game design – Page 3 – Parry Everything

Rethinking ‘Health’ as Game Mechanic: Sekiro’s Verisimilitude

Talking about Sekiro again. Sekiro is a ninja action game by FromSoftware, that involves a lot of sneaking around and backstabbing, but nearly as much sword-to-sword clashing and front-stabbing as well!

A ninja in a red coat and scarf attacks a spearman in an old-japanese-style interior. The ninja is stabbed, but blocks the followup attack, breaking his opponent's guard before stabbing him through. — That beautiful yellow bar there, that’s the posture bar. Love that thing. We’ll get to that.

Verisimilitude! A big word, and one of my favorite ‘game-designerisms’. What exactly does it mean? So if realism is invocation of the real, of reality upon your fiction, verisimilitude in the context of game design is the invocation of what seems real, or rather feels right to give the impression of reality. That distinction might seem fuzzy, but it’s very important. What makes a game realistic is an adherence to the facts of the subject you are simulating, from an objective standpoint. What gives a game strong verisimilitude is a respect for the experience of what you’re trying to depict. In the latter case, it is more important that the gameplay feels right than it is for the game to be objectively close to reality. A horse’s hooves are expected to make a certain sound in television and movies, but this sound is often expected to be the sound of clapping coconut shells, instilled in audiences after many years of the sound effect’s prominence in television and movies. As you can see, creating a fulfilling sense of verisimilitude involves a complex balance of player expectations and affordances. This becomes even more complex, as these things tend to be, when you involve the dimension of interactivity. In Sekiro, I want to talk specifically about the verisimilitude of the game’s sword fighting.

I think one of the things I respect most about Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the design’s willingness to reevaluate even the most fundamental assumptions of action games. The health bar, for one, is ubiquitous in such games. But, if you think about it, ‘health’ as a gameplay mechanic is a little weird, right? There is an arbitrary number representing your opponent’s closeness to death. Maybe the enemy will pull out some stronger ‘desperation moves’ when their health gets low, but so long as it isn’t zero, they can fight as well as they ever have. When that last HP or ‘hit point’ is depleted though, POOF! Their body’s ability to sustain its own weight goes up in smoke and they crumple like their bones have suddenly turned to sawdust. The HP mechanic exists for a reason, it works well. The suspension of disbelief needed to accept this abstraction of how fighting capability works is easy enough to achieve such that most players will not question it, in return for the fun gameplay that HP pools provide. Sekiro wants to go a step further though, and bring the abstraction of their combat closer to a cinematic realization of an idealized sword fight.

A ninja slashes a flurry of blows at a spearman in a old-japanese-style interior. The ninja steps on an oncoming spear attack, knocking it out of the way, then breaks the spearman's guard with a final blow, before stabbing him to death. — The enemy’s posture indicated by a yellow bar above them (the red bar is HP). As the posture bar fills, the enemy is closer to loses their stance.

In reality, a sword fight does not involve two guys hitting each other back and forth until one guy runs out of hit points and collapses. Really, it’s closer to the first guy to land a clean hit… has probably just killed his opponent. So Sekiro has created a system that abstracts this reality – Sekiro is not generally a game about cutting opponents over and over again until you’ve punched out all of their blood, but rather, you strike at opponents as they deflect your blows until you can land a clean hit, killing them instantly. This makes a lot of sense. In a real fight, wearing down your opponents’ defenses, finding ways around their guard, is paramount. Most opponents are not going to just stand there and let you stab them with a sword. The idea Sekiro proposes is that ‘hit points’ are secondary to ‘posture’, or the strength of one’s defenses.

Two ninja duel in a Japanese manor courtyard, one garbed in grey and a mask, one garbed in a red coat and scarf. The masked ninja strikes at the other several times, each time deflected in a flurry of sparks, after the fourth strike, the masked ninja loses his stance, and the red-coat ninja quickly stabs him to death. — clang, clang clang, CLANG. And its over. The nature of the posture system creates a ‘correct’ sense of lethality and back-and-forth in combat.

Posture in Sekiro can be reduced by striking an opponent’s guard to rattle their stance, deflecting their attacks with a well-timed parry, or participating in a number of other contextual maneuvers such as the mikiri counter, a special counter against thrusting attacks, or jumping over enemy sweeping attacks. Posture naturally regenerates over time, and the player or enemy combatants can quickly restore it by holding their position and guard. When posture is completely gone, enemies become vulnerable to a deathblow, which will kill them instantly, while the player becomes stunned if their posture is gone, forcing them to dodge or take a hit. The idea of becoming too tired or psyched-out to defend myself in a tense situation due to relentless pressure from my opponent is much more relatable to me than suddenly exploding into red mist and collectible coins because I was punched one too many times. I am able to, through this system, put a bit of myself in the battle. Feeling my defenses wear down is something I have really experienced, in real life, so that feeling of the real draws me further into the game through Sekiro‘s clever abstraction of the concept.

Deathblows becomes the real hinging point of combat in Sekiro. As I said, whenever an enemy’s posture is depleted, they become vulnerable to the instant-killing deathblow. I say instant-killing, but some enemies can endure two or even three deathblows before really dying. Sekiro takes places in a fictionalized and fantasy-tinged realization of 16th century japan, with inhuman warriors, monsters, and demons, so the idea that a giant ogre-man can survive two ‘clean hits’ before he goes down for good does nothing to hurt the verisimilitude in my estimation. It’s not realistic, but it still feels right. The thought that even the strongest demigod opponents you face can be brought down by just two or three true strikes really grounds the world in a sense of grit and lethality. The illusion is given that life in Sekiro is nearly as fragile as it is in reality, even with divine powers. These ‘deathblow counters’ work brilliantly with Sekiro‘s stealth mechanics as well, as one needs only sneak up on an opponent to get a free deathblow, no risky one-on-one fighting required. The two systems work so well together that I feel I could write an entire article just about that, so I’ll move on for now.

A giant white, headless gorilla charges a ninja in a red coat and scarf in a knee-high spring in a valley. The gorilla, wielding a giant sword and its own severed head, swipes at the ninja. The ninja manages to block, being pushed back by meters with each p;arry. — The verisimilitude of the combat mechanics highlights and heightens the impact of the supernatural elements. So it still works when a beast keeps fighting after decapitation.

Now hit points still exist in Sekiro, but their role has been shifted somewhat. Enemies will still die if their HP reaches zero, though this is much less likely to occur than their posture reaching zero. That’s not to say wearing down your opponent’s HP is pointless. The lower a combatant’s HP is, the slower their posture can regenerate. Now if HP is still meant to represent ‘health’, then this makes a lot of sense. A clean hit is likely to just kill someone in a sword fight, but a series of glancing blows are very likely to make someone less able to defend themselves. Cuts, bruises, a broken finger or two, such things would definitely add up to a poorer and poorer defense, and so this adds to the overall sense of internal consistency in Sekiro‘s combat. No matter the true reality, fighting in Sekiro creates an experience that meets the player’s imagination of how being a sword-fighting ninja would actually work. This level of gradient to the effects of losing HP, where the more injured a combatant, the worse they can defend themselves, addresses much of the inherent weirdness of HP I mentioned earlier, and it does it in such a simple, smart fashion.

Verisimilitude is all well and good, but I wanted to quickly go over some other practical advantages of this system. Since posture is an ever-shifting and renewable resource, it creates a very dynamic tension that can shift back and forth freely as the situation demands. Empowering reversals of fortune on the part of the player are common, as posture greatly rewards consistent performance, making a win when you’re on the ropes a lot more feasible than you might expect. Posture also allows many little tweaks and knobs for the designers to create a great variety of enemy fighting styles based on their posture stats alone. Maybe one boss restores their posture absurdly quickly, but doesn’t have huge stores of it, meaning this boss must only be parried a few times, but they cannot be given the downtime to recover. Maybe another boss has huge stores of posture, but recovers it very slowly. Some enemies might recover posture quickly, but lose this advantage if they’re even a little injured. Etc. There are a huge number of possible variations of these, and Sekiro implements pretty much all of them.

A twelve-foot-tall woman in a skull mask and large monk robes swings a naginata polearm in wide arcs at a ninja in a red coat and scarf, atop a bridge in the mountains, covered in snow and autumn leaves. The ninja is able to deflect several strikes, then steps on the naginata to block it, The ninja cuts the monk twice, then blocks two more strikes, before leaping over a sweeping attack and stomping her shin, breaking her stance, and stabbing her. — The versatility of the posture system can create endurance battles of attrition, or deadly quick-draw duels, depending on context.

Obviously glowing praise is my default position for much of Sekiro‘s systems, but it’s worth mentioning some drawbacks. Sekiro‘s posture system works specifically because of how intense a game it is. It demands constant, focused attention of players in a way that may not be appropriate for every game experience. It’s very much ‘Sekiro‘ but every action game may not benefit from such high levels of gameplay intensity so consistently, and so the posture system isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution that can be injected into every action game without adaptation considerations or consequences. I would like to see more systems like the posture system see popularity, but it is a very delicately balanced system that would demand a lot of care in the implementation. Just plain old HP is much simpler, and it’s been the de facto way to represent combat in so many games for so long for a reason. As I’ve said before, the level of abstraction it creates can be an acceptable tradeoff if it’s supported by a strong combat system, and the simplicity of it fits your game. Another aspect of Sekiro‘s posture system is not only the gameplay intensity, but the intensity on the player’s hand in controlling the thing. The system demands a lot of very rapid and often repetitive inputs that may not be suited for all players. It’s an obvious drawback, perhaps not inherent to a posture system, but correlated to how it’s implemented, and so the system would likely need some fundamental changes and re-tuning to map to a more inclusive suite of control options.

I think the posture system is a great look at how we can rethink the traditionally established rules of how games need to be. Creating new and exciting interactive experiences means being willing to accept that no one game mechanic can be sacred, even if it is ubiquitous. HP bars are so universally standard that any deviation from that mold feels almost alien. The posture system picks apart what HP is meant to represent and repackages it in a way that is extremely conducive to the kind of ninja-action experience Sekiro aims to create, in a way that is evocative of the real, even if it is still very abstract. Sekiro‘s posture system isn’t purely realistic, it’s not what sword combat actually looks like, but it feels very real to experience. It feels like pitched life-or-death battle with high stakes, and real tension.

A ninja man in a red coat and scarf clashes swords with an old woman ninja dual wielding kunai. She jumps from a hidden wire connected to the walls of a crypt-like cellar. Her attacks are deflected repeatedly by the red-coat ninja before losing her stance and being stabbed.

My Lord, I Have Come For You. This… Will Only Take A Moment…

Dark Souls 3’s Brigand Twindaggers or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love Status Effects

It is February 2022, my dudes, and you know what that means. Elden Ring is around the corner and there was absolutely no way I wasn’t going to just talk about Fromsoft games all month. I want to share an interesting experience I found while playing Dark Souls 3 as it pertains to a specific weapon found in the game, the brigand twindaggers. This is less a breakdown of this weapon’s moveset or particular attributes and more a little anecdote about how the daggers won me over once Dark Souls 3 had sold me on using status effects on my weapons, and the subsequent analysis that followed.

In RPGs with character customization I love to bring in my own stock of characters to populate the world, and there are some old standbys I revisit frequently, such as a thief who wields a pair of daggers, whom is often my player character in Fromsoft games. If at all possible, I will deck out my characters in their appropriate gear. I kind of like the RP side of RPG that way.

In Fromsoft’s Bloodborne, an action RPG that preceded Dark Souls 3, there is a weapon called the blades of mercy, a sword that can transform into a pair of daggers. I often refer to this weapon as a lawnmower – it absolutely shreds enemies to pieces with a massive amount of damage output. It scales incredibly well with Bloodborne‘s equivalent of the dexterity attribute, and its moveset is a flowing, seamless series of rapid strikes. Its the most satisfying to use pair of daggers in any of Fromsoft’s games to that point, so I had high hopes and expectations when it was revealed that Dark Souls 3 would have, as a new feature, paired weapons – weapons that come in a set, made specifically for dual wielding. I went over the game with a fine-toothed comb when I got it, clamoring to find a pair of daggers. Surely if paired weapons were a thing, I’d find dual wield knives.

And so I found them, and it quickly became difficult to contain my disappointment. Compared to Fromsoft’s previous outing with dual wielded daggers, these brigand twindaggers had a slower moveset with a much longer startup, and tremendously pathetic damage by comparison. They didn’t even scale that well with dexterity. I tried to like them, and tried to use them throughout my first play-through, I really did. In the end, there were just so many better speedy weapons, whose damage scaled so much better, that I could really not justify using the daggers any longer. I ended up embracing my inner edgelord and used a paired katana and wakizashi, two japanese style swords, as their damage output was insane compared to the daggers.

I had a blast on my first playthrough of Dark Souls 3, but I always regret not making a player build I was satisfied with involving the daggers. It didn’t feel true to my player character to not have him using knives, and I wished the knives were better. They didn’t really need to be though, after some experimentation, I would discover I just needed to change my approach. It started when I saw a player versus player showcase of the brigand twindaggers. The very skilled video author was destroying human opponents, seemingly with ease, utilizing the weapon I had condemned as largely useless. His secret? The daggers were enhanced with a bleeding effect. The Dark Souls series has always had weapon status effects, special attributes that can be applied to weapons to make them debilitate enemies in specific ways, applied if enemies are hit enough times rapidly. Primarily, this takes the form of bleed weapons and poison weapons.

On two pedestals, side-by-side, sits a jagged stone covered in a shiny oozing red liquid, dribbling onto one pedestal. On the other, a pair of curved knives crossed over each other. — Like peanut butter and jelly.

Enhancing a weapon in Dark Souls always modifies its base damage and damage scaling in some way. Status effect weapons on the whole tend to deal a lot less base damage as a tradeoff, and so I’d often shy away from them not just in Fromsoft games but in RPGs in general. It just felt like it was an unnecessary extra step, compared to simply dealing more damage directly. But I wanted those daggers to work, so I gave it a try. In Dark Souls bleed is a status effect that builds up by hitting your target repeatedly, and when it’s built up completely, the victim loses a large chunk of their health to a hemorrhage, all at once. It’s a rather cool mechanic that gives the player a smaller micro-goal to achieve while fighting enemies, that is, quickly building up bleed, in addition to just fighting. It makes for an interesting playstyle and when I tried it out, I found I was having a ton more fun than before. Even when modified, the daggers still deal similar damage to their sharpened variant, and yet now acted as a powerful poison or open wound delivery system.

An undead wrapped in tattered garb thrashes two daggers at a frostbitten undead ghoul, in a snowy medieval city. The ghoul gushes blood as they are struck. After several hits, the ghoul's health indicator suddenly takes a large amount of damage. — See how quickly enemies vulnerable to bleed pop like balloons? It’s a great time, all round.

Status effects in Dark Souls 3 just work. Astounding. But why is this such a pain point for me in so many other RPGs? What is it about Dark Souls 3 in particular that makes it work? I think I’ve identified a few factors that majorly contributed to my enjoyment of using bleed and poison variants of the brigand twindaggers. First off…

It Works

Yeah okay so this one is a little self explanatory. Players aren’t likely to use a game mechanic that doesn’t work, obviously. It goes deeper than that though, players aren’t likely to use a game mechanic that isn’t effective. Every enemy in the game could be vulnerable to bleed, but if it only did a piddly pathetic amount of damage nobody would care enough to go that route. Thankfully bleed is very effective, and can often kill enemies even faster than raw damage. It was also seen fit to make nearly every enemy in the game vulnerable to bleed, a very wise decision. Some are resistant to it, some weak to it, but only a handful are completely invulnerable to bleed. Was this point even worth mentioning? Yeah I think so. Each of these points is something I’ve seen failed in many many games before. There are tons of games where status effects are simply unreliable to the point of near-uselessness. What good is a poison effect if it takes a dozen tries before it actually sticks? What’s more, what is the point if the poison is super hard to apply, but it barely does anything as a result? By then I could have just beaten by opponent to death with a stick. Floundering around with weak status effects feels terrible, and they need to be at least as viable as the more straightforward option.

It Works On Bosses

I cannot stress this one enough. Nothing will make me drop a combat mechanic which requires a time investment more definitively than seeing it is ineffective against boss encounters. Often in combat centric games bosses are the height of the combat system, pushing it to its limit where the most fun to be had is, or even the central axis about which the rest of the gameplay turns. If a combat mechanic breaks down in a boss fight, as a player I often feel as though it’s not worth my time. Status effects work on bosses in Dark Souls 3, generally, or at least frequently enough that I never find myself despairing at the futility of using them.

It is so strange to me that so many RPGs see fit to make bosses immune to status effects. On the one hand I can see the perspective – status effects tend to be very powerful in certain contexts, especially when they are not direct damage dealers, like disables or other utility effects, and one does not want to trivialize combat encounters. And yet. If one has been relying on a certain game mechanic, they begin to take ownership of it as a playstyle. They feel clever or powerful for utilizing it. Taking it away at the most crucial encounter feels awful. There are ways to design around the brute force method of just making bosses immune. Perhaps bosses are merely resistant, and incur a diminished form of status effects applied to them. Perhaps bosses have the ability to remove their own status effects under the right circumstances, or perhaps they last less time. Perhaps status effects are balanced as such to simply be generally useful, but not overly powerful against bosses. I think it’s rarely ever wrong to let players think around a problem, and removing a strategic tool such as status effects from their arsenal, when they can be employed elsewhere feels like player punishment.

In Dark Souls 3, applying a bleed effect deals a flat chunk of damage to enemies, usually enough to kill lesser foes. On bosses, it’s merely a nice step toward their defeat, but not an utter showstopper by any stretch. For bosses that may be felled too quickly if they are bled out repeatedly, it was decided they would be resistant to bleed effects. You can still get that extra damage, and it’s not that hard to do, it just takes a little longer, and the balance is kept that way. There are some enemies and bosses which are immune to bleeding, but not nearly enough to make me question the status effect’s efficacy, and what’s more it contributes to the overall fiction of the game, which has to do with my next point.

Strong Feedback

Dark Souls 3 has very strong audio-visual feedback for when you’re wailing on an enemy. Blood shoots out in exaggerated sprays along with a crunchy *squelch*ing sound with each strike of your weapon. Against armor, you can hear the rattling clang of steel on steel. This is obviously good design from a gamefeel standpoint, but it also provides the very useful advantage of illustrating what can and cannot be inflicted with a status effect. Hitting stuff that can be bled tends to use that exaggerated blood graphic I mentioned, but things that are resistant or immune will show less blood when struck, or none at all.

A well-armored women swings a wrist-mounted blade at a cage full of reanimated corpses. Blood shoots out when it is struck, and after several hits, an explosion of blood gushes from it. — A cage full of reanimated corpses? Can the cage bleed? Kind of ambiguous, except that it shoots blood off when hit. Okay so it can be inflicted with bleed!

I’ve mentioned that some enemies are immune to status effects and how that enhances the fiction of Dark Souls 3. What I mean by that is, it is effectively intuitive what enemies can and cannot bleed. Bulbous fleshy beasts, dripping and shambling undead, living creatures. Things that obviously have blood, are all vulnerable to the bleed effect. Things like enchanted empty suits of armor, a giant tree, skeletons. These things obviously do not have blood, and thus do not bleed. It seems like a simple trick not to miss, but yet again I’ve seen this very concept done poorly too often. Consistency is key. The player shouldn’t have to guess, or at least not guess blindly whether or not their combat tools will even work. Obviously you can’t bleed a skeleton, but obviously you can bleed a giant rat. Design the game so players can trust their own eyes and ears, and the play experience will feel much more seamless. Immunities and resistances should have logical reasoning grounded in the rules of the real world, even if the game takes place in a fantastic one, so your player has a hint of familiarity with which they can decipher the rules of your game.

An undead wrapped in tattered garb thrashes two daggers at a giant rat with exposed wounds. The rat gushes blood as it is hit, and quickly keels over dead. — Giant fleshy rat with exposed red meat? Blood pinata. Spooky skeleton? Not so much. Notice the understated hit effect on the skeleton vs. the huge amount of blood on the rat.

An undead wrapped in tattered garb thrashes two daggers at a cloaked skeleton in an dank catacomb. The skeleton takes damage. but the hit effects against it are dull and understated. — Giant fleshy rat with exposed red meat? Blood pinata. Spooky skeleton? Not so much. Notice the understated hit effect on the skeleton vs. the huge amount of blood on the rat.

We’ll have to come up with some **other** clever solution to deal with the skeletons

Conclusion

So I guess my takeaways from this experience are twofold: certain weapons can be satisfying to use in how they fulfill certain gameplay niches. The brigand twindaggers are an excellent status effect tool in how they apply effects quickly through rapid hits. My other takeaway is that a lot of games could do status effects in a much more satisfying way that makes them feel powerful and useful, something a lot of the designs I’ve seen are often too bashful about. They can be a viable alternative gameplay style all their own, you just need to put in the legwork to make sure this gameplay style feels strong and effective. Locking it out of boss fights makes it feel like a lesser, illegitimate gameplay style, an afterthought. Players should be able to discern the applicability of status effects with audio and visuals alone, without having to consult a wiki. Overall, I think status effects can be underappreciated in games mostly because they so often could be implemented better. When games get it right, I think it’s worth giving a closer look to see exactly what went right. Status effects in Dark Souls 3 were fun enough to use, and strong enough to completely reverse my opinion of an entire weapon’s implementation.

An undead wrapped in tattered garb thrashes two daggers at a giant armored mage wielding a flaming staff. in a snowy medieval city. The mage gushes blood as they are struck. After several hits, the mage's health indicator suddenly takes a large amount of damage.

Such weapons inflict lacerating damage. Most effective with sharp or spiked weapons…

Boss Breakdown: The Ender Dragon

I had one of those weeks. You know the type. An update for worldwide phenomenon Minecraft, survival-based multiplayer sandbox game in which all the world is cubes that can be deconstructed and rebuilt as the player desires with enough energy and time, came out recently. So some friends decided to boot up a new multiplayer server, and there goes all of my free time for the week. We just accomplished Minecraft‘s nominal win condition for its survival mode, the condition which triggers the game’s strange credits sequence; killing a creature known as the Ender Dragon.

Minecraft is a game that, by its very nature does not lend itself to a win condition at all. Even in survival mode, at its core Minecraft opens itself to players defining their own goals and aspirations. Perhaps you wish to build a tall, imposing tower, or a glass city under the sea. Maybe you just want to explore and find beautiful landscapes, or dig into an enemy stronghold and steal their treasure. Maybe you want to raise animals, or start a zoo, or automate the production of gunpowder. All of these things are possible in the game, and none of them really have anything to do with, nor contribute to, the process of killing a dragon, at least not directly. Minecraft isn’t really a combat game, you see. Sure, it has combat in it, and there’s even some nuance to how it works, but it isn’t exactly a challenging set of deep mechanics one is naturally predisposed toward mastering, especially when Minecraft is so rewarding towards its other forms of play, such as digging, landscaping, crafting, and building. All that aside, it was decided Minecraft would have an overriding game-defined goal.

So met with the quandary are we, how does one design a boss for a game in which, A: combat is barely involved, and B: is primarily a game of non-combat mechanics like traversal, building, and uh, mining and crafting. The Ender Dragon is an interesting example of this idea in practice. There are a lot of cool ideas the design of the Ender Dragon utilizes to make it interesting within the context of Minecraft’s unique suite of sandbox game mechanics. If I were to make an appraisal of its overall success in this regard, I’d say the Ender Dragon is… okay. It is at once somewhat convoluted yet also simplistic, and more than a little janky. I’ll get into a little more detail, but overall the fight is fun, and though I don’t think it is the utmost pinnacle of this idea, it is one of the most popular – Minecraft is played by millions, and is in a unique position to examine this idea of boss fights or boss-fight like gameplay engagements for games that are not primarily about combat.

From a first person perspective, a person stands atop a high obsidian pillar, while shooting arrows at a black dragon made of cubes, who flies and circles in the distance. Another minecraft guy stands atop a second nearby pillar and shoots fire arrows at the dragon.

The Ender Dragon encounter is primarily a player-directed boss fight, meaning that the pace and rhythm of the fight is directed by the player, rather than by restricting rules of the boss’s environment. The player directs their interaction with the environment, rather than the other way around. The Ender Dragon is a large black winged beast that breathes fire and flies around an isolated island in an empty void. Her behavior consists of several states which she cycles through, with a preference for certain states over others depending on the status of the structures surrounding the outer edges of her boss arena, called End Crystals. The dragon will dive at players occasionally, and being buffeted by her wings can send players careening off into a lethal fall if they’re not careful. Whilst circling above, the dragon will launch fire balls that leave pools of deadly fire-like substance that persist for some time. Minecraft does not have extremely robust combat mechanics as I mentioned, and dodging usually just means moving to where the danger is not. The fire pools can be irritating, still, them lingering encourages players to dig and build around persistent obstacles.

From a first person perspective, a person digs into the side of a stone wall with a pickaxe, then further up to reveal purple sky above the dug hole. Outside the whole, several blocky minecraft guys scramble around a pool of purple fiery gas. — Burying yourself underground is a viable strategy, like some sort of gopher or marmot

So essentially what’s going on, is that these Ender Crystals want to be destroyed. Some can be sniped with projectiles, but some have protection that needs to be dug through, and to do that you need to build a scaffold up to their elevated location. If you don’t destroy these, the dragon stays in the air and restores her health. The design is suggesting the player utilize their building skills to solve the problem, which is good. Building is one of Minecraft‘s most fun and robust features, so it’s good to lean into for a boss fight. It’s a little straightforward though, there isn’t much developed knowledge of building technique needed to build up to these crystals. What’s most restrictive is simply the intimidation factor of the dragon, and outside of that there’s not much to it, as far as the end crystals are concerned.

Another strange quirk of this fight is the presence of many Endermen monsters in the area. Endermen are some of the strongest, most deadly, and most aggressive enemies in the game, but only when provoked. They can be provoked by attacking them, or by centering one’s camera on theirs. The Enderman’s relatable aversion to being perceived translates to a need for avoiding eye (camera) contact with them. I can’t speak too much for others’ strategy, but I always find myself look down at my feet during this encounter, as though my character is just really embarrassed to be there. It’s strange challenge – having to be wary of where your camera is pointing, not just where you character is standing. It does fit with the dragon being an Ender Dragon, as the Enderman monster, which can be encountered outside this fight, and isn’t all that uncommon in the overworld, always abides by this eye-contact rule. It does give the player another plate to spin, but it may feel claustrophobic and a little artificial to some. I can’t help but wonder how this fight might be improved if the designer can rely on the player having full freedom of motion with their camera.

From a first person perspective, a person shoots a bow and arrow at a black dragon made of blocks, flying around in circles below. The person stands atop a tall obsidian pillar.

In the bottom left corner of the display, a dialogue states that several allies have been killed by Endermen. — The Endermen live up to their name

One of the things I find most commendable about the design of the Ender Dragon is how open to various forms of problem solving it is, and how it accounts for the many methods a player might used to dethroning it. Minecraft offers players a huge number of tools with which to solve problems as they explore the world. For instance, the dragon usually is flying around the sky, out of reach of Minecraft‘s most common weapon, the sword. It can, of course be shot with range weapons such as arrows, but the dragon will also frequently land to rest after the End Crystals are dealt with, making it vulnerable to melee attacks. This is one solution. Since the dragon will land and stay stationary for a time, it’s also possible to load up her roost with explosives and set them off like a trap.

From a first-person perspective, a person runs up to a roosted Black dragon made of cubes and places a white bed on the ground, which then promptly explodes in their face, catapulting them into the sky. — Yup. Working as intended.

The dragon’s fire can be dangerous to those walking across her arena’s surface. Of course, Minecraft, being a game about building and digging, it’s totally possible to dig a safe series of tunnels under the arena to move around, or build up cover to protect from the dragon’s fire balls. Climbing up to reach the End Crystals poses another challenge, one that can be tackled in several ways. Shooting the crystals with projectiles is possible, but some are encased in shields that need to be removed. Building up to them with blocks is an option, or placing water (which can inexplicably be swam up in Minecraft) also works. Gravity is an ever-present threat in this encounter, so it’s wise to have some way to address it. Careful use of water can break any fall, or enchantment to one’s boots renders great falls less lethal, or you can drink a potion to fall more slowly. The point is, in Minecraft there are a myriad of ways to approach any given problem, and the dragon neatly accommodates nearly all of them.

From a first person perspective, a person is falling down the side of a tall obsidian pillar. As they approach the ground, they dump a bucket of water onto the side of the pillar, whose contents miraculously breaks their fall. The person then eats a slab of steak. — The tools of dragonslaying: steak, a four poster bed, and a bucket of water

The existence of the crystals is evidence of this. They exist apart from the dragon, at stationary, elevated points. If you want to destroy them up close, they require you to reach their elevated location, likely with building. Building during a dragon attack is a pretty compelling idea, and having to build up to your target seems like a natural fit for a boss fight in Minecraft. There is some inherent risk and reward to how one approaches building up to them. You can build straight up, or try for a more cautious staircase, or perhaps build up to one crystal, then create a bridge to the others.

Another advantage of Minecraft‘s immense suite of problem solving tools is how it frames the fight against the dragon. It is a difficult undertaking, even with a group of friends cooperating. There are a lot of hazards to look out for, so preparation is key. Minecraft is, in a lot of ways a game of preparation. Each night, hostile monsters will appear and overwhelm the unwary, but a solid roof over your head, and an ample supply of food will get you through. Bigger challenges in Minecraft harbor greater risks, and protective enchantments, armor, potions, special food, animal companions, building materials, etc. can all lighten the load. There’s a special sense of camaraderie when all of your buddies convene at a central location to swap enchanted bows and arrows, high-quality armor, and buckets of water in preparation for a great adventure. The Ender Dragon’s accommodation for all these varied modes of tackling problems is one of the best parts about it, regardless of other shortcomings. It’s the context and framing of this boss fight, I think, that creates its greatest moments.

Blocky minecraft guys in armor run around an enclosed space made of gray bricks. There are boxes, chests, and supplies piled around the room. One guy runs up a staircase at room's center and repeatedly crouches and stands. — Just messing around is truly the essence of this game

Whether Minecraft players wanted it or not, the Ender Dragon is the unambiguous overriding goal of a Minecraft ‘playthrough’, its final boss. Is the Ender Dragon a culmination of the skills and knowledge a Minecraft player accrues during their journey to the End? Well, kind of. The levels of preparation and supplies gathering players can engage in is huge in scope. There’s all sorts of stuff you can gather and build to prepare for this fight, and gathering/building is one of the most fun things you can do in the game. In my opinion, the experience is only heightened when a group of friend communally pool their resources to maximize the chances of success. The fight itself is a little convoluted, with the disparate Ender Crystal targets, apart from the dragon itself, but also somewhat dead simple in the very limited suite of behaviors the Ender Dragon can actually engage in. Having to utilize building or similar methods to reach the Ender Dragon’s crystal weak points is compelling and fits with Minecraft’s gameplay, although it’s a somewhat blunt and simplistic implementation. I find the Ender Dragon’s overall design commendable in a lot of ways, and I do look forward to the challenge as a fun communal activity with friends, but it feels under-designed in several ways. Sometimes putting a dragon boss fight into a game like Minecraft feels like hammering a square peg into a round hole. Still, I think there’s a lot to praise about and learn in regards how to approach these sorts of challenges in games that don’t primarily utilized combat as a central game mechanic.

A black dragon made of cubes slowly rises into the air as it disintegrates, a purple light emanating from it, then it explodes.

And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream…

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…

Sonic’s Famous ‘Health’ System, The Rings

Sonic The Hedgehog is an exquisite corpse of a franchise with a history as deep, interesting, and confusing and some of earth’s mightiest empires. You could fill volumes on the ins and outs of this thing. I cannot deny, I love this weird little rodent and his weird little world immensely. Yes, I’m as excited as anyone for Sega’s next absurd windstorm of a Sonic title, despite all the, uh, feedback, I’m about to unleash. Sonic has had some very high highs for me, and it’s a series that does certain things in gameplay that have never quite been captured elsewhere. There’s a laundry list of things people like to complain about in regards to this series, and I’d probably agree on most fronts too. Instead of the usually suspects, though, I want to complain about something I haven’t seen brought up before. It’s something that’s been with Sonic since the beginning, actually.

I don’t know if this is something that only bothers me. Perhaps that’s why I feel the need to get this jotted down and explore my feelings about it, but the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise’s rings system is weird, right? In Sonic The Hedgehog, and near every sequel and spinoff to that game since, rings have acted as the primary collectible – a sometimes currency, sometimes score counter, and almost always a barrier against the failure state. While rings in Sonic games frequently have some use within the game that make them valuable, their primary purpose is to prevent a Game Over. When Sonic is hit by an enemy or obstacle, he’ll lose all the rings he’s collected, spilling them out into game space, where they can be re-collected. If Sonic is again hit without any rings, the failure state engages, and Sonic is returned to the last checkpoint.

Grassy Cliffs. Sonic The Hedgehog walks into a beetle robot, losing rings, which scatter out in a circle from him. Sonic then destroys the robot by spinning into a ball. (Sonic The Hedgehog) — Gameplay this week sourced from Evolution of Sonic getting hit and losing rings (1991-2021)

To elaborate on what bothers me about this system I went and tried to elaborate on what makes a compelling health or damage system in general. To me, there are three things to guide the design of a successful player health system. A successful health system may include one or all of these. First, the health system provides a balance knob by which the designer may tune how many mistakes a player can make before incurring a greater failure state like a Game Over. It makes for a pretty simple tool to balance the game. If it’s too hard, players can simply be given more health or ways to restore their health. Furthermore, this balance can change as the player collects upgrades and gets stronger, or encounters more deadly enemies. It’s good for tuning the interest curve. Secondly, health systems can create a sense of tension or danger, to shore up the threat of the player’s opposition. Instant death makes for threatening enemies too, but that little bit of anticipation a more graduated health system provides, as the player slowly watches their strength wane with each hit they incur, it exaggerates and emphasizes that danger. Third, health systems can be used to incentivize players in interesting ways to guide the gameplay, by tweaking how it is that players regain or maintain their health through specific behaviors. Doom 2016’s glory kills, which reward aggression when the player is low on health, comes to mind.

So how does the blue blur do on all of these fronts? Well, the ring system is rather limited in that having rings only prevents Sonic’s defeat through a single mistake, before more rings have to be collected. In this way it doesn’t do much for balance. By virtue of how the system works, rings are always available when you get hit, unless you’re over a bottomless pit and will just die from the fall regardless. Rings are also plentiful enough in the world that tense moments of danger are few and far between. This is a good thing in a sense, Sonic is a game about flow and freedom, less one about oppression or danger. The result, though, is often that getting hit is just annoying – a disruption to that flow- more than anything else. Sonic gets a lot of its somewhat undeserved reputation of excessive simplicity from this. It’s hard to fail (instant death traps aside), and very easy to get annoyed.

Grassy Hills. Sonic The Hedgehog walks into a moving robot and loses rings, which fall into the foreground and off the screen. (Sonic The Hedgehog 2) — I feel like this ‘scattering rings everywhere’ thing works better in the 2D games, generally. With one less axis to worry about, it feels less restrictive.

Finally, rings are indeed a highly incentivizing aspect of Sonic games, especially those of which have a store in which rings can be exchanged for prizes, although this brings up an important point. I feel as though rings are desirable more for their excellent audio-visual design and feedback. It’s fun simply to hear and see the cheery, shiny sound and sparks of collecting them, and watching the ring counter go up, rather than for any practical gameplay reason. The reason for this is that collecting an excess of rings does very little to contribute towards the player’s success. Sure, having a certain minimum number of rings makes it far less likely you won’t be able to pick up another ring before it disappears, once the player gets hit. However, there is a maximum number of rings that can actually be displayed on screen before any excess rings simply evaporate. You get no real advantages having 200 rings over having 20 rings. So, Sonic‘s health system doesn’t do much to incentivize interesting gameplay. On the contrary, actually, since having a single ring can theoretically keep Sonic alive indefinitely, the player isn’t really incentivized to learn about their obstacles or enemies because getting hit doesn’t have much of an impact or consequence. Some Sonic games have attempted to address this, by having Sonic only lose a fraction of his ring total on hit. The results are a similarly toothless health system, in which hoarding large numbers of rings essentially trivializes any threat enemies could possibly pose, without addressing any of my other issues with the system.

Sunny Beach. Sonic The Hedgehog dashes through the air, but is hurt by a tank-like robot, losing rings which scatter on the ground. (Sonic Adventure) — Stop to pick them up, or ignore them and keep going. Kind of just pointless or disruptive.

One thought I’ve had on it is how starkly getting hit in this game kills momentum. I get it, it’s kind of the point. In lieu of a persistent tracker for how many mistakes the player makes, getting hit simply means halting forward motion, which means you don’t hit that all important state of flow that makes Sonic games so enjoyable. That annoyance is your incentive to get better at avoiding obstacles. At the same time though, if that’s what we assume the player wants – to go fast- then it is odd that rings are scattered around the player when they’ve bit hit at random, or in the case of the 3D games, in every direction on the floor. Surely, we only want to incentivize the player to go in one direction – forward. If a player wants to re-collect some of their lost rings, as they surely would, then they can’t immediately continue their forward momentum where they left off, they have to take a moment to mill about collecting the rings. It’s just a bit odd. Elsewhere in Sonic games, free-floating rings are used as signposts to guide that sense of forward momentum for the player. If you see a path of rings, it’s generally a clear and safe path forward to gaining speed.

Sci-Fi cityscape. Sonic The Hedgehog, Knuckles, and Tails run into a robot turtle, getting hurt and scattering rings on the ground. (Sonic Heroes) — Sonic Heroes loves to kill forward momentum. It’s basically its favorite thing.

Losing rings normally does not create much of a sense of tension for me either. Getting hit in a Sonic game rarely creates any palpable danger for Sonic, outside of falling into instant death pits. This all-or-nothing approach makes enemies in Sonic games rather toothless, until they aren’t in very specific scenarios, which can often feel cheap – as though the difference between losing some rings and having to start over is outside of the player’s control. You lose any sense that dangerous things in the world are actually dangerous, and more like the environments are dangerous in a way that’s almost arbitrary.

Beach Pier. Sonic The Hedgehog walks into a robot crab, getting hurt and scattering rings everywhere. (Sonic Advanced) — Are we really expecting the player to double back and chase those rings here?

What if, instead of spraying rings in every direction, when Sonic is hit, rings fly out ahead of Sonic relative to the direction he’s moving, so that when it comes time to re-collect rings, Sonic needs to keep moving forward in the direction he was going? He needs to regain his lost speed to regain what was lost. First of all this make sense. If Sonic is losing speed and letting go of his rings at the same time, they should logically pour out in front of him as they retain their previous speed. That’s a secondary concern, but not an unimportant one. I think making the rings behave realistically that way could contribute to keeping the gameplay flow even when Sonic gets hit, which is my primary concern here. The main thing this would accomplish is keeping the re-collection of lost rings as a harmonious part of simply playing the game, which is to say, running forward. Sonic is all about doing things while running forward – defeating enemies while running, avoiding traps while running, and yes, collecting rings while running. In this scenario not only is there a greater challenge, a greater uncertainty of re-collecting what was lost that calls on player skill, but it’s far less disruptive, not requiring the player to behave in a less fun and interesting way as punishment for being hit. On the contrary, your punishment for being hit is a momentary increase in intensity and demand of skill, or in other words, a heightening of tension.

Grassy Hills. Sonic runs into a beetle robot, getting hurt and scattering rings a small distance ahead of him. (Sonic Generations) — When I say ‘fly out ahead of sonic’, I mean send the rings into the distance, so you have to like, build up speed and run after them. Maybe we could even ease up on the ‘knock Sonic on his ass’

Sonic is as inseparable from his rings as Mario is from his coins, which was the point, of course, when Sonic was invented in the 90s. Sonic was meant as a counterpoint to Mario, to stand out as different. He’s younger, faster, and has an attitude. His game is about speed, and his collectibles serve as health, in a way. It’s certainly novel enough to have survived about a billion iterations on Sonic games, but I’ve never totally understood how it fits in a game that’s about speed. Everything good that I love about the Sonic franchise is somewhat apart from this one odd yet oddly persistent gameplay mechanic. The classics like Sonic can provide a useful lens to see how certain design goals can be successfully executed. However, I’d never want to design something in a way just because that’s how it’s always been done. The weird ring system has its advantages, like near any mechanic in the right circumstances, but I’m still skeptical it’s the best solution for what Sonic is and could be.

Grassy tube-shaped planetoid. Sonic The Hedgehog walks into a beetle robot, getting hurt and scattering rings in a circle around him. (Sonic Lost World)

Don’t give up on the sun. Don’t make the sun laugh at you…

Yes, that is a real Sonic quote.

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…