a friendly zombie is frozen in ice, and his allies are forced to attack him. This ends when a fairy sends her wisp to terrorize nearby enemies. Afterward, the fairy turns to throw her projectiles at a fleeing wizard. — In an extended battle, there’s LOTS to keep track of, so knowing the visual and audio cues becomes an essential skill. It’s better to make that learning curve as painless as possible. It may be hard to track Dark Willow in all this mess at first, but look out for her midnight color scheme.

Audio-Visual Feedback is one of those things you really have to nail, if you’re game’s to be any good, honestly. If a lot of important information is moving around in your game and it doesn’t reach the player in a prompt and unintrustive way, it can severely hamper the experience. Dota 2 is pretty good at it, considering all the challenges of keeping things clear and readable that comes with the MOBA genre. Dark Willow is a particularly strong example, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons I was drawn to her and her playstyle.

The aftermath of a green explosion in an open plain is overlaid with the words 'Radiant Victory'. In response to someone asking 'why did you mid' I respond 'so wed win, like this', to which someone responds 'like milk'.

A scoreboard follows.

You thought you were winnin’?

Let The Player Break The Game Already; Inscryption, Isaac, and Others

While on break for the holidays I found myself finally taking a look at a little indie card battler game I’d heard much about. Daniel Mullins’ Inscryption is a 2021 roguelike card battler in which you build a bestial-themed deck of cards to traverse a table-top adventure scenario game-mastered by a mysterious shadowy card dealer, who seems to be keeping you in a spooky woodland cabin. You may have heard the game is rife with compelling mystery and secrets, and it is, so rest assured I won’t be spoiling anything about the game, merely talking about its combat mechanics sans any story context.

A stone altar is placed on a wooden table immersed in shadow. A set of cards featuring the likeness of beasts is lined up before the altar. A card with a cat is sacrificed on the altar and disappears, but a stoat card is granted the cat's sigil, a special power in the form of an infinity sign on a dagger. — Yeah, you look very honored.

Specifically I want to talk about this concept of ‘breaking the game’, or employing a strategy so overwhelmingly power it almost seems to throw off the difficulty balance. Here’s the thing though, well-designed games like Inscryption and The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth want to create this feeling in the player of overwhelming power, which is why they tend to be so brutally difficult at the start. Roguelike games, by their nature, are games designed with the players’ repeated failure in mind, and thus repeated replaying. With each of those failures, generally, new inherent advantages are collected, as well as new knowledge of the game. By game’s end, the player will have accrued a large number of mechanical advantages and game knowledge, allowing them to plow through challenges that once seemed insurmountable. The game designer’s fear of the ‘Dominant Strategy’ is the trivialization of their game mechanics.

Isaac from The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth runs around a burning basement. A purple ring of laser beam moves around the room, contorting and destroying nearby enemy spiders. — This is a combination of three rare items

Isaac from The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth runs around a dingy basement. A purple ring of laser beam moves around the room, contorting and destroying nearby enemies. — This is a combination of three rare items

What’s clever about a lot of the more popular roguelikes, is that they leverage powerful strategies as a way to engage the player with their systems. Knowing exactly what the most reliable and powerful combinations of weapons and items in The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth takes time, effort, and exploration, so by the time you’ve ‘broken the game’ so to speak, you’ve already gone through a lot of the game’s interest curve just getting there, and a well balanced game can tilt that power scale back at you. Often in the roguelike Hades I’ve found myself achieving a combo that can absolutely demolish early content, but I’m then brick walled by later enemies, and have to change up my approach, keeping the game dynamic and interesting. These games make the opposition an overwhelming obstacle, so that overwhelming power is not only incentivized in the player, but almost demanded.

I’m tending more and more towards designing the opposition in a combat game to be more powerful, rather than limiting the powers and options of the player. Finding wacky solutions to the problem of ridiculously deadly enemies is fun! Isaac allows you to reach such absurd levels of power that it’s comical, and yet Isaac is so vindictively engaging. Every time I fail in that game I’m just reminded of how much I want to taste that overwhelming power again, I think about all the little ways I could combine and recombine the disastrously large number of powerups existent in Isaac, and I dive right back in. The same is the case for competitive games with deckbuilding elements such as Dota 2‘s Ability Draft, in which one drafts the ability for their player hero from a pool of powers that don’t normally go together in Dota 2‘s base game modes, but can combine to create some ridiculous effects. The possibilities are just so tantalizing, because the designers went out of their way to insure the various elements all meshed with each other in interesting ways, without much need for exceptions or limitation. Dota 2 also has its own roguelike mode that utilizes design sensibilities as I’ve described. Enemies are monstrous, lethal, and oppressive, but clever power up allocation can render what once seemed impossible, routine, and it’s an exciting climb to that point.

A child cries stylized tears that shoot from his body like bullets in a dingy basement. The tears spray out in a shotgun pattern. — Just a couple shot upgrade items..

A child cries stylized tears in a burning basement that shoot out from his body like bullets. The tears are orange, and split into smaller bullets on contact with anything, then those split bullets split again on contact. — Just a couple shot upgrade items..

No matter how overwhelmingly powerful one might become in these games, the games generally stay extremely lethal throughout. That is, even if you can crush your opposition with a flick of the wrist, a couple mistakes may still lead to a loss, especially later in the game. Pulling a bad hand in Inscryption, all of your overpowered cards aside, can still be disastrous if you don’t have a plan to stall the game until you can pull your winning cards. This is a pattern games which employ the concept well have in common – their core gameplay is still reinforced even as the player becomes ‘overpowered’. In Hades and Isaac, you still have to be able to dodge attacks, or you’ll most likely be toast very quickly. In Dota‘s Ability Draft, you still need to have a feel for the game to make the advantageous plays. In Inscryption, you still need to think through your strategy in case of unfavorable scenarios, as described above.

The key is to make things dramatic. The game can quickly swing in either direction based on the player’s performance, and if the player ultimately becomes an unstoppable force, it should be as a reward for a good performance, and therefor not feel cheap. The rug can still be pulled out from under you if you underestimate opposition that is designed to itself be powerful, and lethal. Inscryption‘s particular health system resembles other card battlers, but takes the form of a scale, so the winner is determined by who has dealt more damage as weighted by a literal scale, and the threshold of victory is not much. So in other words, even with your most powerful cards, things can swing quickly. If the purpose of combat in a game is to be an easy vector by which to create conflict for the player to overcome, and the purpose of conflict in a narrative sense is to be dramatic, then combat should be dramatic. I’m personally pretty tapped out when it comes to power ups the likes of “Increases critical strike chance by 0.5%”. Sure, such things have their place, but I think I’m over entire skill trees and player progression systems being centered on the low-numbered variety of powerups. They’re often barely noticeable in practice, even if they add up over time. When a player gets a new card, or a new weapon, it should dramatically shift the balance of power, or change how the game is approached. Really play up that drama. Otherwise, what’s the point of the new element even being added?

In dark cabin a rustic card game is set up on a wooden table, seen from first-person perspective. The player attacks with two cards marked 'wolf' and 'stoat', causing teeth to be loaded on the opponent's end of a scale. The opponent attacks with their own wolf in kind, and the scale swings back toward the player. — Danger in this game is swift and intense, but it swings both ways

Inscryption embodies this philosophy with how its death cards and sacrificial altars work. Death cards are essentially custom cards, created by the player, utilizing elements of their own deck to combine into one card. The player is given a random assortment of cards from their deck, from which they can choose one card’s play cost, one card’s power and health, and one card’s special effects aka sigils. The result is more often than not something far and away more powerful than what can be normally obtained. The sacrificial altars are similar, allowing you to sacrifice one card to permanently transfer its sigils to another, making a powerful card. This system greatly rewards understanding of the game’s mechanic, and is inherently explorative in nature. Player’s are invited to use the game mechanics as a form of personal experession, so they can leave their own mark (in this case literally, as you can also name the card) on the game. A personal favorite of mine was a card with a medium level of power and health, but no play cost, the ability to attack three times, and the ability to return to my hand when killed on the play field. I called him ‘The Immortal Mantis’. Needless to say, getting this card into play was a reliable way to end matches in my favor. And yet, I never felt as though I was cheating the game, or robbing myself of a more compelling and challenging play experience, because Inscryption like Hades, like Isaac, like enemy players in Dota‘s Ability Draft, and like many other roguelikes, because it took a lot of effort on my part to make this power happen. Either effortful forethought, or playing through a challenging game with little power to start, or both. My ability to swiftly end combat encounters feels earned, and misplays can still lead to a loss by virtue of how lethal a game Inscryption is.

From a first person perspective, a map is unrolled on a rustic wooden table, along with a board game figurine. The figurine lands on a card icon, and three cards are dealt in the map's place. One card features a silhouetted figure and the name... Explodia — Ahh yes. Explodia, the Foreboden one.

A stone altar is placed on a rustic wooden table. Several cards are lined up along it, and two are selected. One is sacrificed and disappears to empower the other, Explodia — Ahh yes. Explodia, the Foreboden one.

I think making the player ‘too powerful’ is more a question of how you design their environment, or high you contextualize that power, than it is something to be altogether avoided. Inscryption is one of the most compelling play experiences I’ve had this year, all other advantages it has such as its narrative and world-class aesthetic presentation aside. Inscryption certainly allows you to become ‘too powerful’! Power in a combat game often means a wide breadth of possibilities, and that power can translate directly into a sense of ownership of, and self expression within the game mechanics. There are many ways to ‘break’ Inscryption and Isaac and Hades, but no two players are likely to do it in exactly the same way.

In dark cabin a rustic card game is set up on a wooden table, seen from first-person perspective. The player draws a card featuring a silhouetted figure with the name... Explodia — This card right here is dopamine, in auido-visual format

In that fashion, ‘breaking’ the game, is the game. Outmaneuvering and outwitting your opposition is the essence of conflict. Building systems where breaking free from their perceived constraints is the point of those systems seems somewhat counterintuitive, but I think the continued explosive success of the roguelike genre, especially in regards to games that operate this way, speaks for itself. There is a market for this specific flavor of power fantasy, and there are ways to give the player that overwhelming power without trivializing the game.

Sacrifices must be made…

How To Fight Things in Three Dimensions: Zelda’s Z-Targeting

Can’t believe I haven’t done one of these on this topic yet. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time is rightfully revered for how it set the tone for what action and adventure games could be in what was the relatively new frontier of polygonal 3D games in 1998. Moving to 3D comes with a whole host of problems, though, especially when it comes to active combat. Our real three dimensional space is very complicated, and abstracting that to a computer program can have some disorienting results if not done with care. One of Zelda‘s most notable contributions to the craft, I think is the Z-Targeting system. “Z-Targeting” is the name for Ocarina of Time‘s 3D targeting system which would let the player focus the game camera’s attention on a single point of interest by tapping the “Z” button. It gets plenty of mention, but honestly I feel like sometimes this one innovation doesn’t get praised enough. It kind of set the standard for how real-time gameplay involving two moving bodies works even to this day. There are also a lot of little things that helped this first iteration of a 3D targeting system work remarkably well, despite its age.

Child Link (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) strafes to the left and right while a targeting crosshair focuses on a rock in a grassy forest. The rock remains center-camera, while Link shifts to either side of the camera. — The rock was very patient with me during the filming of this clip.

Notice in the image above how the camera smoothly and automatically situates Link to one side. You may have heard of the rule of thirds, an stylistic concept in art for generating compelling composition. By dividing an image into thirds and placing the subject of your art into the first or last of those thirds helps emphasize their importance, and draws the eye. It also frames the remaining, more open two thirds as a point of interest to the subject, a place they might be looking or going. Link is the subject in this scenario, and the camera essentially enforces the rules of thirds while Z-target is active. It’s not only very aesthetically pleasing, and helps draw the player into the drama of a good sword fight, but it’s very functional. But ensuring Link and the target occupy opposite ends of the screen, then it becomes very rare that Link himself will obscure his target from the player sitting on their couch. In this way essential information conveyed by your target, like an incoming attack, isn’t accidentally hidden from the player. This diagonal framing also helps keep the spacial relationship between Link and his target clear and unambiguous, which as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is essential to satisfying combat.

This mechanic of making Link’s position relative to his target unambiguous is very strictly upheld. The camera will eagerly clip into walls to ensure the target remains properly framed, but this isn’t a problem as obscuring geometry will often not be rendered, so the camera’s over-commitment to framing is actually an advantage. It’s very intuitive. In an interview with the game’s general director, Toru Osawa, it was said that the system was inspired by a ninja and samurai themed performance. A ninja attacked with a sickle on a chain which was caught by the samurai. The ninja moved in a circle around his opponent as the chain connecting them was pulled tight. It seems drawing an invisible and unbreakable line between two entities helped the developers visualize how this new system would work. Link will always circle around his target in-game, and inputs on the controller are changed during a Z-target to reference the subject of the target. Moving Link “Left” means he will move clockwise around his target. “Right” means he will move counterclockwise around his target. It is as if Link is moving on a 2D plane, but bent and wrapped around the target. This abstraction expands into a rather robust system.

Child Link (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) sidles up to a wall while a targeting crosshair focuses on a giant spider. The camera moved through the nearby wall, but the wall fades from view as this happens, allowing Link to see the spider's underside, which he shoots with his slingshot. — With the spider conveniently framed by the camera, even through this wall, Link is able to sneak a shot in to hit its vulnerable underside.

Another thing I noticed while playing Ocarina of Time recently is how movement during Z-targeting relates to the input of the gamepad controller. I’ll give you an example. While a Z-target is active, Link can do a quick side-step or back flip to avoid enemies. Holding the control stick back, toward yourself, when you press the action button will initiate a back flip. Holding the control stick to the left or right will initiate a side-step when the action button is pressed. So it seems the game is tracking Link’s relative facing direction to the camera for the purposes of his evasive jumps. If Link is facing perpendicular to the camera, or in other words, if his shoulder line forms a right angle with the plane of the game screen, then a “right” or “left” input on the control stick is considered “back” for the purposes of evasion. You can see this illustrated below:

Child Link (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) hops to the side repeatedly in a naturalistic wooden interior. A targeting crosshair focuses on a giant cyclopic bug. When Link is almost side-on to the camera, he does a back flip. — During this clip, I am holding only the “right” direction, but Link eventually back flips anyway.

In this above clip, I am holding “right” on the control stick throughout. Once Link’s angle to the camera becomes too extreme, he no longer side-steps, and instead back flips. However, Link’s stride never changes. “Right” on the control stick is always considered to be Link’s right, relative to his current standing position, for the purposes of calculating what direction Link should be running. I can imagine a couple of reasons this might be. Changing Link’s continuous move direction on a dime would be very disorienting for the player. Link’s stride is not really changing in the previous clip, only the player’s angle of observation, so it’s unintuitive to think that a change in input is required to keep that stride in any scenario. The evasive jumps, however, are discreet units of movement and thus are not jarring when their operation changes based on camera position. Further, if Link were to side-step while side-on to the camera, it would be difficult to tell if he had done much of anything. By changing it to a back flip, the feedback of Link making an evasive move is maintained.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, being the first 3D Zelda game, obviously utilizes its verticality in ways that previous Zelda games could not. Zelda is a series well known for an arsenal of unique weapons and tools for solving puzzles and dispatching enemies. Iconic tools like the boomerang and hero’s bow are very compelling. It would have been a drastic admission of defeat to not translate such things into the first 3D Zelda. They have some hefty inherent problems, though. Control sticks are, frankly, not best suited for precision pinpoint aiming compared to a computer mouse, a gyroscope, or a photonic motion sensor. Ocarina of Time still offers the option of manually aiming projectiles through a first-person perspective, which is convenient for solving puzzles, but not ideal for most combat encounters. The Z-Targeting system rather elegantly solved this problem as well. The drawback is that the player doesn’t do much aiming at all when utilizing their bow and arrow in combat, which could be argued as part of the skill set of playing the old Zelda games, but in trade Ocarina gets the advantage of keeping airborne enemies in focus and keeping the use of projectiles in combat practical. Zelda combat is typically more about understanding the best tool for the job than skillful execution anyway, so I think it was a savvy decision to enable ranged combat in this way.

Child Link (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) shoots a strange giant egg off of a ceiling, in a naturalistic wooden interior, using his slingshot. He then stabs a nearby giant bug with his sword, then shoots it as it runs away. — There was an intent focus in this game on making your tools practical and functional, even if they’re not always the most complex or involved.

So many modern games utilize an automated camera or targeting system that can be traced directly back to Z-targeting, so I felt it deserved its own appreciation post here. The mechanic is unintrusive, fit-for-purpose, artistically sound, and practically seamless. It even has its own little diegetic explanation of your partner fairy, Navi acting as the source of your target’s focus. You might notice her dancing around targeted enemies in the clips I’ve provided. Helps reinforce her as an important partner to Link, even in spite of her infamous chattiness. Honestly, after looking into it, there are some features that even some modern targeting systems don’t do as well as Ocarina of Time. There have been perhaps more elegant, more robust, and even more interesting targeting systems since, but it’s absolutely astounding how much Zelda nailed it on its first try, and set the stage for the iteration of 3D navigation for many years to come.

Child Link (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) pursues an elephant-sized cyclopic insect as it climbs up a wall in a dark cavern. Link aims up at it with a targeting crosshair focused on it, then shoots its eye with his slingshot.

Time passes, people move. Like a river’s flow, it never ends…

Everything Stacks With Everything, ft. Risk of Rain, Binding of Isaac, etc.

There’s a specific design ethos that I’ve noticed runs through a lot of roguelike games such as Risk of Rain 2 and The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. These are action games in which the player collects a myriad of various weapons, powerups, and augments to enhance their combat capabilities. These items often do weird and wild things that greatly change up the gameplay, and yet, they all almost always work together in ways that never cancel out. Every item you collect remains significant throughout your run of the game, and adding new powers on top of it only further enhances your abilities, and often, these items even synergize in exciting ways that multiply your capabilities. Risk of Rain 2 and The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth adhere to this design philosophy almost religiously.

A lot of games have cool effects and weapon qualities that augment your combat abilities, but tend to lean toward special exceptions, edge cases, and fuzzy inter-connectivity between combat abilities. For example, I play a Dark Knight character in the online RPG Final Fantasy XIV. The Dark Knight can spend the resource MP on special abilities which deal extra damage, allowing them more attacks in the same amount of time than they’d normally be able to do . The Dark Knight can also activate an ability called Blood Weapon to restore some MP with every attack ability they land for a few seconds. I’d often find myself wondering if I can generate MP with the same abilities that spend it, as they are technically attack abilities. Through experimentation, unfortunately, the answer is no. I feel as though storing up MP to spend before using Blood Weapon to get in more hits is a cool ability synergy I’m missing out on because of this arbitrary lack of inter-connectivity. Blood Weapon also specifies in its description that extra MP is not awarded for using AoE abilities which hit multiple enemies, another case of non inter-connectivity of abilities. A lot of RPGs do this, Final Fantasy is just one example. This can not only cut off cool synergies that reward exploration of ability interactions, but also makes systems more difficult and complicated to read, as the player needs to parse sometimes very complicated layers of exceptions when it comes to understanding how things work. Being able to critically strike with normal attacks does not guarantee one can critically strike with special attacks, etc.

Something that a lot of roguelike games such as The Binding of Isaac and Risk of Rain have embodied, is a system of interconnected combat abilities which do not interfere with one another, and coexist with very few special exceptions. I never find myself asking the question ‘do these two things work in concert?’ while playing Risk of Rain 2, as pretty much invariably, they do. Sometimes this happens in ways you may not even expect, but are a welcome synergy when you realize. For example, Risk of Rain 2 features an item which will spray razors at nearby enemies when you take damage, and even these razors will apply any attack effects the player has, like bleed and critical strike, among others. This opens a world of possibilities, where things like building a loadout in which taking hits is a viable method of destroying enemies, may be plausible.

Isaac from The Bind of Isaac destroys some monsters by crying tear "bullets" at them, goes through a door, then fires said tears from both his eyes and the back of his head. — Here my tears (bullets) are capable of blocking enemy projectiles, shooting out of the back of my head, and inflicting fear on enemies, all-in-one!

There are a couple of big advantages to this strategy. As I explained above, it allows for a much grander scope of variety when it comes to player loadout, which often translate to a grander variety of playstyles. Variety is always an excellent tool for increasing replayability, expanding your games appeal, and just generally enhancing interest. Another advantage is a clarity and unity of combat attributes when it comes to the player’s loadout. You’re demanding less parsing of systems, rules, and exceptions on the part of the player if it can be assumed that any advantage they obtain from an item or powerup can be applied universally.

Captain from Risk of Rain 2 shoots a shotgun at a bell-like robot in a purple field. A missile fires at the contraption, causing lightning to arc from it to nearby floating fireball enemies. — Notice that the arc of lightning, itself a powerup, originates from the missile, another powerup. Powers in *Risk of Rain* can be nested, and synergize in this way.

To be clear, there are also advantages to making exceptions to ability interaction, even beyond the technical overhead. Design wise, lots of games have made interesting decision making out of a specific separation of abilities. One of the most common forms this takes is separate magic and physical ability types, wherein each set of abilities have their own advantages and disadvantages that don’t intersect, which leads to compelling strategizing on the part of the player. Sometimes having to choose between one advantage and another is a good thing, both for strategic depth and for fun. Another advantage to compartmentalizing game mechanics in this way is simplicity for the designer’s sake. Making sure everything in a very large pool of game mechanics mix and mingle in an organic way can be a daunting task.

The disadvantages, however, become apparent when abilities do not combine in ways that feels like they should. If a special item exist that causes your bullets to split on impact and hit multiple enemies, and there’s another item that causes your bullets to bounce between enemies, it stands to reason having both my allow your bullets to split as they bounce between targets. In The Binding of Isaac, this is the case! Although I’m sure you can imagine a fair few games with similar scenarios in which these items are mutually exclusive, and that cuts off a lot of interesting gameplay opportunity!

Captain from Risk of Rain 2 destroys monsters simply by walking near them in a hellish cavern. Lightning arcs from the Captain, and a missile fires from his back just after. — Passive damage is one of my favorite ways to play Risk of Rain 2

I love how in this clip, my passive lightning-emitting item is launching missiles and spraying lava at enemies. I have an item that causes me to do so when damaging enemies, and indeed that means all damage I deal, no matter the source. This comforting reliability, that any special bonus to attacks I pick up applies to all forms attack allows me to play the game in whatever way I want. If I prefer to use the shotgun, I can. If I want to focus on passive damage, I can. If orbital strikes are more my thing, that works too.

Another example of this from Risk of Rain 2 that I love are the mobility items. The Hopoo Feather allows your character to perform a double jump, or in other words jump a second time in midair before touching the ground. If get multiple Hopoo feathers… you just get more midair jumps. In fact, I was lucky enough on my last run to get three Hopoo feathers, meaning I can jump a total of four times in one. This insane level of mobility is something many games would shy away from, the fact that Risk of Rain 2 does not makes all of its systems feel a lot more organic and reactive to the player.

Captain from Risk of Rain 2 jumps three times in midair above a greenish canyon full of mossy old ruins. — Get enough items in this game, and you can basically fly.

Overall, I tend toward preferring this sort of game mechanic parity that allow unambiguous and universal interaction between mechanics. When every stacks with everything, I find it all much simpler to understand as a player. I also find it affords a lot more room for creativity in playstyle by allowing a multitude of interesting and often bizarre combinations. There’s a lot of design overhead necessary to make sure everything works together seamlessly and without jank, and not every gameplay system will be conducive to this level inter-connectivity of gameplay mechanics

WEAK, WITHOUT YOUR BAUBLES AND TRINKETS…

Mega Man X: The Dash and The Wall Kick, Power and Applicability

Mega Man X, released in 1993 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, marked a big step forward for its sister-series Mega Man, as well as for 2D action games in general. It’s a game about robots, fighting robots, with cool weapons and powers. The protagonist of Mega Man X was cooler, sleeker, just a liiiiiiiittle bit more Bladerunner (maybe like 10%) and slightly less Astro Boy. The titular Mega Man X was made to be stronger, faster, more capable than his older predecessor. Nowhere was this made more apparent than in the movement system, which included two new movement mechanics, the Dash, and the Wall Jump.

The fighting robot Mega Man, starting with Mega Man 3, is able to slide, which changes his hitbox for registering enemy attacks to a wider, shorter rectangle, meaning it could be used to dodge certain projectiles, while also making him move slightly faster in quick bursts. The Mega Man X dash was an evolution of this, retaining the change in hitbox while also greatly magnifying the speed of the ability. It was made more powerful in that sense, but also made more generally useful with an additional technique. Jumping out of the Mega Man X Dash would allow the player to clear greater distances with their jump, as the Dash’s bonus speed would not dissipate until they hit the ground or a wall from said jump.

The protagonist of Mega Man X can jump into a wall, cling to it, and slowly sliding down its length. When jumping from this wall slide, he can gain additional height by jumping off the wall. The interesting thing, is that because of the high degree of aerial maneuverability in this game, it’s possible to change direction mid-air immediately after a wall jump, and reattach to the wall at a higher elevation, effectively allowing the player to climb any vertical surface. This is known as the Wall Kick. 2D action games, obviously, have two axis of movement, though generally one access is rather strictly limited, the vertical axis. The Wall Kick gives a vector of control over this space while maintaining the advantages of limitation through gravity have on the game world. Giving the player a limited method by which they can break the rules of gravity offers the overall design a certain dynamism. The player now has two modes of operation they can switch between on the fly without even thinking about it – aerial oriented and ground oriented.

Secrets and extra areas like this are littered all over the place, giving the levels a rewarding sense of scale

These two moves, simple though they are, were designed intentionally to be extremely powerful, and extremely dynamic by giving them a huge possibility space with a wide range of use cases. Wall climbing can be used to avoid attacks near the ground, to reach hidden areas, or to get over and behind a troublesome enemy. The dash can be used like a dodge to quickly position the player out of harms way, to clear a level faster by stringing dashes together, or to clear large horizontal spaces with the dash jump. Those are just a few examples. With such a broad range of possibilities, this empowerment of the player greatly raises the skill ceiling of this games, making mastery more rewarding, while broadening what can be done in the design of levels and bosses. It’s the applicability of these moves, in particular that widens the possibility space. Mega Man X can climb any vertical surface, and dash at any time. Because these moves are always available, the game needs to be designed with them always in mind.

From here, bosses start to incorporate this possibility space into the overall plan. If a player is made more powerful, in this case given a broader degree of control over their position in 2D space, then the environment needs to be designed to both accommodate and interact with that power. You’ll notice a lot more verticality in the level design of Mega Man X over Mega Man. Trees, tall buildings, and aircraft are common. The original series did play with vertical movement from time to time, but mostly in the form of moving platforms and falling – not things the player had much control over.

Chill Penguin here is pretty simple, but at least the extra verticality gives him more to do than just running back and forth across the screen

With this added degree of control comes added obstacles. A Mega Man game in which enemies never posed a threat to you while wall-climbing would mean losing the game’s notable blend of combat and traversal for the sake of this new mechanic. Rather than make it incongruous, the Wall Kick feels like a natural extension of Mega Man‘s movement systems, that flows with the established gameplay. What’s more, by introducing threats and problems to solve in the context of using the Wall Kick, the Wall Kick is made to have functional, practical application in and out of combat.

Tall shafts like this become a lot more common as the series goes on. I feel like a ninja!

I know the title of this piece says Mega Man X, but the Mega Man series, overall shows an increasing level of acuity when it comes to making use of the Wall Kick and Dash abilities. The story and general gameplay aesthetic of Mega Man X continued on to the Gameboy Advanced Mega Man Zero titles, as well as the Nintendo DS Mega Man ZX titles, which are direct sequels to the Mega Man X series, despite the change in subtitle. Faster and snappier than ever in both control and combat design, they really illustrate the limits to which the Wall Kick and Dash can really push Mega Man. Mega Man X itself has some fun and memorable bosses, but they only scratch the surface of how the new movement can be leveraged to make new and more interesting boss encounters. X and others like him will find themselves climbing walls to reach weak points, ducking projectiles, and clashing with inhumanly fast foes as the series goes on.

Killing robo goons from below just never gets old. It’s all so seamless

Bosses like Deathtanz Mantisk (which, incidentally, may be the single best name for a boss enemy in any video game ever made. I’m serious. Just, try saying it out loud. You’ll see.) utilize vertical space in really interesting ways, creating a counterpoint to the player’s ability to climb walls. Now not only can the player climb walls, which is fun, but they can outmaneuver their foes by doing so, which is fun and empowering! When this terrifying death-robot zooms across the screen, narrowly missing Mega Man Zero with a razor-sharp scythe blade, as the player readjusts their position with a dash, the sensation of taking part in a sci-fi-anime-robot-battle becomes very real. A high-powered player character creates high-powered situations, if the enemy and level design rises to meet these elevated powers.

Very few games make me feel as capable as a good Mega Man

The best part of all of this is that Dashing augments the Wall Kick, meaning both of these maneuvers can be used in concert to an even more powerful effect. Using to verticality to your advantage is powerful. Moving great distances in quick bursts is powerful. So, moving great distances in quick bursts through vertical space is extremely powerful. Mega Man is able to populate its many entries with some of the most visually impactful and fluidly playing boss encounters in the business leveraging the possibilities allotted by this high level of player power. Growing up on these games, they’ve had a big influence on me, and I tend to, when designing, leaning towers player empowerment. The more powerful a player is, in a practical and broadly applicable way, the more room there is in the design to do crazy and surprising stuff with environmental and enemy encounters. Because Mega Man can traverse so much vertical space so easily, there needs to be wild, sprawling vertical spaces filled with interesting things to see and do, things that wouldn’t be possible if he were more strictly adhered to the ground. There’s something to be said for more limited player power depending on the overall design goals, of course, but Mega Man very succinctly shows the design advantages of allowing the player a great deal of power.

Omega’s encounter has no walls on which to climb, although this is because, as an early boss, he exists to teach you the merits of ducking and jumping projectiles with the dash

The simple combination of a dash and a powerful yet limited method for traversing vertical space has become an extremely effective tool for 2D action games in creating elaborate and spectacular combat systems. It’s no surprise to see surprise to see spins on it utilized in such titles as Hollow Knight, Azure Striker: Gunvolt, and Super Meat Boy. It’s just a very elegant way to give the player a way to leverage the huge amount of air control they have in those games for interesting combat and traversal scenarios. Metroid has been exploring its own take on this concept to similar effect since 1991, actually two years prior to the release of Mega Man X, but no series has quite so thoroughly explored its possibilities as that of the blue bomber.

You may even become as powerful as I am…

FromSoft and The Taxonomy of a Parry

I love parrying things in video games. You might have already guessed that. I’m always looking for how and why things work or don’t work in games, so I have a particular interest in one of my favorite gameplay mechanics, the parry. So what is a parry? In the context of an action game, I’d define it as a maneuver the player can execute on the fly to nullify incoming damage and disarm enemy defenses, which requires an acute execution of timing to succeed. Commonly, it’s a button press that initiates a short window of animation during which, if an enemy attack connects with the player character, the parry activates. After considering how to approach the design of this gameplay mechanic, I’ve decided there are three pillars of a good parry mechanic: usability, versatility, and impact.

Usability describes the practicality, from the player’s perspective, of actually using the parry at all. How restrictively difficult is the timing necessary to succeed in using one? Is the risk of using the parry worth the reward? How necessary is the use of this parry to succeeding within the game? Are there other specific considerations like spacing that make the parry more or less practical?

Versatility describes the frequency of general use cases for the parry. Can the parry be used to deflect any attack encountered in the game, or is it limited in some way? Can even large and powerful enemies be parried? Do you need a specific weapon or in-game skill to use the parry? Is the parry’s reward worth forgoing a more straightforwardly offensive approach?

Impact is at the center of what makes me want to use a parry. A parry can be powerful, but ultimately I am motivated to use it by how fun it is. What’s the audio-visual feedback of a successful parry like? Do I get a rush from disarming my opponent, or is the reward for parrying barely noticeable? Does it make me feel powerful? Does it make me feel skilled?

FromSoftware or FromSoft is a Japanese game developer well known for their popular action games, all of which in recent memory include a parry of some kind. I want to run through three of their flagship titles, the original Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and analyze their respective parry mechanics through this lens I’ve come up with to see how it can be applied to specific cases.

The parry mechanic in Dark Souls is an interesting beast. A favorite of the game’s more hardcore fans but, in my experience, one that new and even many veteran players ignore completely. It’s powerful, and it’s fun to use once you get the hang of it, but that’s kind of the problem, it’s not very fun to learn to use, and many players will not bother with it, as it is far from essential to completing the game. I’ve found most friends I’ve introduced to the game simply ignore the utility of parrying, or try it once and discard it in favor of the game’s more developed mechanics.

Though powerful, the parry in *Dark Souls* is stiff, restrictive, and difficult to master

The parry in Dark Souls suffers severely from a lack of usability and versatility. Usability, as I explained, is my concept of how practical it is for a player to actually execute your parry maneuver consistently and successfully. Firstly, this parry is not universally available – the player must be wielding a small or medium sized shield in their off-hand. Given the wide and varied options of character customization in this game, it’s possible a player won’t be using a shield at all. I think the greatest source of dissuasion for using this mechanic, though, is how difficult it is to succeed with it. Dark Souls has a very specific and narrow window of time at which a parry will succeed. An enemy’s attack must connect with the player character during this 6 frame window – that’s one fifth of a second. Needless to say, it is a difficult mark to hit. Now, with practice one can hone in on Dark Souls‘ very consistent and reproducible rhythm. Not every enemy attacks with the same timing, but they all share a fairly general pattern of wind-up, swing, and follow-through. Once you get it, you’ll find parrying a pretty consistent tool.

Failing to parry can result in incurring massive damage, and its timing is excessively strict

However, the skill floor to reaching this point of consistency is restrictive, even by this game’s standards. Given how great the risk is of failing a parry in this game, and how the game itself trains players to be extremely risk-averse with enemies that deal massive amounts of damage when interrupting player actions, players are naturally disinclined to even take those risks. Thus, they’ll not learn the parry timing. What’s more, most enemies can be thoroughly dispatched, with far lesser risk, by simply striking them down with your favorite weapon or spell when the foe’s defenses are down, between their attacks. I conclude that the parry in Dark Souls is not entirely practical, or usable without a great deal of personal investment, time, and effort most players will find better spent in learning the nuances of movement, dodging, and attacking. These options are far more practical, realistically, even if the parry becomes very powerful once one masters it.

The impact of this parry is intense, and intensely reward, so it’s a shame it’s so hard to use

This would be enough turn off most players from the mechanic on its own, but the move also struggles in the versatility department, meaning the frequency of its general use cases. Dark Souls is filled with enemies that can be parried – essentially any enemy that can suffer a backstab. I’d always say that any enemy with an obvious spine that your player character can reach can probably be backstabbed and parried, as a general rule of thumb. Not every enemy matches this criteria though, and nearly none of the game’s 25 boss encounters do either. Boss encounters are a major part of this game, and something players will be spending a lot of time on. They’re also notoriously among the game’s most difficult and high-intensity segments. Since parrying is useless in those encounters, it further disincentivizes paying the mechanic any time or energy. If you can’t use a move for a game’s greatest challenges, what worth is it? Any real world skill building towards parry mastery is, objectively, better spent on other things, if finishing the game is your goal.

I like using the Dark Souls parry – it’s got excellent impact. A harrowing low boom sound effect accompanies its successful use. Parried enemies reel in a wide, exaggerated swooping animation, soon to be followed by a riposte that drives a weapon straight through them, gushing comical amounts of blood (if the foe has blood). It all really accentuates the player’s power and superior skill over the opponent. The totality of the audio-visual feedback here is excellent, it’s just a shame so few will ever get to actually see it. The move is simply not useful to a significant portion of the player base.

When a mechanic like this goes so underutilized by your players, the designer might ask themselves what’s causing this discrepancy, and what can be done to address it.

In Bloodborne, FromSoft wanted to shift to a more action-oriented system, less about patient and considered movements, more about reaction and aggression, as compared to Dark Souls‘ more traditional RPG inspired roots. As part of this shift, the parry in Bloodborne was made to be more of a central mechanic than in Dark Souls, something to be expected of the player regularly throughout combat encounters. So that means getting players to actually use it. First, FromSoft needed to address usability. Bloodborne‘s parry is unique in that it takes the form of a projectile. This accomplishes two things. One, it makes accounting for space exceedingly easy for players. Dark Souls was fairly strict about where player and opponent were standing for a parry to successfully work. In Bloodborne, if an enemy is shot during the tail end of its attack animation, it will be parried, no matter its distance from the player. Two, this means the player does not have to put themselves in direct danger to parry, as an enemy can be parried even if their attack is very unlikely to actually hit the player. The risk to parrying now feels much more proportional to the benefit, making it a valid alternative to just wildly attacking.

Even when incurring damage, it’s possible to parry in *Bloodborne*, the mechanic is forgiving

As the timing for Bloodborne‘s parry is now timed to the enemy‘s attack, and a moving projectile, rather than lining up the player’s parry animation with the enemy’s animation, the player really only has to track one movement, the enemy’s. Together, these elements remove a ton of cognitive blocks on actually using Bloodborne‘s parry system, so its usability is extremely effective by comparison. Bloodborne‘s parry is also extremely versatile. When looking at the 30 or so bosses in the game, about 15 of them can be parried, roughly half, making mastery of the parry a far more effective tool in way more situations than it was in Dark Souls. Bloodborne doesn’t shirk in the impact department either. The same familiar boom sound effect accompanies a success, and can be followed up with a violent and beastly visceral attack that grabs the enemy’s insides, twists them, and rips out a huge gush of blood, knocking the foe to the ground and stumbling nearby enemies. The player hunter’s sense of superiority over their prey is the focus.

Even the biggest and burliest can be parried, and at a distance too!

The Dark Souls parry had another issue I didn’t mention; if you did master it, and made it a consistent tool in your arsenal, many enemies outside of boss encounters become exceedingly easy to deal with, even if they are still fun to beat. Nevertheless, this runs the risk of the move becoming too powerful, especially if it’s easier to use. FromSoft’s solution to this was to make parry attempts a limited resources. This elegantly maintains the risk of attempting a parry, while assuaging the frustration of losing one’s own progress as a result of said risk. There’s still some risk of injury to a failed parry, but it’s much less likely than in previous games, most of the risk is the parry-centric resource of quicksilver bullets.

If Bloodborne made parrying a more central mechanic, then Sekiro made parrying a core mechanic, one of the primary action verbs of the game. Parrying is most of what you do in combat. Formally, the Sekiro move is called ‘deflection’.

To accomplish its design goals, Sekiro‘s parry is made to be even more accessible and low-risk than Bloodborne‘s. A deflection can be directly transitioned into from a block (which itself nullifies incoming damage), and a block can be transitioned to directly from a deflection. Both ‘block’ and ‘deflect’ are activated with the same button, block is simply the result of holding it. Deflections are initiated when the button is compressed, not when it is lifted, so erring on early deflections makes the maneuver even safer – deflections that fail for being used too soon simply result in a block. No damage is taken either way. The limiting resources of Bloodborne are gone here, at least for parries, so player’s will often find themselves using the deflection move even more than they attack, but this was the goal. Sekiro aims to evoke the back-and-forth clanging of cinematic sword fights, and the game is built around the interest of deflecting a series of attacks in quick succession. Any one given deflection is easy, but the difficulty can be smoothly ramped up by stringing a sequence of them together.

Sekiro conditions the player to use a series of parries as a defensive, and offensive tool

We’ve come a long way since Dark Souls, with a skill floor that is extremely approachable, without sacrificing the skill ceiling. Where the parry window of Dark Souls was only 6 frames, one fifth of a second, Sekiro‘s deflection window starts at the extremely generous, by comparison, half-second. This deflection window decays in size if the player abuses the deflect button. Deflecting rapidly and repeatedly causes the window to shrink down to only a small fraction of a second. The goal is to make any given deflection easy, but the player is encouraged to use their own powers of reaction and prediction, rather than relying on spamming the button. Even still, this window decay is also generous, as the deflection’s full capability is restored after only a half second of not using it.

All this to say, Sekiro has extremely generous usability for its deflection mechanic. It has to, as deflection is the primary tool for defeating enemies in this game. Were it as restrictive as the parry in Dark Souls or even Bloodborne, it would be an exercise in frustration. To counterbalance this, the individual reward for one Sekiro deflection is much lesser, and you need to do a lot of deflections to add up to a bigger reward.

Sekiro is a masterclass in parry versatility. The deflection maneuver is applicable to nearly every encounter in the game. It’s extremely generally useful, so much so that exceptions, attacks which cannot be deflected, are unlikely to be deflected, or require other special maneuvers to deflect, are given their own glowing red UI graphic to further make them stand out. Outside of that, if it deals damage, it can be deflected by the player’s sword, near-universally. Formalizing what can and can’t be parried in this way is also helpful for usability, as it removes guesswork on the part of the player.

When deflecting successfully, right orange sparks fly like a firework cracker was set off as a cacophony of metal sounds clang in satisfying unison. The audio-visual feedback for a successful deflection is actually kind of subtle, compared to simply blocking. It is merely a heightened, more intense version of the block visuals, just distinct enough to unambiguously be its own separate function to ensure players know when they’re succeeding, but similar enough to not be distracting. This makes sense, as players are expected to deflect a lot of attacks in any given encounter. A series of successful deflections looks and sounds like a larger-than-life battle of master swordsmen, with sparks showering about amidst the metal clanging. When an enemy has finally been deflected past the limits of their endurance, Sekiro will delight players with some of the most lavishly animated executions in video games, anything from the tried and true gut-stab, to decapitating a gorilla with a hatchet the size of a refrigerator, to gingerly extracting tears from a dragon’s occular injury. The impact of Sekiro‘s parry system is not only good, but usually proportional to each situation, even though the overall impact of any one given deflection is not super intense.

It’s clear somebody at FromSoftware loves parrying things almost as much as I do. It’s a common mechanic for a reason, giving players an area of skill to strive for mastery over, which reinforces a sense of power. Few things can make a player feel more powerful than successfully turning enemy attacks against them. Over the course of these three games, FromSoft has made parrying more and more central to the experience, to the point of it becoming the main point of focus for Sekiro. It’s clear there was an awareness of how neglected parrying was in Dark Souls among casual players, and even some veterans. They needed to find ways to make using it more attractive, without sacrificing the sense of power it imparted, the thing that makes it fun in the first place. While the Dark Souls parry has its flaws, I’m glade they persisted in iterating on it. I think Sekiro and bloodborne have two of the most consistently fun combat systems out there, and the excellence of their respective parry mechanics are a huge part of that, in Sekiro especially, which deserves its own write-up, eventually. The metrics I’ve come up with here to assess parry mechanics are just the way I look at things, though. It’s useful to look at design through a variety of lenses. So the next time you stab some zombie in the face after battering its arm away like you’re in a kung-fu movie, think about why and how that maneuver works the way it does.

Hesitation is Defeat…

The Iterations of Luigi’s Mansion

Alright to finish off Spooky Month I’ve got to talk about the spookiest game franchise there is; Luigi’s Mansion. It’s the superlative. There is no other. That’s science. Luigi’s Mansion is an action adventure game (does that mean anything?).. Luigi’s Mansion is a spooky ghost-catching action game centered around methodically exploring a creepy mansion whilst engaging in periodic encounters of high-action ghost-hunting that punctuate the gloom. It released in September 2001 for the Nintendo GameCube, received a sequel in March 2013 titled Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon for the Nintendo 3DS, and a second sequel, Luigi’s Mansion 3, in October 2019 for the Nintendo Switch. All the games’ action plays similar on the surface, involving a lot of running around, bumping into things while you fight ghosts in a tug-of-war scenario. They’ll drag you around the room, and you’ll suck them up by the tail with a vacuum cleaner. The player can lean Luigi around in different directions to have a limited control of his movement while the ghosts try to escape his vacuum. Leaning away from the ghosts drains their energy faster, and poor movement control might let the ghost escape. The combat of Luigi’s Mansion is easy to grasp and instantly satisfying. What I’m interested in though, is how the simple systems were iterated on in its followups. In particular, why I found the combat of Luigi’s Mansion 3 so blase so often.

The game doesn’t look **that** bad for being over 20 years old. At least I didn’t use the 3DS version.

Aha, yes. Plot twist, I actually think the combat in Luigi’s Mansion 3 is pretty weak in comparison to its predecessors. The games play mostly the same, and there aren’t that many elements in play here, relatively speaking, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to suss out what’s going on here. Luigi’s Mansion 3 introduced a mechanic called the slam to Luigi’s arsenal, which allows him to, after vacuuming a particular ghost for a short time, repeatedly slam the ghost into the ground, in any direction, stunning and damaging other ghosts while annihilating his main target’s energy. It quickly becomes a one-size-fits-all solution to any ghost altercation outside of boss fights, and isn’t an especially engaging mechanic on its own.

My brain cells preparing to critique one of the Nintendo Switch’s most critically acclaimed games

Luigi’s Mansion 3 was never going to miss out on its well-earned popularity for lack of a more considered difficulty curve. Being too easy isn’t exactly the problem I have. Luigi’s Mansion 3 was always going to be popular because it is one of the most lavishly produced, polished, and animated Mario games of all time. I don’t really think Luigi’s Mansion 3 has bad combat. On the contrary, I think one among the many reasons for Luigi’s Mansion 3‘s notable anticipation was due to its less talked about predecessor’s proof of concept. It showed that the off-beat, frankly weird gameplay of Luigi’s Mansion was a formula with staying power that had room to grow as a robust system. Indeed, Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon doesn’t quite get the credit it deserves for what it contributed to the notoriety and design ethos of Luigi’s Mansion. Luigi’s Mansion 3‘s combat has its basis in Dark Moon and works well enough as a result. Dark Moon is where most of the changes to the formula came from and they are for the most part, positives.

The strobulb is Dark Moon‘s first prominent addition. Where in the first game, sweeping one’s flashlight over a ghost’s exposed eyes was sufficient to stun it and open it up for being captured, Dark Moon requires an active button press. The light will flash brightly, and anything caught in its cone will be stunned. The strobulb can also be charged up for a wider flash that is less likely to miss its mark, and has the added bonus of hitting many more ghosts at once. The original GameCube game made stunning ghosts in this way passive – simply sweeping the light over them is sufficient. Speaking of passivity, I liked the way the first two games in this series made defeating ghosts such a concerted effort. They would drag Luigi about the room, possibly ramming him into obstacles. The player’s own control input was the only thing stopping them. Admittedly this aspect of being dragged around a room began to be de-emphasized in Dark Moon, and that trend continued in 3.

On the flip side, Dark Moon added the power surge ability, which would let Luigi deal extra damage to a ghost he had been focused on for a certain amount of time, uninterrupted. Adding this simple additional button prompt helps keep the player feeling like an active participate, among other advantages like rewarding skilled play. The slam move is an iteration of the power surge, whereas now pressing the button after focusing on a ghost will slam it into the ground for massive damage, and this can be repeated multiple times on one charge. The move is so powerful and repetitive I often found myself passively clearing rooms of ghosts without thinking much of it.

That’s not to say that passively oriented gameplay is inherently a negative. There’s plenty of passive gameplay in Luigi’s Mansion anyway. It’s an atmospheric piece about slowly creeping through an abandoned estate. If action is half of what you do, the other half is kind of just wandering around, albeit in a extremely realized world dripping with personality. The point is, the action could stand to have some active engagement to accentuate and contrast the more low key exploration. I think something that made the original GameCube game’s spooks stand out as so, well, spooky was how legitimately threatening ghosts could be, and how that threat made a real intrusion upon the quiet tension of Luigi’s nervous wanderings. Luigi’s reactions are telling me that I should be elevating my heart rate when ghosts appear, after all. The ghosts need to pose a legitimate threat.

Ghosts’ erratic movements can reposition Luigi into obstacles if you’re not careful

Luigi’s Mansion 3 is not lacking for interesting boss fights that feel legitimately threatening, but while bosses are often a highlight of their games, moments that stick out as particularly exciting or memorable, they’re not what you’re going to be doing in an adventuring game like Luigi’s Mansion 80% of the time. If most of what you do is fighting mooks, or if even half of what you do is fighting mooks, fighting those mooks may as well be fun, or at minimum engaging. I found the slam ability’s overwhelming power and utility distracting from this. I wasn’t engaging the core Luigi’s Mansion experience like I used to. I missed those chaotic tugs of war. What’s more, the animation for this maneuver just looks… wrong. I did mention this is among the most lavishly animated Mario games ever, and it completely is. There’s some real talent and attention to detail on display here, so it’s kind of confusing how strange the transition is on this loop of Luigi slamming the ground. The way he’s leaning his weight around just doesn’t make much visual sense. It looks much more like he’s supposed to shift from slamming on one side to the other, yeah? The natural motion here would be for him to swing the grappled ghost over his head. This is fairly obvious if you go out of your way to alternate what side of Luigi you’re slamming the ghost on.

The biggest problem, though, is in how powerful the slam move is, relative to how easy it is to use. The power surge mechanic in Dark Moon only served to accentuate and accelerate the flow of gameplay as it happened. An enemy with a piddling 10 hp is probably going to be captured by a skilled Luigi pretty quickly regardless, so the addition of the power surge mechanic would let a skilled player skip that extra 5 hp at the tail end of the engagement – we all knew they’d get through it no problem anyway. In this way it’s a reward for skilled play that keeps things smooth and flowing, but it doesn’t overtake the game’s main combat mechanics, it merely augments them. The slam, on the other hand, functionally replaces the combat of Luigi’s Mansion as it had existed up to the point of Luigi’s Mansion 3. It’s not a extra tool that augments gameplay, it’s a sledgehammer that is overwhelmingly more powerful than engaging with the game’s other tug-of-war mechanics. More often that not, the goals of struggling in a ghostly suction-y duel are shuffled aside for the goal of simply reaching the point where you can start slamming which, while rewarding in its own way, gets awfully repetitive in how readily available it is. It begins to homogenize the combat encounters of the game.

The slam animation loops really awkwardly, and IT DOESN’T SUCK UP GHOSTS WHAT?!

I have to touch on the fact that when defeating a ghost using the slam, it does not, I repeat, does not, get sucked into Luigi’s vacuum. Defeating ghosts in Luigi‘s Mansion near-universally results in the ghost’s malleable body getting all smushed into the mouth of the device, before disappearing into it with a satisfying slurp and *pop* sound. Delightfully expressive flails of panic from the victimized ghosts accompany. It’s the punctuation of ultimate victory over your foe. The cherry on top. The fullest realization of the fantasy of Luigi’s Mansion– being a ghost hunter. Any and all dark spirits no matter their might may be laid low before the great equalizer of an overcharged vacuum cleaner. There’s little more satisfying than that in the game. The idea that the most powerful move in Luigi’s Mansion 3 is also the only way to dispense with ghosts without that oh so sweet final animation of a ghost being sucked away into oblivion is utterly baffling to me. How is a ghost even destroyed? Is that not the point? They’re already dead, so you need to capture them with a device, right?

This may seem like a minor point, but I cannot under-emphasize the importance of nailing the aesthetics of your game to work in concert with its mechanics. Would Luigi’s Mansion be as fun if everyone and everything were replaced with featureless blobs? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think its as fun if it’s missing even this one crucial animation and sound effect. Destroying ghosts just doesn’t feel right compared to capturing them in this setting. Imagine your favorite tense or emotional scene from your favorite dramatic game, or movie. Now imagine it set against the backdrop of this music. I just cannot reconcile the incongruence here. If you defeat a boss ghost with Luigi’s slam ability, the ghost-getting-sucked-into-a-vacuum-cleaner animation plays in its entirety, because of course it does. Why is this not the case for regular ghosts, whom you will be encountering far more often? It throws off the whole vibe of the game, so I have to physically restrain myself from using the most powerful tool in Luigi’s arsenal if it would finish off a foe, and that feels terrible.

Ahhhh, one more for good measure. So satisfying

Now if this sounds pretty harsh, don’t worry, because this is the part where I shower praise on the slam mechanic, as it is not a bad concept by any stretch. One of the greatest strengths of Luigi’s Mansion is its slapstick and cartoonish aesthetic. Action in these games quickly becomes outlandish and comedic as kitchenware flies off of shelves, vases are smashed, and tablecloths go whipping about in the scuffle. The thought of a struggle with Luigi escalating to the point that he’s literally slamming stubborn ghosts over his head like he’s hammering a tent peg into the ground is inherently hilarious, and perfectly congruous with the game’s general feel. Having this big and bombastic move to build up to gives every encounter a concurrent goal alongside simply ‘defeat all the ghosts’. It does potentially offer an interesting choice between slamming ghosts or simply sucking them, were it rebalanced to make the latter method more viable. The addition of an attack specifically for dealing with large crowds of ghosts also fills a niche in Luigi’s moveset that could allow for a far more varied and interesting array of encounter designs.

There are so many possibilities. Ghosts that wear armor which needs to be slammed into pieces before they can be properly captured, ghosts that can only be captured after they’ve been slammed into water, ghosts that only take damage if other enemies are slammed into them, rooms full huge numbers of ghosts that are best dealt with using the slam to thin out their tanks. The list of goes on and on. If it were just a little less frequent, if it were just a little less powerful, if it didn’t replace the more seamless power surge ability, and if it were just a little more in line audio-visual-wise with the rest of the game (by which I mean, allow the slam to suck up regular ghosts like it does bosses), I’d probably be over the (dark) moon for this addition to Luigi’s repertoire. The point is, the slam is a potentially excellent addition that fumbles in the execution.

Personally, I think a slam in this scenario would’ve been a bit excessive

What’s frustrating about this, is that Dark Moon had already figured out how best to implement this. In the game, there are instances where the power surge technique can charge up to multiple levels, by spending more uninterrupted time connected to a particular ghost. In essence, by proving you are able to keep up with a ghost for a longer period of time, you are rewarded with a great amount of damage you can ‘skip’. A longer charge yields greater damage, but also requires making a meaningful decision as to whether hanging out for a little longer for a little extra damage is worth it. Why not implement the slam in a similar way? After suctioning a ghost for a short period of time, you could power surge to get some extra damage. Useful for quickly dispatching small ghosts, or for pumping the damage on a ghost you’re not totally sure you can hang onto much longer. If you can, however, stay connected for a decently long period of time, you can instead slam them for much greater damage, and the added bonus of stunning and damaging other nearby ghosts. This implementation would be a lot less repetitive by making the slam more specialized, requiring a greater investment of time and risk to perform. By specializing the slam more, you improve the flow and perceived speed of the game, because Luigi’s tug of war action with the ghosts is no longer being constantly interrupted. The slam now acts as a crescendo to more gradual and engaging interest curve within each combat encounter, while most of the benefits of the previous version of the slam remain intact with the power surge as a replacement.

Right. I’ve gone on and on about the changes to the combat formula of Luigi’s Mansion that I didn’t care for. To be clear, I did not dislike the game. It’s gorgeous, funny, and engrossing with an abundance of creativity on display. Its polish is outstanding in almost very way, but it could’ve have been even better if all of its gameplay was as overachieving. That’s the ultimate takeaway I have here. Luigi’s Mansion 3 has almost all good ideas, but not all of those ideas are executed as superbly as they could be. The way the slam ability ironically beats the game’s own combat mechanics over the head distracts from the combat’s other strengths, and moves the game away from those strengths. Luigi’s Mansion 3 deserves a lot of praise for bringing one of the Mario franchise’s weirdest entries back into the limelight and to a bigger audience than ever before. I just hope they keep iterating on its quirky gameplay and don’t forget what great ideas all of its games brought to the table. I hope a new surge in its popularity doesn’t mask the fact that no game is perfect, and Luigi’s Mansion still has room to grow. Forgetting that, would be the spookiest fate of all. Happy Halloween everybody!

What do they feed you Mario Brothers anyway… Gullible Soup?

Boss Breakdown: Metroid Fusion’s Nightmare

In honor of Spook month, I wanted to analyze the design of Metroid Fusion‘s arguably spookiest boss, Nightmare. Certainly a spooky name. I’m fascinated by gameplay that leaves a lasting impact on people, experiences that are remembered long after the game’s last play session. Nightmare seems to be one of those special few bosses that everyone remembers, if they’ve played the game he debuted in. There’s something viscerally haunting about Nightmare in particular that sticks with you. In a game full of terrifying encounters with predatory aliens on an isolated space station, he manages to stand out as this weird, horrific science experiment gone wrong.

In Metroid Fusion you play as galactic bounty hunter Samus, once again finding herself in the unenviable position of being trapped in isolation with ravenous alien monsters that want to eat her face. Unfortunately for them, wanting to eat Samus’s face is the leading cause of death in the Metroid universe, so the player and Samus will team up to claw their way through the abandoned space station to recoup Samus’s gear, destroy the monsters within, and blow the place to kingdom come.

To give a quick rundown of Samus’s capabilities, for those who have not played Metroid Fusion, Samus primarily does a lot of running, gunning, and jumping. Samus can jump high into the air and, at this point in this game, perform the space jump – where she can gain extra height in mid-air as much as she likes, so long as the jump button is pressed just as Samus begins to fall from the previous jump. Think a standard double jump, except with no limits. An infinite jump, a space jump, if you will. She can make herself a smaller target by curling into the morph ball form, with which she can also roll around in tight spaces. Samus can shoot horizontally in basically any position except the morph ball form. She can also aim vertically while standing or jumping, but diagonally upward or horizontally while running as well. Her primary weapon is a beam that can be charged up while moving then released for extra damage, and she has a limited stockpile of missiles she can fire in place of her beam. They do about as much damage as a full charged beam, but have expendable ammo.

Very ominous, the way you keep turning your sprite renderer on and off

It’s hard to describe what exactly Nightmare is. He’s some sort of awful military experiment with gravity manipulation. It a bio-mechanical monstrosity hooked up to a gravity device, and perhaps some sort of life support apparatus, sealed within with an ominous mask. He has very limited animation, with basically only a few details on his arms and *ahem* face to distinguish him. He kind of just stares in one direction and floats around, but visually it works because of the kind of character he is. He’s pretty horror-themed, with his thousand yard unblinking stare and immovable stance in one direction reinforcing this sort of awful, emotionless terror-machine.

The Nightmare boss fight is made up of three distinct phases that seamlessly transition from one to the other linearly as the Nightmare creature takes damage. As is often standard for 2D action games, Nightmare’s behavior pattern is actually rather simple once you break it down. In the first phase, Nightmare will only do two things. First, he’ll fire a salvo of laser projectiles that move horizontally in a line from his arms. Several are fired at once, forming an obstacle that is just high enough for Samus to be able to jump over, if they’re fired near the ground. This is complicated by the second thing he does; he will track Samus’s vertical position with his own, levitating up and down to match her “y” position on the screen. It’s not one-to-one though, Nightmare overshoots Samus’s position, and if she quickly changes her vertical place, Nightmare will have to take a moment to reorient itself as a result.

This movement creates the sense that Nightmare is an intelligent predator going out of its way to aim its deadly lasers at Samus, although in truth they aren’t aimed as such. Nightmare is repositioning its entire body to fire at Samus. This overshooting vertical motion is a simple and effective way to convey the illusion of intelligence in enemy AI. An enemy that perfect lands its shots every time, with no room for error is even simpler to implement, but it’s not very satisfying to fight against. By having Nightmare overshoot, he seems more alive, with the capability of making error, while staying motivated and on target – he tries to shoot Samus, but does not do so perfectly. Once the player can properly manipulate Nightmare’s movement, they can defeat him much more easily. One could even say that Nightmare’s movement is an extension of the player’s own as Samus. It’s always a response to how she moves, that is then disrupted by the lasers which fire on their own time, beyond the player’s control. Having mechanics interact like this instantly multiplies the number of situations that are possible, and this simple interaction alone drives the entire first phase of the fight.

There’s one more complication, however. Nightmare is immune to Samus’s weaponry on most of his body, vulnerable only at one specific weak point – his gravity device. Dodging Nightmare’s attacks in the first phase is not a terribly daunting task, as again his movement is totally lead by Samus. The position of his weak point forces you to try to manipulate him in a certain way, though, and this may put Samus in harm’s way. It’ll be easier to understand how this work by understanding how Nightmare is shaped:

Very definitely NOT shaped like a friend

As you can see, Nightmare is made up of these four primary parts, very approximately outlined here. None of the areas marked in green can take damage, but the red gravity device can. So now first phase is a game of landing your shot in that small space between his arms, which will otherwise block your fire. Seems difficult, but is thankfully alleviated somewhat by a beam upgrade Samus will have by this point in the game, which makes her shot very wide, so damaging Nightmare requires a precision, but not pinpoint precision shot from Samus. This also means hitting Nightmare is much easier with the charge beam than with missiles, ensuring the player is taking some time to charge up, and therefor interacting with Nightmare’s attack pattern as the fight goes on, none of his mechanics can go ignored. To access this weak point, Nightmare needs to be high enough in the air, and thus the ladder on the back wall Samus can use to goad him into exposing himself. This little scenario will also give the player ample time to observe and learn about how Nightmare’s movement works. If the player can successfully repeat this cycle a few times, Nightmare will activate his gravity field, and we enter phase 2.

Nightmare’s gravity field makes Samus heavier, causing her jump to get a lot less airtime, and her running movement to be a lot slower. At the same time, Nightmare will be encroaching on Samus slowly, characterizing a very off-kilter and haunting vibe. Nightmare does not track Samus’s position here, but rather simply bobs up and down a short distance. This happens rhythmically and regularly. He notable stays in his higher position for a longer time than his lower position, designed such so that the player has time to aim a beam shot at the gravity device. His lasers now fire only two at a time, so Samus’s shorter jump can clear them, but they follow their own regular timer that is desynched from Nightmare’s movement, meaning they can fire at any vertical “Y” position, so the player will have to duck or jump the lasers on the fly. This shift to a more reaction-focused mechanic reinforces a sense of being on the backfoot, of the terrifying creature closing in you, literally forcing you into a corner.

The method of attack remains the same here, but it’s re-contextualized, as Nightmare now moves of his own accord, meandering around like a zombie, rather than following your lead. He reminds me of a horror-movie monster, the way he sort of just vaguely shambles toward you. The fight remains simple, but the distortion of the environment, the ooze dripping from his eyes, and the ominous humming of his gravity device, along with the subtle shift of the mechanics toward reaction-based gameplay really sets the mood. The aesthetics do a lot of work here, creating a building tension going into the third face, er, I mean phase, which starts with..

AAAAAAH DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIIIIE

HOLY mother of god what IS that!? Augh, yes his mask comes off to reveal this grotesque melting abomination once you’ve destroyed the gravity device. At this point Nightmare will gradually move toward you, firing lasers in a new much more aggressive pattern, forcing Samus off the ground. If Samus tries to jump over Nightmare, he will fly off screen then back on in an attempt to ram her. Nightmare is responding to Samus’s movements again. It’s more obscure and aggressive, but still predictable. Once you understand that bosses like Nightmare are only responding to their circumstances (aka you, The Player), you can predict how they’ll react and use that to your advantage, and this applies to pretty much any AI enemy. Incidentally, this is largely how competing against real people in games works, too, although they might be a bit smarter than Nightmare. At any rate, he’s now vulnerable to missiles, so blast his exposed face to smithereens. It’s a lot easier to damage him in this phase, so it’s simultaneously cathartic as his increased aggression continues to build tension. The extra room and freedom to move about more of the arena creates a sense of a shift in tone. Samus is now in a position of greater power, and Nightmare a position of greater desperation, to match his screeching unmasked face.

It’s worth going over here a kind of ‘soft’ phase 4 for Nightmare. Nearly every boss in Metroid Fusion, once defeated, releases its Core X, a parasitic creature that contains some of their power. Samus must defeat this as well, before she can breathe a sigh of relief. The Core X is a pretty simple floating target that can be taken down with a few missiles. Beam attacks don’t damage it, but they do release some health and ammo restoring items. The Core X’s behavior is to simply follow Samus’s current position, and move towards her to ram her. You’ll notice it uses that same ‘follow but overshoot’ technique Nightmare employed, except in both the horizontal “x” and vertical “y” positions. If you know to look for it, you’ll see this mode of movement in AI design everywhere. I always found these Core X encounters a very interesting kind of denouement to boss fights, where there’s still some danger, but not nearly so much, as the heightened tension eases out. It’s a pretty satisfying cap off to hard encounters, and not many games do anything similar. It’s unique.

It seems to be the case that Nightmare’s design is intended to exercise all of Samus’s mobility options. The presence of a ladder on the back wall gives the player easy access to the air above Nightmare for some evasive space jumps, certain Nightmare attacks are best evaded by Samus’s famous morph ball, and a command of Samus’s ability to fire diagonally while moving gives a huge advantage in this fight. Nightmare is one of the first bosses in Metroid Fusion that really pulls together a lot of Samus’s various capabilities, and, even though he’s rather simple and straightforward, he does a great job of it. He marks the beginning of the endgame sections of Fusion, and can be a bit of skill check for people, so they may very well get stuck on him for a time. This coupled with the outstandingly horror-filled atmosphere that follows from his horrific design, reinforced by AI behavior reminiscent of a lumbering horror villain, and you’ve got a recipe for an extremely memorable encounter.

This thing is out of control. Hurry before it destroys the entire station…

Healing in Hollow Knight

It’s spooky season, and I’m gonna talk about one my favorite spooky games, Hollow Knight (Science fact: a game doesn’t have to be scary, to be spooky). I mean, hey, it’s got ghosts and zombies and curses and lots of tombstones, so it counts. Hollow Knight is a 2017 side-scrolling 2D action game. It has other genres too, but I won’t be getting into that, an interesting topic in itself. Mainly I want to look at its very elegant combat system, specifically the way it handles health and healing. In Hollow Knight you play as The Knight, a mysterious little guy wandering a vast, sprawling underground kingdom of bugs once teeming with life, now racked with curses, beasts, and sorrow. Everybody, you included, in this game is a bug, if that wasn’t clear. Lot’s of danger out there for a bug. You’ll get into plenty of scrapes, and will need a reliable way to patch yourself up after a fight. Thankfully, you obtain the ability focus pretty early on, which allows The Knight to restore health by expending a resource called SOUL.

So what design purpose does a healing spell like this serve in a game? If you think about it, the presence of a heal really just artificially extends the number of mistakes a player can make before triggering a fail state. Why not just extend their health pool? What is the advantage of a healing spell? There are a number of reasons you can put something like this in your game. Healing hides information from the player, in particular how long they can survive encounters, making their success and failure less certain. A healing system can act as a safety net against frequent failure states for less skilled players to lean on. Hollow Knight accomplishes these things with its healing system, as its an exploration-based game that requires long ventures between check points. As to why Hollow Knight uses a certain specific implementation of healing in particular, I think it serves three primary purposes.

Creating tension
Teaching situational awareness
Allowing meaningful decision-making on the part of the player

I will elaborate, but.. Okay first, it’s time for some math. To heal, The Knight need only stand still and concentrate for precisely 1.141 seconds. This will restore one unit of health, which usually translates to one hit of damage from an enemy. For each subsequent 0.891 seconds The Knight holds focus uninterrupted, another unit of health will be restored. This costs the resource SOUL, like I said, and this resource is accrued whenever The Knight deals damage with a melee attack to an enemy. SOUL has a maximum value of 99, and it costs 33 to restore each unit of health. 11 SOUL is restored to The Knight each time an enemy is struck by the melee attack. This means, from a full SOUL meter, the player can restore 3 hits of damage to their health. For each additional unit of healing, they’ll need to successfully strike the enemy 3 times. In other words, to succeed in Hollow Knight you’ll need to be hitting an enemy while receiving damage at a ratio of 3 to 1, while successfully casting your focus spell without being interrupted, of course.

With this system, you just have to be good enough. Comforting, in the dark caverns of Hollownest

Those time figures, 1.141 and 0.891 seconds, seem awfully precise, and that’s probably because they are. My thinking is that these figures were arrived at after extensive playtesting against Hollow Knight‘s wide variety of enemies and bosses. Because The Knight needs to stand absolutely still during that roughly one second of time, it was pretty essential that it’s possible to safely do so during boss fights without being interrupted, otherwise the healing ability would be completely useless. However, if it was always safe to do so, or if the safe windows of time in which the healing could be done were always obvious or easy to react to, the game’s challenges and combat gameplay could be in danger of being trivialized. That being the case, I don’t doubt that a lot of consideration was put into these figures, as they carry the heavy burden of creating tension during combat encounters. A lot of that tension happens in the final moments of the focus healing animation. You may find yourself waiting with bated breath as that one second of focus seems to stretch out to years, an angry bloodthirsty beetle bearing down on you.

Hollow Knight‘s combat can be broken down into small-scale, medium-scale, and large-scale encounters. Large-scale encounters are things like boss battles and long gauntlets of enemies. Small-scale encounters are the moments of fighting against smaller enemies found wandering around the world. Medium-scale encounters can be found somewhere in the middle, being rooms full of those small-scale encounters like enemies, or tougher enemies strategically placed to challenge the player. The healing system in Hollow Knight needs to be versatile and universal enough to function in any of these situations. During and after fights against small enemies, the healing focus spell can usually be used pretty safely, without interference, as enemies can be easily retreated from. Resources for healing are provided in return for successfully striking enemies, so as long as the player is engaging with the combat to a certain minimum level of success, these small encounters will provide some sense of danger without bringing the player closer to failure. On a medium-scale, the healing system being so tied to successful combat helps keep an encounter’s obstacles threatening. It is possible to bypass much of Hollow Knight‘s dangers without fighting, but if a slip up is made, no additional resources can be obtained without engaging an enemy. This ensures the player is consistently engaging with the game’s mechanics, and learning to fight as they explore. Ironically, although the healing system exists to keep the player safe, the way it works, hinging on a delicate balance of risk and reward, promotes engaging with the game in such a way that tension is built, and that there remains an ever-present sense of danger.

Not minding your spacing or timing can get you into trouble

Large-scale encounters are where things get really interesting. If the player can heal indefinitely, then how do you build tension in a boss encounter, when the player should theoretically be in the most danger? This is where the ratio of how many hits a player needs to land to restore health, how quickly a heal can be executed, and how frequently a boss attacks the player had to be tightly balanced. As the game goes on bosses will provide smaller and smaller windows of time for the player to heal, but there always must be some possibility of healing or else the system would feel broken. At the same time, by requiring those three all-important melee attacks of the player before allowing them to heal, engaging with the boss’s combat mechanics is essentially enforced, with that aforementioned ratio of hitting-to-getting-hit acting as a sort of design guide for how boss fights should be structured. It gives the designers a pretty good barometer for how to tune the difficulty of Hollow Knight‘s fights. ‘At any given point in the game, the player should be averaging 3 hits against the boss for every 1 hit they take, if they are to defeat it’.

Boss enemies will give you plenty of space to heal, the key is knowing where to find it

This all of course assumes the player can successfully heal against frantically aggressive bugs (the creepy crawly kind, not the game-breaking kind) that want to kill them. Knowing when to attack and when to heal is one of Hollow Knight‘s most essential skills, and it ties in with that relative spacial awareness I’ve mentioned in other topics. The focus spell teaches the player to keep their eyes open for the various tells and telegraphs of their opponent, to be aware of their Knight’s relative position to the enemy, and how to exploit gaps in the enemy’s activity. Utilizing and capitalizing on situational awareness is one of the best ways to make a player can feel powerful or skilled, as though they have some secret knowledge that puts them above the opposition. Gently nudging the player to get good at sneaking in healing spells in-between the boss’s attacks reinforces that feeling. Making meaningful decisions is also how a player stays interested and invested in a game, it’s how to make their agency in the play space feel impactful. Deciding when to start up a heal in Hollow Knight is a meaningful decision, but the game pushes this idea further.

Using SOUL to attack is a risk as you can see in this clip of Hornet… basically whupping my ass

You see, SOUL can be spent not only on healing spells. Early on The Knight will obtain a projectile attack spell called vengeful spirit that deals even more damage than their normal melee strike. Other attack spells will also be obtained at various points throughout the game. These attack spells draw on the same SOUL resource, and cost the same 33 point value as a heal. Suddenly, the player has options in combat. Heal one hit of damage, or deal extra damage? It’s very tempting to go aggro with those powerful spells, especially against tough enemies with deep health pools. If they die quicker, that’s less time the player’s spent potentially making mistakes, after all. So now the player is being made to think critically about the overall situation, weighing their intake of SOUL versus how often they need to heal, factoring in their confidence in their own abilities into how SOUL should be spent. It becomes a series of interesting decisions all happening in rapid, in-the-moment succession. It makes the combat overall more interesting, while also rewarding mastery of the game, as skilled play will allow the player to launch the satisfying and crunchy magic attacks more often while healing less, defeating enemies and bosses more quickly.

As you can see in this clip, I make the impactful, meaningful decision to fail spectacularly

So Hollow Knight‘s healing system accomplishes a lot by playing with the player’s investment of time, sharing a resource with the player’s offensive magic, and tying its efficacy to the player’s success in combat. It creates a satisfying risk-reward experience where the risk is determined by the player’s skill and self-knowledge, as well as a tense and exciting atmosphere in combat.

Very tense. The Knight nearly pee’d their pants here. Do bugs wear pants?

I think it’s worth considering some alternative healing systems games similar to Hollow Knight often employ. Hollow Knight lets you heal indefinitely so long as your combat performance is up to a certain par, but some games will put a hard limit on how much healing you can do before reaching a checkpoint, potion shop, or other such demarcation. Limited quantity healing systems do have some unique strengths. They still give the player ultimate agency over whether and how to use healing resources, like in Hollow Knight, but also give an emphasis on a player’s overall performance, rather than Hollow Knight‘s more moment-to-moment focused system. You can make a lot of mistakes in Hollow Knight but still recover to full strength with some acutely skilled play. With limited quantity healing, you can succeed with skilled play even if you make a lot of mistakes, but the tension will remain high when you’re all out of healing, as your mistakes cannot be undone. Both systems have a lot of potential, depending on what player experience your design is geared toward. I think Hollow Knight‘s implementation is pretty perfect for its world design. With fewer check points and an emphasis on prolonged exploration, it makes sense to make The Knight’s healing resources theoretically indefinite.

Another alternative is health pickups, a very common healing system. In game series like Metroid and Mega Man you can restore health through health pickup items randomly dropped by defeated enemies. This accomplishes a similar end as Hollow Knight‘s healing system, with a safety net against failure being rewarded for successfully fighting enemies. There are a couple of key differences though. For one, health pickups are usually randomly generated by defeated enemies to keep the flow of healing less continuous, and more uncertain. There is a certain excitement unique to finding a healing item right when you most need it. During extended combat encounters without an abundance of targets, such as during a boss fight, naturally there won’t be any health pickups. Games with a health pickup system often try to circumvent this latter issue by throwing smaller enemies into the middle of boss fights that drop health pickups, but that comes with a couple of problems too. For one, the presence of smaller enemies in a boss fight can distract from the fight’s core mechanics and design appeal, especially if it’s meant to be a pitched duel between some important character and the player. For another, that scenario is now rewarding healing for engaging with the small enemies, rather than fighting the boss directly, which may not be the intended experience. Players might spend a lot of time only engaging with smaller enemies to collect health pickups, and ignore the boss. The alternative is simply balancing boss fights such that players aren’t expected to heal during them, or having the boss themselves drop health pickups at various times, but at that point your creeping awfully close to Hollow Knight‘s rather elegant solution anyway.

That elegant solution is not the best way to do healing necessarily, no design scheme is objectively the best one in every situation. It may just be the best one for Hollow Knight though, and it’s hard to argue with the precision of its implementation.

Whew! Got through an entire gameplay analysis of Hollow Knight without once mentioning Dark Souls… wait, damn it.

*Sighs* Bafanada…