Insights from Sirlin.net

My Interview with Edge

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:25:54 -0800

This interview with Edge took place at the Montreal International Game Summit. It's my usual controversial stuff that should not be even the slightest bit controversial.

Here's the link.

MIGS: Ken Rolston

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:36:19 -0800

Ken Rolston: Old guy you should listen to.I'm a few weeks late on this report from the Montreal International Game Summit, so let's see what we can do from memory only and no notes!

I found Ken Rolston's presentation to be accidentally highly self-referential. Before explaining that, let's look at his ridiculous summary of what is presentation was about:

The road to success as a narrative designer is long and arduous. But you don't want to hear that. So Ken Rolston, Internationally Celebrated Lead Designer of Oblivion, Morrowind, and other light classics, will reveal the carefully hoarded treasury of cheap tricks and short cuts that enable him to avoid Real Work. In this fast-paced and charming presentation, Rolston delivers the box of tools, lavishly illustrates their use in the production of Rolston's Great Works, and teaches you how to project a shallow but persuasive mastery of the craft of narrative game design.

I read that and thought, "wait, he's kidding right?" He avoids real work, he's charming, he's Internationally Celebrated with capital letters, and he will teach us to project a "shallow but persuasive mastery of the craft"? Ha!

I can't convey the actual content of his presentation because there was way too much. In fact, he started the presentation by explaining the "spew principle." If he spews so much information at us that we can't process it all, we'll have the warm feeling of discovery (of all the tools and principles he will spew), but no time to be critical. This will cause us to enjoy the talk and to like him, he said.

If you want a taste of the actual content, you can check out his terribly designed PowerPoint slides here. But I'd rather give you a sense of his tone. Ken mentions here and there how great he is, and we all know it's a joke (because we are not idiots from the internet, possibly?). He tells us how he manipulates his employees, players, and even us in the audience--and we laugh, but he's kind of not kidding. He's just on the edge of whether he's kidding or not, so you can't really be offended, but he sneaks in the sad truth.

The self-reference comes from these two pieces of advice Rolston gave us about narrative: 1) recognize that you have a distinctive voice, and that you should express it in game-narrative and 2) you probably want your world to be serious so it feels more real, but you also want to have the player and designer wink at each other, too.

I don't think it was really on purpose that Rolston's presentation embodied these two ideas: it's just how he is. He has a unique voice and he can't help but express it in a presentation. Also, his presentation is ultimately serious in that he explained many principles of narrative design, but he also seems to be delivering deadpan humor half the time, too. Take this example. Rolston explained that the type of game he makes involves having a big team of developers so a big part of his job is explaining his ideas to everyone. He showed a few simple techniques for this (making a clickable map of the game made of simple symbols, each location giving info from the point of view of the locals who live there), but he also had some management tips for us....

Bad Chemicals

He said he brings a giant box of donuts to work in the morning. They are the most sugary ones he can find and filled with "bad chemicals." He says

Brenda Brathwaite, again

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:09:18 -0800

Brenda contacted me, and seemed not too offended about my write-up about her talk, ha. She did offer several clarifications though.

First, she says that there is only 1 copy of Train, not 6 copies. The number 6 referred to the number of games in the series of games she's making of which Train is just 1. Mexican Kitchen Workers is another of the 6 games, I think.

She had this to say about the rules of Train:

Regarding the rules of Train, think of them as the rules of Wizardry combat. At some point, I need user input or the game just becomes a simulation. Train requires these user inputs at very specific times. It also takes advantage of the tendency I have seen in Euro rules - if it is not expressly prohibited by the rules, then it may be allowed by the rules.

I must have a different impression of Euro games though, because to me they are games with extremely iron-clad rules, as opposed to games that leave parts of the rules up to the players. Anyway, she also commented on why she hasn't made the rules available on the net: she doesn't want a computerized version of the game created, she says.

Next, my statement that none of the players ever say "Oh it's the Holocaust" was not right. Many players said that, she says. What she meant was that during an actual session of the game, if one player discovers this mid-way through, he or she never seems to share this information with other players who haven't figured it out yet. Fascinating behavior, says Brenda (I agree). This is what I meant in the first place, by the way, that DURING a play session no one tends to ruin the revelation for others, but my previous post might have been unclear on that.

Finally, I asked Brenda if she had played Ayiti, because it's an example of a replayable game with well-defined rules that aims to make players really feel something. I personally think that game is very successful at its goal (as is Train, by the way), and that maybe its methods are something we should be trying to replicate. Brenda of course knows of the game, but said:

I am holding off on playing Ayiti until I've completed my own game that deals with the same geographical area. I'd like not to be influenced by that.

Thanks for the follow-up, Brenda!

MIGS: Chris Hecker

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:17:33 -0800

Chris HeckerChris Hecker always seems like the smartest guy in the room. Even when the room is big and full of lots of people, he still seems like the smartest guy in the room. He's a hardcore programmer who fights crime at night and can fly. Here's a sample of his everyday conversations:

We use a 4th order polynomial in the squared distance from the sample point to the center of the given metaball for the implicit surface, similar to Triquet, Meseure, and Chaillou. They use a 2nd order polynomial, but we square the main term again to get more continuous derivatives to avoid lighting discontinuities. The actual equation is:
$c i$ is the metaball center position, $R i$ is the metaball radius (the function is defined to be 0 outside this radius), and $s i$ is the scale factor for the metaball, affecting its goopiness.

Anyway, he often talks about non-programmery stuff at conferences so that the rest of us can learn something from him, too. At the Montreal International Game Summit, he talked about the game industry as a whole. He looked at a lot of data and I'm not able to pass that on to you because I don't have it, so instead I'll cover more holistically what his point was.

The Game Industry Is Bigger Than Movies

Hecker started by showing several stats that show the game industry is bigger than the movie industry. We make more revenue per year, our biggest blockbusters pull in as much or more cash than movie blockbusters in the opening weeks, and so on. Even though there's lots of convincing figures that support this overall claim, Hecker says that it's all basically bullshit.

The Game Industry Isn't Bigger Than Movies

Hecker told us about the Sultan of Brunei, a man who owns 6,000 cars

MIGS: Brenda Brathwaite

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:35:37 -0800

Brenda Brathwaite

EDIT: Brenda contacted me and I posted some corrections to this article here.

I don't know what to make of Brenda; I was kind of dumbfounded and speechless after her presentation. Brenda probably would (and should) take that as a compliment because that is the reaction that a true artist hopes to achieve with a work of art. (Does that make her a true artist or does it make her a work of art?) I will explain the big praise I have for her work, the big criticism, the reason my criticism isn't valid, and the nagging feeling that it somehow must be valid. Or I don't know anymore.

First some background on her. She is a professor of game development and interactive design at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. At 15 years old, she got a job where she played games in order to know enough about them to answer phones at a gaming hint-line. She said she was going to get a "real job" after that, but it just never happened. She went on to work on Wizardry and several other story-based video games.

A Game That Meant Something

Now let's cover what I consider to be her awesomeness. It starts with a story about her daughter and then half-way includes what she did next. Her daughter came home from school one day and when Brenda asked what she did, her daughter said she learned about the Middle Passage. I think the students were learning about slavery for a whole month, and this was one part of it. The daughter then recited in detached textbook voice how Africans were taken from their homes, put on boats, taken to America, made to work, but then Abraham Lincoln freed them with the Emancipation Proclamation.

Brenda was horrified. Her daughter just DIDN'T GET IT. It was not some vacation cruise. It was not something you even talk about in the tone of voice the daughter had. That's understandable though because the daughter is only 7 years old, so it's hard to grasp a topic like this. Still, Brenda felt extremely uncomfortable that after a month of school about this sort of thing, the message wasn't getting through.

She decided to do something about it. She devised a simple (non-computer) game for her daughter. First she got a bunch of wooden pawns of various sizes (she has things like this laying around for prototyping things) and pained them different colors with her daughter. A big green pawn and two small green pawns. Two big blue pawns and two small blue pawns, and so on. When she had several sets of these (that obviously represented families), she took some at random and put them on a piece of wood she called "the boat." Her daughter thought her mother was doing it wrong already because she didn't take all the green ones, but just one or two. The colors were now all mixed up and there sets weren't complete anymore because some were on the boat and some weren't. She told her daughter that that's how it was. You didn't have a choice to go on the boat and you didn't get to be with who you wanted. "Will the green one see the other green ones again?" the daughter asked. "Probably not," Brenda said.

Brenda devised some simple rules about making the ocean journey. It takes 10 turns to get to the other side, there are some certain number of food-units, each person needs X food units or they die, there was some dice mechanic somewhere in there to make it less deterministic and a bit harder to figure out.

Half-way through, the daughter said, "Mom, we aren't going to make it." Brenda said that maybe it would be possible to make if farther if we "put some of them in the water" (so there's more food for the rest). Brenda reports that her daughter had a look of understanding on her face, the same look she should have had when talking about the Middle Passage earlier. Her daughter cried, and Brenda did not continue the game any further. Brenda cried too.

It's a powerful thing. A simple

MIGS: Every Click Counts

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:37:40 -0800

I was invited to speak at the Montreal International Game Summit, which happened earlier this week. My topic was called Every Click Counts. The idea is to OMIT NEEDLESS CLICKS wherever you can.

A video game is a system of rules that are codified in the form of software that runs on hardware. A player is a human being, a separate entity from the game. That player's experience is heavily influenced (even defined?) by the interface--the thing crosses the gap between game and player. We spend millions of dollars on some games, focusing on the development of their systems and their software, but somehow the part where the player actually presses buttons or clicks through a non-terrible menu often slips through the cracks.

Can you imagine if instead of games we were talking about writing, and writers were so busy telling their stories that they ended up with goofy, semi-unreadable fonts and page layout so terrible that you get annoyed just looking at it, much less trying to read it? Somehow the magazine and newspaper industries have figured this stuff out, yet in our industry, I still see lots of wasted clicks in games that should know better.

"Actually Flossing"

I started my lecture explaining that I would take the unusual path of telling the audience what they already know. I mean, we all know that making the command to reload a weapon be 5 clicks would be a terrible idea, right? It's like when you go to the dentist and he says, "You really should floss your teeth more." You probably already knew that. So the point of my lecture wasn't to tell you floss more, it was to get you to actually floss...so to speak.

I explained to the audience who made me "actually floss" when it came to concise writing: Professor Strunk from Vigorous writing is concise.

When I see a sentence that's a just a bit bloated, sometimes I think, "maybe that's ok." Then I see my mental picture of Strunk and he says "No! It's not ok." He's a constant reminder to me that in writing we should all try harder. He reminds me that the reader is "floundering in a swamp," as Strunk says, and that the reader needs all the help he can get. If he can be confused somehow, he will be. If he can be annoyed somehow, he will be. Strunk's contempt for bloated or ill-conceived prose keeps me on track, so I prosed to the audience that my contempt for extra clicks could be their tool to do better. Picture me (or Strunk if you prefer) with head-in-hands, or quivering in revulsion at whatever tragic UI decision or game mechanic is at hand.

Examples

Armed with that, we were ready to look at examples. I showed an extra click in Burnout Revenge every time you want to restart a mission, then compared it to

Making Games Faster

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:26:38 -0800

At last week's Unity engine conference, Flashbang Studios gave a presentation about how to make games faster. To me, it was a surprising and great presentation. Surprising because went against my expectations of what a talk at the Unity conference would be about. Great because it summarized much of the best advice I've heard about project management in one place with nothing extra.

Flashbang decided to make games on an 8-week cycle (!!) and post them at blurst.com. They made 8 games this way. They've now decided to change their model and work on polishing up just one of those 8 games into a full version, but that's really beside the point. The particulars of their situation aren't important because their message is appropriate to a very broad audience: not just Unity engine users, not just people who want to make 8-week games--or games at all--but really anyone who is working on a software project.

Reframing the Problem

Matthew Wegner (founder and CEO) and Steve Swink (game designer and kindred sprit) presented. They started by explaining the importance of questioning the framing of a problem, as opposed to trying to find a solution for a problem. A problem you might have is, "It takes too long to place enemy AI waypoints in each level of my game." You might optimize that process by finding a way to reduce the number of clicks the designer needs to place any given waypoint. But if you use a bit of lateral thinking, you might instead design levels that don't need so many waypoints. Or much better than that, design the AI system so that it doesn't need waypoints at all! What they're getting at is that if you take the problem as given, you will probably limit your solution space--the set of things you would even possibly consider as potential solutions.

What if your problem is, "how do we make games faster?" I think they might have given another presentation about how to optimize various things inside the Unity engine (or at least I think they said they did), but here they were saying that that sort of thing isn't *really* the problem. I mean, when they try to ship games in 8 weeks, is it really the inefficiency of waypoints or whatever that threatens the schedule? There are much, much bigger problems. In fact, the question should really be, "how can I get more things done?" (Not their words, but here's a link to the seminal book on Getting Things Done.)

Two Amazing Hours

The first part of their theory is that we really only get about 2 hours of seriously focused, amazing-quality work per day--if we're lucky. Maybe you can get 2.5 or 3 sometimes, but that's pushing it. There are so many distractions and blockers, so many times when you're too tired or hungry or upset about something, or whatever. Flashbang is saying just be real here: accept that you're only going to be able to do amazing work for a short time each day. Knowledge work as it's called, is the type of thing where you could spend 20 hours on a problem and not solve it, but just *one* hour of your fully charged genius-time could solve it.

Ok, so how do we make sure we get that super-charged-time each day? And how do we maybe get a little bit more of it than usual? Flashbang's answer is that the WORST thing you could do is work really long hours as is common in so many game companies. If you're spending all your time at work, tired, fatigued, probably malnourished, how are you going to have any of that time be the amazing 2 hours? Factor in that you probably had no time for laundry, a haircut, your dentist appointment, or your relationships, and it sounds like you're going to be pretty miserable. Do you think being miserable is a good way to increase the number of super-productive hours you have?

Flashbang tried an experiment. For two weeks, they REDUCED their work hours to 10am to 3:30 pm. The idea is that everyone knew they had only limited time to get things done, and they had plenty of time to live a good life outside of work. At first, they actually kicked people out at 3:30 and turned off the power to make sure people left and didn't stay out of some strange guilt. They measured (though didn't give the details) their productivity before and after this change. If it turned out they got less work done than usual during that 2 weeks, they would cancel the plan and go back to regular work hours. The thing is, they found that productivity really did go up. They kept these reduced work hours for the rest of their projects. It's more informal now and sometimes people do stay longer, but they said "if we're still at work and it's time for dinner, we usually say 'hey, that's pretty weird! This is like crunch-mode day!'"

They said that if you see your time as an unending ocean ("hey, I'll be here for another 15 hours anyway today, and again tomorrow"), then it doesn't even phase you if the solution to a problem would take 5 hours of menial labor from you. But when your time is limited, you think about alternate solutions, or question the framing of the problem that is leading to the tedious work. This is one area where I'm not sure I agree though. I do often see my own time as an unending ocean, and if a task takes me 10 hours, that's what it takes. I asked them about this afterward and Matthew said "yeah, when you work from home, it feels like every moment is a moment that you 'should' or at least could be working." I guess spending long hours of my own time on what I choose to spend it on at home isn't quite the same thing as a game company creating a corporate culture where you must be there 15 hours per day to fit in.

48 Minutes of Flow

This concept of high productivity time is really called Flow. (Here's the seminal work on Flow.) Steve Swink gave further advice on how to actually get down to work. He said what usually happens is

Unite '09

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:02:52 -0700

I attended the first two days of the Unite '09 conference, for the Unity game engine. Unfortunately I'll be out of town to miss the rest, but I saw quite a bit.

In case you don't know, Unity is a super great game engine. You can develop on Mac or PC, and you can publish to Mac, PC, and web. You can also get upgrades that let you publish to Wii and iPhone as well, and they finally announced that Xbox 360 publishing is coming soon, though I've known about that for a while. The ability to publish the same game to so many platforms (in one click) is pretty game-changing in our industry. The web player is especially game-changing because it allows full 3d games in a browser that are just as fast (hardware accelerated!) as the downloadable versions!

I'm particularly interested in turning Yomi and two other of my card games into online free-to-try web games, along with a puzzle game. I was wondering how to integrate the Unity 3d web stuff into an actual website in a nice looking way, but the conference answered that too! Two speakers showed how to integrate Flash (for non-game stuff like profiles, chat, nice menus, etc) with Unity (for the actual game). Very impressive results. Now I just need some way to actually make it all happen. ;)

Unity increased its amazingness today by releasing version 2.6 with a great new animation editor (allows you to carefully integrate script calls with animations), a profiler (to watch cpu usage of everything in your game to find out what's slowing things down), and several more features, fixes, and speed increases. But the biggest news was that their Unity Indie license (which lets you do like 95% of what the full version can do) went from $200 to free. Yes, FREE. That's a bold move on their part, but when you look what the small percentage of revenue that version made them overall, it really does make sense to open it up to everyone for free. Your whole classroom can use it for free. Your garage band of game-makers. Your professional studio even. Pros will surely upgrade to Unity Pro anyway, just to remove the Unity slash screen, but there's no break in workflow by upgrading, so you could start your project for free and work as long as you want with that free version, then make the upgrade anytime. Or never. You can ship commercial products with the free version, ha.

Anyway, I'm really impressed. I just need a team now, and we can get to making things. ;)

Special thanks to Mauricio Longoni for making great looking games in Unity, Paul Tondeur for his work on integrating Unity and Flash (Mauricio too), and everyone at Flashbang Studios for being all-around cool guys. Perhaps the special-est thanks of all to David Helgason, CEO of Unity. He explained that one of the things you can do at the conference is book time with just about anyone at Unity you want and ask them any question you want. Like "why doesn't my game controls work right?" and then show them what you have. Or "how would I make an AI system that does X,Y,Z in Unity?" He said last year someone booked time with him, the CEO, and asked "How did you manage to create a community so infused with love?" Interesting question, but one way or another, that is the helpful vibe I get from everyone involved. Unity seems to want to actually enable people to make games, as opposed to some other game engine companies that seem a bit more interested in making Gears of War. Not that there's anything wrong with that engine either, but hey, it's hard to beat free. And it's hard to beat publishing to mac, windows, web, wii, iphone, and xbox 360, too.

The Design of Things

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:42:05 -0700

My girlfriend asked, "When someone asks you 'what do you like to do?' do you ever tell them that you like to imagine the meeting that took place where they designed whatever it is that's in front of you? Because that seems like your main hobby."

Owned. And yes it is my main hobby, more than playing games. Here's a couple examples.

The Emergency Shut-off Valve

I was at Costco, a discount warehouse store (does not mean that it sells warehouses) with its own gas station. The layout of the gas station is designed so that you can only approach the pumps from one side. This is actually fine and not a problem. It has the consequence that while you are getting gas, your car is definitely pointed in a certain direction. Several feet in front of you, away from the pumps, is a sign that says "EMERGENCY SHUT-OFF VALVE." I thought this was well-designed, and I should have taken a picture for you, sorry. Anyway, if something goes horribly wrong at the gas station, you or someone else there could push that button and prevent even more gas from catching on fire or blowing up or whatever.

The sign is red with bold white lettering. The words are in all capital letters. I'm usually against all caps as there is some mistaken impression that this makes things easier to read. It doesn't because when letters are all caps, they look more similar to each other than when they aren't. It also has the connotation of yelling. All caps is way overused, and it has no place on my menu saying things like "BAKED APPLE PIE: $8.99." But if there was ever a time to use all caps, I think a warning sign saying "EMERGENCY SHUT-OFF VALVE" is probably it.

Under the sign is one button. Not a panel of buttons, just one button. And it's pretty big and red. It would be impossible to look at this situation and think, "I'm not really sure how I operate this emergency shut-off valve." Further, there's another sign next to the button that describes in a few more words the concept of pressing this button in case there is a fire. It also tells you to call 911, and some other important people you can call too, while you're at it.

I wondered if the sign started out as white with red letters. After all, red letters are attention-getting right? But the red sign with white letters that they actually chose is better, it really looks, um, emergency-ey. Also, do you think there were early plans that put this button right by the gas pumps? I mean that would make sense, it's a button that has to do with the gas pumps so maybe someone drew up some plans to put it there. Then someone pointed out, "Uh, if you need to push that button, you're probably ON FIRE if the button is located right there. How about not right next to the pumps, but instead ahead, in the direction we already know all the cars are facing?"

My girlfriend suspects there was no meeting, and that a non-iditot silently figured all this out on his own, drew up plans, and no one questioned them. Maybe, but that's boring to think about.

The "Silence Ringer" Switch

My girlfriend just an iPhone (finally), and one of the first questions she asked me was how to silence the ringer. I showed her that there is

Yomi: Testers Wanted

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:42:20 -0700

Yomi: Fighting Card Game is suffering from endless art delays, but balance testing is on-going. The testers asked for some new blood though, so join them! (They are a friendly bunch.) You can learn about the rules of the game and see all the decks here. To play online, you can use the virtual card table program called Lackey. Information on how to setup Lackey to play Yomi is here. And stop by sirlin.net/chat to ask for help and for opponents. There are tournaments about every week, but of course casually playing whenever you want is fine too.

Here's the newest version of Jefferson DeGrey's character card.

DeGrey is an educated, noble diplomat who fights for the rights of the oppressed, no matter who they are. He's from an earlier time, so he knows more than anyone how much worse his land has become. Long ago, at the moment of his death, his bargain with the Nox Oracle (a future Yomi character) granted him unnatural, long life and enough time to right the wrongs he's so passionate about. His female companion in life now watches over and aids him--even after her death--as her obligations in this world are not finished either.

DeGrey's character ability in Yomi is called Moral High Ground. His special moves (face cards) deal 1 extra damage for each extra card his opponent has in hand, compared to number of cards in DeGrey's hand. Even when he's low on options, DeGrey still has the Moral High Ground. And if all else fails, he can Pilebunker for a ton of damage.

To get started playing DeGrey and the other 9 characters, read about the game here and about playtesting online here.

Subtractive Design

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:24:52 -0700

(This article originally appeared in Game Developer Magazine.)

Subtractive design is the process of removing imperfections and extraneous parts in order to strengthen the core elements. You can think of a design as something you build up, construct and let grow, but it’s pruning away the excess that gives a design a sense of simplicity, elegance, and power.

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." —Albert Einstein

First let's look at the theory behind this idea to see why designers in many fields often think in terms of negatives (subtracting things) rather than positives (adding things). Then let's look at several successful subtractive designs so we know what to aim for. Finally, I'll discuss why subtractive design often breeds controversy.

This image is simple, powerful, and without extraneous detail.

Why Subtraction?

Designers in many fields, not just games, often think in terms of negatives (subtracting things) rather than positives (adding things). Design is creating a form (a game in our case) that fits a context. There isn’t just one boundary we have to check between form and context though, there are infinitely many. Is our game easy enough to learn? Does it have the desired amount of strategy or depth? Does it appeal to the intended age-group? Is it cheap enough to make in both time and money? Is it aesthetically pleasing? Do the aesthetics help the player understand how to play the game? Do the mechanics work well with each other? Do they require the desired amount of dexterity? The list goes on.

We first come up with a design that might fit all the requirements. Sometimes this comes from the intuition of a designer who has internalized all those forces and somehow spits out a new answer. More likely, we start with something pretty well established so that we know it solves many of the requirements already. That’s how genres, sequels, and remakes help us make good (but not necessarily new) designs.

Once we have something, we have to evaluate how good our design is. Does our form actually fit the context? Architect Christopher Alexander had some choice words on this subject in his Notes on the Synthesis of Form:

We should find it almost impossible to characterize a house which fits its context. Yet it is the easiest thing in the world to name the specific kinds of misfit which prevent good fit. A kitchen which is hard to clean, no place to park my car, the child playing where it can be run down by someone else’s car, rainwater coming in, overcrowding and lack of privacy, the eye-level grill which spits hot fat right into my eye, the gold plastic doorknob which deceives my expectations, and the front door I cannot find, are all misfits between the house and the lives and habits it's meant to fit. These misfits are the forces which must shape it, and there is no mistaking them. Because they are expressed in negative form they are specific, and tangible enough to talk about.

Alexander explains that when a misfit occurs, we are able to point at it specifically and describe it. When we instead try to explain what a good fit would be like, we’re often reduced to generalities that are hard to act on.

With this in mind I should like to recommend that we should always expect to see the process of achieving good fit between two entities as a negative process of neutralizing the incongruities, or irritants, or forces, which cause misfit.

/// Ico

This isn't the real box cover for Ico, but it probably should have been.When Fumito Ueda designed Ico, he did not start with a list of everything the game should have. Instead, he started with the core idea that it should be

Super Balance Articles II Turbo

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:49:53 -0800

I was the lead designer of Street Fighter HD Remix. This is a collection of all 20 articles I wrote about designing the game. Together, they are even longer than my book. CLICK ON THE PORTRAITS BELOW for each character's article. Enjoy.

--Sirlin

Special thanks to all the Evolution tournament players who playtested the game and helped it be what it is.
(Text-only version of this page here.)

Street Fighter HD Remix Features

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:16:32 -0800

You get a hell of a lot when you buy Street Fighter HD Remix, way more than you might realize. Lets go over all the goodies.

1) Two games in one. You get the gameplay of the classic Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, just like the arcade, and the brand new sequel to that game, Street Fighter HD Remix, both in one package. (They are called Classic and Remixed in the menus.) That means you get the nostalgia of the old, awesome gameplay AND you get a new, rebalanced game guided by the wisdom that tournament pros have accumulated over the last 14 years.

2) HD graphics. Every single piece of art in the game is redrawn in 1080p HD. That includes backgrounds, characters, endings, menus, and—well—everything. Udon Comics drew most of it.

3) Remixed music. All the music in the entire game is new. Every stage, every ending, and the menus. It’s from the OCRemix community, so the fans really contributed here.

4) Widescreen mode. On an HDTV, you can play the game in its original 4:3 aspect ratio, or switch to widescreen mode to fill your screen during gameplay. Widescreen mode zooms in and has slightly different camera behavior, but has no affect whatsoever on gameplay.

5) Every combination of the features above. Whether you’re playing the Remixed or the Classic game, you can turn HD sprites on or off. If you turn them off, you’ll get the original game’s sprites scaled up in all their blocky glory. This has no impact on gameplay, it’s just visual. Regardless of whether you play in Classic/Remix and HD sprites on/off, you can also turn remixed music on/off. If you prefer the original game’s tunes, go for it, it’s up to to you. Finally, no matter which of any of those modes you’re in, you can play in widescreen mode or 4:3 mode. All of this stuff is independent so you can customize these options however you want.

Also note that when you play online, your opponent won’t even know what your choices are regarding HD sprites on/off, remixed music on/off or widescreen mode on/off. All three of those affect your experience only, and your opponent might have different settings for those options on his end.

6) Advanced networking. The art delays in this project gave us a chance to experiment with several different networking techniques and we chose the best. We went with a predictive/rollback system that has the advantage of reducing input delay. I know that sounds pretty jargon-filled, so in plain English, it makes the game feel responsive and usually look smooth even during lag. We were able to refine this from the feedback on our open beta test, and also from a few experimental things we tried in the patch to the open beta.

The final version of the game has another feature called “smoothing” that lets you turn the input delay up or down. We found that best results were generally when there’s a very small input delay of 2 frames, as that leads to smooth network play that it is still so responsive that it feels instant to most people. You can set this to suit your own tastes, but try the default setting (2 frames) first.

7) Double-blind character selection online. When you’re playing online, don’t you hate it when your opponent refuses to pick a character until the last possible moment because he’s trying to make you pick first? He wants to see who you pick so he can pick the best character to beat yours. In HD Remix, all online play has double-blind character selection. That means that you cannot see who your opponent picked or even where his character selection box is until both of you finish picking your characters. Now there’s no reason to stall on this screen, you might as well just pick your character right away.

8) 8-player tournaments. As you saw from the open beta test, you can create your own 8-player, single elimination tournaments. The results go in the leaderboards. Those results don’t contribute to any kind of actual rank (you get to choose who enters your tournaments so we can’t really make them ranked) but after the tournament is over, anyone can see the bracket to verify who won.

9) A new announcer. We got overwhelming feedback that people did NOT like the voice of the high-pitched announcer in the original game. He’s usually referred to as “Big Bird.” We replaced him with a more gruff sounding voice. While we were at it, I replaced Guile’s girly sounding “Sonic Boom” with the more manly version from Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting. Give this one some time, and you’ll realize that almost anything is better than Big Bird.

10) Revised endings. Udon revised and rewrote the story and text of the endings to make them consistent with the current canon. And of course they redrew the endings, too.

11) Original costume colors. The original game has 8 costume colors for each character, but these costumes do NOT include the original iconic colors from the first Street Fighter 2. So if you want to play Ryu wearing white or Ken wearing red, your only choice was to play the “old” versions of those characters by using a code. The old versions had slightly different (usually worse) gameplay. First of all, you no longer need a code to select the old characters in Classic mode, you choose between two different game logos: Super Turbo and Super SF2.

The cooler news here about the costume colors in the Remixed game though. You can’t play the old characters at all in that game, but of course you want to be able to pick those iconic colors. You can. Select your character with the jab button to get that character’s old-school costume. If you want the color that used to be on jab, hold any punch button for 2 seconds. That means in the Remixed game, you have access to 9 different costume colors in total.

12) The CPU difficulty. In the original game, the difficulty of the computer AI is ridiculously hard. It’s harder than in any other Street Fighter game ever. Beating the first opponent is hard and beating the third one is usually beyond hard. Well, it’s just as hard as ever if you pick Classic mode, but in Remixed mode, I fixed up the difficulty so that easy is actually easy, medium is actually medium, and so on. Try playing the HD Remix arcade mode (where you fight all the CPU opponents), then if you want to risk breaking your controller in frustration, switch to Classic arcade mode.

13) Hitbox display. In training mode, you can turn on a display of the game’s hitboxes to see what’s really going on under the hood. Blue boxes are where your character can be hit and red boxes are where you can hit the opponent. This is my gift to the hardcore community, so they can refine their strategies more than ever.

14) Game speed. The game speeds match the arcade version of the game, but this is confusing so bear with me. In SF HD Remix, speed 3 is the default and is intended for tournament play and online play. It’s the same speed as Japanese arcade speed 3, which is also known as US arcade speed 2. You don’t really have to understand what’s going on with all that, just play at the default speed 3 and be happy that it matches the arcade.

Furthermore, there is a speed 0 in there for the hardcore players. On all speeds except 0, the game uses its own system of dropping frames in order to increase speed (we didn’t touch this, the arcade version did it too). This does affect whether some combos are possible/impossible. Speed 0 is slow, but it will let combo masters and makers of combo videos take frame-dropping out of the equation when they are trying to figure out which crazy combos are possible.

15) Dipswitches. The Dreamcast version has several secret dipswitches for turning bug fixes on and off. We took the dipswitches that actually affect gameplay and put them in a menu for you to adjust, if you want. These only affect offline matches, so you can’t use them online. For example, they let you turn on or off the ability for Chun Li to “store” her super. Note that the default setting for many of these is for a given bug to be fixed in Remixed mode but still unfixed in Classic mode (have to stay true to the original!).

Here's a list of the dipswitches you can toggle:

Ability to throw an opponent who was dizzied by a throw
Ability to store Honda's super
Ability to store Honda's command throw
Ability to store Chun Li's super
When Bison does a headstomp that hits a rising opponent only a few pixels above ground level, he briefly pauses
Old Characters in Classic Mode can cancel the same normal moves into special moves as...Super/Super Turbo characters
Slowdown during hit-stun
Percentage chance that the first frame of Old Ryu's air hurricane kick is unblockable
Percentage chance that the first frame of Old Ken's air hurricane kick is unblockable
Percentage chance that the first frame of Akuma's air hurricane kick is unblockable
Percentage chance that the first frame of Blanka's horizontal ball is unblockable
Percentage chance that the first frame of Blanka's vertical ball is unblockable
Vega's super drains the meter when he...touches wall/grabs opponent
Ability for Sagat to perform a reversal Super
Can do Sagat’s super using a kick button during a 1 frame window
Dhalsim’s reversal super
Ken’s reversal super
Some moves, such as Chun Li’s throw, which normally require a forward/back input can be done with an up input.

16) The dipswitch “hat.” I didn’t want to have to worry about tournament situations where someone changes the dipswitches to their advantage without anyone realizing it. In SF HD Remix, if you change even one dipswitch, a blue dot with a chrome enclosure will appear at the top middle of the screen, above the KO box. It looks kind of like a hat for the KO icon. Anyway, if you see that, you immediately know that someone has changed the dipswitches. Dipswitches don't affect online play, so you don't have to worry about any tricks there.

17) Button config. You get the best button config screen we could think of. Both players can set their buttons at the same time. It’s NOT that horrible kind of button config where it lists the buttons, then you have to scroll through various functions for that button. That kind is bad because when it says Y Button, or whatever, you might not even know which button that is if you have an arcade joystick. Even if you know, it takes a moment to think about it and figure out what is what.

Our button config works like this. You don’t have to know what any buttons are called and you don’t have to care about the layout on your controller or joystick. You simply press the buttons on your controller in this order: jab, strong, fierce, short, forward, roundhouse. That’s it. You don’t even have to tap down in between: we do that for you automatically. Furthermore, after you press those 6 buttons, you’ll end up on something called “unassigned.” If you press the remaining two buttons on your controller, we’ll unassign those for you so they don

’t do anything if you accidentally hit them. If you unassign those (so you did 8 presses total) then we’ll move the menu highlight to ACCEPT for you automatically. Also note that we even support mapping more than one button to a function if you want. If you want two fierce buttons, then go for it!

18) Competition. I hope Street Fighter HD Remix becomes the new standard of fighting game competition and that you'll have plenty of online opponents to play against. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo was still played in tournaments 14 years after its release, so I hope that you’ll be playing SF HD Remix for that long as well.

Thanks for your support and enjoy the game.

--Sirlin

Professor Sirlin and the Fourth Amendment

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:42:00 -0800

On October 21st, 2008, I gave a lecture at Hastings Law School in San Francisco to first year law students. My lecture was first about the concept of competition in law school and second about analyzing a hypothetical case that the students would have to write about for class. You might think that me not being an actual lawyer was some kind of drawback in leading a discussion about the law, but the professor who asked me to speak didn't think so.

Competition

You don't have to treat every situation like a tournament finals.I heard that the students at Hastings were acting overly competitive, to the point that it was hurting their development. I explained my background, my business and math degrees from MIT, that I am a fake scientist, a fake psychologist, a fake lawyer, and a real game designer. In addition to that, I am a competitor, and I'm knowledgeable about competition and which types of people do well in competitions.

Whether the arena is political debate, legal argument, or video games, the people who win tend to have things in common. There's a lot I could say about the things that winners do during competition. They get into the head of the opponent and predict their moves. They know when to attack, when to defend, when to stall. They know when to look for "critical points" to blow open a match (or a debate) when they are losing, and when to avoid them if they are winning. There is a lot to say about the strategy of competition, but that is not what I focused on with the students.

It's the other side of competition that their professor and I thought they needed to hear about: continuous self-improvement. When you enter any competition, be it legal or a video game, you hope that the rules are fair to all sides. But the things that don't have to be even--aren't supposed to be even--are the skills, abilities, knowledge, and experience you bring with you to the competition. By improving and improving, eventually winning becomes incidental. Just stop by and win easily, if you are that far ahead of everyone else.

If I look through a crystal ball to the future and discover that you end up being great--as great as Gandhi--how did you get there? You turn out to be a great fighter for the constitution, action figures are made of you, children want to grow up to be you. How did you get there? Was it by putting down other students? By trying to give other students disadvantages so that your own mediocrity appears slightly better? No, that's ridiculous. You got there by developing an excellence in yourself regardless of what anyone else is doing.

Ortiz vs. Sirlin

I remember feeling the full effects of this against fighting game player Ricky Ortiz. Ricky played a certain game, I played a different game. Then a third game came out (Capcom vs. SNK) that we both played. I was older, more experienced, and better than Ricky. I understood Ricky's advantages (better dexterity, better reaction time, and better ability at judging precise distances), and I played around them. Ricky was good, but not a real threat to me.

Then, months later, I entered a tournament in this game. I faced Ricky in the finals. Finals matches are usually best 3 out of 5 games. Ricky won 2 games, and he won them decisively. He crushed me. Onlookers yelled out congratulations to Ricky he won the tournament, but I said, "wait a minute, I thought it was best 3 out of 5." The tournament organizer then informed us that this particular tournament was 2 out 3 finals. Then Ricky said to me that if I thought it was 3 out of 5, he would play more games. I almost couldn't believe it because he had every right to declare victory on the spot, but I took his offer. Ricky then crushed me one more game and won the tournament.

Ricky was demonstrating that it didn't even matter what went on in the game. He brought to the table an excellence that I simply could not compete with. It had nothing to do with putting me down, or giving me disadvantages. It had everything to do with Ricky's amazing development as a competitor. You [the students at Hastings law school] need to develop that kind of excellence in yourselves, I said.

There's one more Street Fighter story I thought they had to hear before getting to the topic of the law. When I played Street Fighter at the MIT arcade, most players tried to keep secrets from each other about techniques and tricks. I disagreed with this mindset and I did not keep secrets. Instead, I told my competitors everything I knew so that we could all practice against everything. Why? Because the MIT arcade was not the REAL competition. It was the training ground. When I went to play at an international tournament in Japan, that was a REAL competition. The only way to be prepared for something like that is to develop your skills as much as you can in your training ground.

This is the reason that law students should not hide their research from each other. Human nature might compel you to hoard the good secrets you found, but that is the path of trying to be slightly less mediocre than your training partners. Instead, know that a high tide raises all boats and that when law students get together, share research, and discuss cases, they reach a level of understanding of those cases that is far deeper than would be possible without the discussion.

And now it's time to demonstrate that.

The Case of the Woman Who Was Searched

Here is a pdf describing the case and the requirements of the legal memo the students had to write about the case. Read it to know what the rest of the article is talking about.

The case at hand is about the Fourth Amendment rights of Phoebe Thorne. It's a fictional case that is representative of and very similar to real cases. In this case, Ms. Thorne lands in San Francisco on a flight from Bogota, Columbia. She is questioned, searched, detained, and ultimately held long enough to have a "monitored bowel movement" to see if she passes any drugs. She did in fact pass a large number of pellets containing heroine. Her case challenges the validity of various parts of her search.

The first and most important thing to understand here is why it's important that we care about the rights of Ms. Thorne, a known drug trafficer. In the law, the ends do not justify the means. You can't just say that because she did have drugs, it's ok for the government to treat her any way they wanted, ignoring her Fourth Amendment rights. There are rules for when searches are legal and when they are not, and those rules protect the innocent as well as the guilty.

You might only care about the rights of innocent people to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. You might think that a case where a person turned out to be guilty is not that important in the grand scheme of civil rights. The trouble is, only guilty people can really bring these cases to court. When guilty people are searched unfairly, they have standing to sue, real incentive to sue, and there are reasonable remedies they can seek (for example, "don't put me in jail.") Innocent people could have their Fourth Amendment rights voilated routinely, but the courts can't stop that without a case. So cases exactly like Ms. Thorne's are what set the precedent for how we will ALL be treated. You need to care about her rights because her rights are YOUR rights.

Street Fighter Mini-Site

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:19:49 -0800

I was the lead designer of Street Fighter HD Remix. This is a collection of all the articles I wrote about designing the game. Together, they are even longer than my book. Enjoy.

--Sirlin

Introduction

Character Balance Articles:

Putting it all together:

Special thanks to all the Evolution tournament players who playtested the game and helped it be what it is.

Street Fighter HD Remix: Akuma

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:18:45 -0800

Akuma is so powerful in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST) that he's banned in all US tournaments. I’ve noticed that when players of other games read about this, they think that is some kind of hypocrisy to the general theory that we should ban as little as we possibly can. But Akuma is not like whoever the best character is in whatever other game you play. He’s not just the best, but he’s miles and miles and miles above the rest of the cast. He was never intended to be fairly balanced in ST, and it shows.

In HD Remix, Akuma is our chance to get a 17th playable character. By taking him down several notches to make him fair for tournament play, we get 17 new matchups in the game. I even put him on the character select screen so you don’t have to do a code to pick him. In a nod to his fake-secrecy though, he’s “hidden” above Honda’s selection box.

So how do we balance Akuma?

Air Fireball

Akuma has a lot of completely unfair things, but the air fireball is the main one. Most characters just can’t deal with it at all. My first idea was kind of an experiment. What if the air fireball was the only non-super move in the game that used up super meter, rather than gave super meter? Let him keep the unfairness of the move, but limit its use. The idea is sort of like an EX move from other Capcom fighting games.

I thought of this version of the move kind of like Millia’s hairpin in the fighting game Guilty Gear. In that game, Millia wants to rush you down. She has a hairpin move that has a similar trajectory to ST Akuma’s air fireball. Hers travels insanely fast though, and forces the opponent to block while she uses that time to get in. The catch is that she then has to pick up the Hairpin to do it again, so she can’t keep doing it over and over in a row. ST Akuma’s fireball is so hard to deal with that I thought allowing even a few of them would be pretty powerful because it would allow him to teleport or crossup or whatever other tricks he felt like. I tried making the move cost 25% super meter, but the air fireball itself was just as strong as ever.

Odds and Ends

There was a bunch of other stuff to fix up:

Akuma’s ducking kicks no longer have invulnerable legs(!)
Akuma can now be dizzied like any other character
Akuma’s Hurricane Kicks don’t have invulnerable startup and can’t hit on the way up
Raging Demon super tuned to go slower than the secret version of him on Dreamcast, but travel farther
Teleport no longer has random input window and can be done with 2 punches or 2 kicks rather than 3 punches and 3 kicks (drawback: can't use "piano method" for Dragon Punch)
Teleport has vulnerability in the head so he can’t run away forever with it, and it builds no super meter.
Stray hitbox that was floating in the air on his medium kick is fixed
Akuma takes more damage than other characters
Red fireball recovery made way worse so it can’t do inescapable lockdown
Blue fireball startup and recovery made closer to Ryu’s
Knockback effect on his fierce blue fireball only happens from very close range
Timing on Raging Demon command much more lenient

All of this definitely brought him down to Earth. He wasn’t overpowered anymore, but all the fun was balanced out of him too. More testing revealed that he was probably the worst character in the game.

Air Fireball, Take 2

The air fireball is Akuma’s signature special move, yet he could hardly even do it because of the meter restriction. That was a failed experiment. Next, we tried to make an air fireball that he could use as much as he wanted, like any special move, but that was somehow fair. It needed a much more downward angle for starters. The problem is that even when the angle was right, he could do really nasty lockdowns with repeated air fireballs. Making the fireballs travel faster or slower didn’t help at all. All it did was change the way he did the nasty lockdown.

The real trick to making that move work is the slight upward hop we added as he releases the fireball. This increases the time between two consecutive air fireballs, and it’s what lets opponents actually get out of any traps he might do. It took about 5 or 6 tries of tuning this move, but suddenly it clicked and seemed right.

At this point, I also added back in his hurricane kick’s ability to hit on the way up, so that it can hit ducking opponents and lead to a juggle. I also toned down his damage penalty so he didn’t take quite as much as before.

This version of Akuma was pretty good. It was definitely more fun to be able to do the air fireball more and try to set up tricks with it. A few months past and I started to think that Akuma was still the worst in the game, though. He has no super fireball like Ryu, no overhead, and no fake fireball. Akuma had some advantages, but just not enough to really justify picking him.

Version 3 Akuma

Then I made one small change that made a world of difference. I allowed his air fireball to be performed very low to the ground. In the original game, it has a minimum jump distance before it can come out, but I removed this. Now it became possible to do a “tiger knee” air fireball, meaning you roll the joystick from down to forward to up/forward (for a jump), then wait a moment for Akuma to barely leave the ground, then press punch to get an immediate air fireball. This turned out to be way more fun and versatile than I realized it would be.

Akuma can attempt many, many traps and setups with this. An example is immediate air fireball (I’ll call it TK air fireball, referencing the tiger knee motion), then land right next to the opponent with the cover of the air fireball. Then do, say, low strong, TK air fireball and land right next to them again. Then do low strong, low strong (pushes you farther away), and TK air fireball to reset the trap. This time, after you do a normal move or two, jump straight up and do an air fireball.

I just listed three different air fireball situations there: one TK from close, one TK from farther, and one where you jump straight up and don't do the tiger knee technique. Many characters have to do a different move or act at a different time in order to deal with each of those situations. Against new players, I can create what looks like an inescapable lockdown, but really it’s a mixup that gives the opponent several chances to get out. It’s all an illusion.

I tested this trap against all 17 characters and every single one can get out. Ken can do a medium dragon punch (invulnerable on the way up) to ignore the entire situation. Zangief can use his green hand. Bison can just jump strong. Everyone can do something. Also remember that if these air fireballs hit, they deal only a couple pixels of damage. If they hit as Akuma lands, he can attempt to go into a damaging combo, but due to the way the game intentionally slows down when fireballs hit, this combo will fail about 50% of the time no matter how good you are.

The air fireball was a hit with playtesters because it’s so fun and feels so powerful, yet is actually beatable in many ways.

Raging Demon

Somewhere in the middle of development, we discovered that it was possible to make the Raging Demon super a guaranteed throw in many situations, such after a jump roundhouse. By adding some startup time (9 frames, same as CvS2), we thought we fixed this. Toward the end of development, we realized that we really didn’t and the Raging Demon was still guaranteed in lots of ways, most dangerously after any blocked air fireball! This made it the most powerful thing in the entire game and we had to do something. Unfortunately, the technical limitations surrounding this are big because it’s very difficult to mess with things like throw timing in the circuitous assembly code.

The solution we were able to implement is not quite ideal, but it’s definitely workable. In general in the SF2 series, when you hold up on the joystick, your character does not leave the ground immediately. Instead, he goes into a “pre-jump” state that lasts 2 to 5 frames, depending on the character. You can be thrown during pre-jump frames. The only change we made is that pre-jump frames are now invulnerable to the Raging Demon specifically.

That means if you hold up and you aren’t locked into doing a move or recovering from a move, you will always be able to jump out of Raging Demon, even from close on reaction. This makes the move a little weaker than intended, but it’s a preferable situation to being the best move in the game. This means the best time to use the super is when the opponent has committed to doing a move, such as a fireball or sweep. To help you land it, the Raging Demon is completely invulnerable and unthrowable. Even though opponents can jump out on reaction, it’s still possible to land this super by baiting their attacks first.

Conclusion

Akuma has a solid ground game with fireballs that stand up to Ryu’s, juggling special moves, an incredibly versatile air fireball, and a tricky super. He does take more damage than any other character, but not by a large margin. We finally have a 17th character.

--Sirlin

Street Fighter HD Remix: Bison

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:29:44 -0800

Bison always seemed strong in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST) because he can suddenly win matches out of nowhere, and he can keep up the pressure against most characters...if he can get things going his way. If he lands a solid jumping roundhouse, he can combo into low forward, then psycho crusher for a dizzy, then follow up with another combo for the win. If he lands a cross-up attack, he can do a different (admittedly difficult) kill-combo. His standing kicks and scissor kicks let him keep up the pressure.

But Bison can’t always put that offense together. Getting out of Ryu’s fireball trap in the corner once it starts is extremely hard. Even getting near Old Sagat is extremely hard. And Honda has a huge advantage over Bison because Bison has no way out of repeated Ochio throws other than his super. In short, Bison lacks defense. He’s the only character in the game with no special move that can be used as a reversal. Even Dhalsim has a teleport to get out of trouble.

I always liked Bison’s character design though. In theory, a character who is all offense and no defense is an interesting addition to the game. In practice, he just has too many matches of disadvantage and he’s not used that often in tournaments. He’s not even considered a second tier character. What to do about it?

Suggestions

A few people suggested that his psycho crusher become a reversal attack (some invulnerability and/or active hitting frames at the start of the move). This is way too powerful and mostly just turns him into Honda. The most common suggestion was to make the headstomp a reversal that can go through fireballs. Even this is too powerful because it means an attempted fireball trap against Bison leads to Bison getting guaranteed damage (the headstomp is fast and would hit fireball throwers during their recovery). Yet another common suggestion was to give Bison a teleport because he has that move in later games. This would allow him to escape from trouble, but not get any free damage. Even that is too strong, in my opinion. Yes he needs a way to get out of trouble, but it should not lead to guaranteed damage and it should put Bison at some risk.

Reversal Devil’s Reverse

The devil’s reverse is that move that hardly anyone uses where you charge down, then up + punch. It makes you leap into the air, then you can press punch again to fly around with your blue fiery arm extended. In HD Remix, this move now has a few invulnerable frames on startup. Bison can use it to escape a fireball trap, but he’s also committing to a devil’s reverse, and gets no guaranteed damage. He can try to reset the situation with this move.

A couple notes about the new Devil’s Reverse. Bison is as vulnerable as ever as he leaves the ground, so you can jump kick him as he leaves the ground to stop him. Ryu can actually still keep up a trap against Bison by alternating fireballs and then jump roundhousing (or jumping strong for juggles) when expects Bison to try to Devil’s Reverse out. This is preferable to the situation in ST though, because it requires both players to make careful decisions, as opposed to the fireball trap just winning flat-out.

In fact, it can’t escape jumping attacks very well at all. Earlier versions in development did allow Bison to avoid cross-up combos most of the time, but this was really never supposed to the be reason for changes to the devil’s reverse. I rolled back the invulnerability to be about as little as possible while still allowing him to escape fireball traps with it.

For many months of development in HD Remix, the devil’s reverse put the opponent into a juggle state if it actually hit. That means you could follow up with two jumping strongs and then nick them with one hit of a super if you have super meter. On the one hand, no one should really get hit by devil’s reverse because it’s enormously telegraphed. On the other hand, the entire sequence (with super) did more than 40% damage, and it was just uncomfortably much. You’ll have to live without this one.

Fake Slide

Bison also has a new move: the fake slide. His regular slide from ST is unchanged, and you can still hold down/back to charge up as you (regular) slide up to your knocked-down opponent (a common Bison maneuver). The command for the new fake slide is hold diagonally down/forward and press roundhouse. This means you are charged for a headstomp or devil’s reverse, but you lose your charge for psycho crushers and scissor kicks when you fake slide. I actually originally wanted the fake slide to be performed by holding the roundhouse button down for X frames when you slide, which would have allowed him to keep all four special moves charged. We had technical difficulties with this, but maybe it’s for the best, because the move is good enough as it is.

Why have a fake slide at all? Bison is about offense, so here is one more offensive tool. This move isn’t really intended to change his position in the rankings though. I don’t think it allows him to beat characters he couldn’t beat without the slide. It’s more to reinforce what Bison is about. When you pressure the opponent with standing forward and standing roundhouse, you are also at just the right range to fake slide, then throw. The fake slide recovers much more quickly than the real slide, travels a shorter distance, and it does not put the enemy into blockstun because it can’t hit at all. It’s just a way to travel quickly (and then usually throw!).

I actually call this one of Bison’s “circus tricks,” meaning it’s something you can randomly throw into an attack pattern and hope for the best. Though it’s not a super-solid lock down (it can’t even hit!), it will catch people off guard and we already know people will call you cheap when you use it to throw. It should be great fun.

Miscellaneous: Jump up Strong and Stand Jab

Two other odds and ends. In ST, Bison’s jumping strong punch can air juggle for 3-hits. This is true for his jumping toward and jumping away punches with strong, but not true for his jumping straight up strong. This always seemed like an oversight to me, because his fist has that same blue fiery graphics during the jump straight up version. Now the jumping straight up strong punch has the same ability to juggle.

Finally, Bison’s standing jab is slightly higher priority. This does not give him any extra air defense (the new anti-fireball startup of the devil’s reverse is quite enough defense for him). The purpose of this change is to let his standing jabs reliably hit Honda’s torpedo and Blanka’s roll. Bison has trouble against Honda, so any tiny advantage like that helps. Besides, Balrog’s standing jab beats both of those special moves easily, every time, and it really looks like’s Bison’s should, too. I just extended the hitbox slightly so that you can now jab incoming Honda torpedos and Blanka balls.

Conclusion

The new Bison can still practically kill you with a solid hit, if he ever gets one. He can still perform various “circus tricks” such as randomly jumping around with strong, or headstomping, and now we can add fake sliding and devil’s reversing to the list. He now has at least some way to attempt to get out of lockdown traps, but not without risk. In HD Remix, he feels like even more of a pressure character (yay for fake slide), and a slippery fish when he’s forced into devil’s reversing on defense.

--Sirlin

Street Fighter HD Remix: Sagat

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:27:11 -0800

Sagat—well actually “Old Sagat”—is one of the best characters in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST). He’s even soft-banned in Japan, meaning there’s a tacit agreement not to play him, even though you are technically allowed. He might not be as strong of a character as Balrog or Dhalsim overall, but the problem is that there are several matches where he just dominates. His tiger shots (fireballs) are so powerful that many characters spend the entire game trying to get around them. I think everyone knew that this nerf was coming.

Tiger Shots

Sagat now has fireball recovery that’s better than New Sagat and worse than Old Sagat. In ST, the difference in recovery times was about 12 frames between Old and New (huge), and Remixed Sagat’s recovery is about 4 frames worse than the terror that was Old Sagat. It’s still very good, but not as abuseable. It’s similar to Ryu’s fireball recovery.

Various Boosts

In exchange for this loss, Sagat has several new bonuses. First, he is based on ST’s New Sagat, so he now is able to soften throws and he has a super move (with the reversal bug fixed, even). Furthermore, the super travels farther than in ST and it always knocks down on hit. It’s now a viable tool. He also has ST New Sagat’s ability to cross-up with medium kick. This gives him a way to apply some up-close pressure.

Remixed Sagat has Old Sagat’s fierce tiger uppercut, meaning it hits only once for good damage rather than juggling five times for low damage. The five hit juggle can be fun, but one-hit version is just more effective in most situations. As with all dragon punch motions, the tiger uppercut has a more lenient (non-random) input timing window.

Tiger Knee

Finally, his tiger knee is now performed with a dragon punch motion, it always knocks down on hit, and (as a result of that) it can juggle for three hits. Usually this means if he hits with tiger knee, he can do one more because either the first or second knee will get 2 hits. This is good damage and it pushes the opponent back into the corner. I reduced the tiger knee’s damage and dizzy power because of this juggle.

I didn’t really intend this juggle to exist in the first place, it was just a consequence of fixing the 2-hit moves that don’t knock down when they should. I did this very early in development and the tiger knee juggle seemed fun, so I kept it and balanced Sagat around having this.

Although the knee doesn’t have any better frame stats or hitboxes than before, several playtesters said “Wow, is that higher priority now?” when they play against it. I think the ability to walk forward and do it because of the dragon punch command, coupled with the usefulness of scoring a knock-down even on a glancing blow makes it a much more useful tool. And no, you can’t juggle with a super after a tiger knee unless you’re making a combo video.

Normal Move Cancels

Old Sagat could cancel his stand short, stand forward, and stand strong into special moves, while ST’s New Sagat could not cancel any of those. (Well, he could only cancel the first hit of stand short and stand forward, not the second hits.) Remixed Sagat cannot cancel the second hit of standing forward because that was only used for combos anyway, and the ability to juggle with tiger knees is good enough already! He also cannot cancel the second hit of standing short, which is a somewhat controversial decision. In ST, this is mainly used in the following strategy:

Tiger, tiger, tiger, tiger, tiger, stand short because enemy got near, cancel into tiger, tiger, tiger.

If the enemy gets near, he deserves his chance at Sagat without having to block a very far stand short cancelled into another Tiger Shot. Remixed Sagat can, however, cancel his standing strong into special moves. This is mainly useful against Dhalsim and Balrog, which is fine, and Zangief.

Conclusion

Playtesers said that playing against my Remixed Sagat was actually fun. I think this was because standing in place and doing nothing but tiger shots wasn’t as effective, and the lack of a cancellable stand far standing short makes it even harder to keep up the old iron defense. In HD Remix, it’s better to mix in tiger knees, cross-ups, supers, and even jump ins, so it feels like more is going on when you fight Sagat.

Despite his slightly slower fireball recovery and loss of stand short cancel, Sagat still seems very strong, just not dominating like before. Plus, more characters now have more options against fireballs, such as Cammy’s spinning backfist, Blanka’s faster “rainbow roll,” Fei Long’s short flying kicks, Dee Jay’s machine gun upper, and Honda’s jab headbutt. Sagat managed to go to one of the most boring characters (to me) to one of the characters I have the most fun playing.

–Sirlin

Street Fighter HD Remix: Vega

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:26:44 -0800

Vega is sometimes considered top tier in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST), or at least in the top of the 2nd tier. He’s fast, has many good pokes, a good slide, and his off-the-wall attack is versatile and powerful. In keeping with the design philosophy of HD Remix, Vega is only barely weaker now, and he has harder competition all around from other characters.

The Wall Dive

Vega’s wall dive no longer knocks down. In ST, after you get knocked down by the wall dive, Vega can do it again as you get up and force you do block a tricky cross-up. If you get hit again, he can do it again, and so on. Vega is actually perfectly capable of winning without this abusive, repeatable tactic, so losing it isn’t crippling.

Note that if Vega hits you out of the air with the wall dive, of course you will be knocked down (same as any air-to-air attack). And his izuna drop (throw) from his wall dive still knocks down, so if you get hit by either of those things, he can threaten one more wall dive as you get up, but even if that hits, you’ll be able to stop his next attempt much more easily.

While it is possible to combo a low strong after you hit with a wall dive now (because the dive doesn’t knock down), it’s position-dependent. You usually end up hitting a little to high with the wall dive to actually combo a followup, but with good timing, you can. I didn't specifically intend this combo to work, but adding more delay at the end of the wall dive would mean you could hit back Vega too often, even when he hits you. Overall, I think it's much preferable to fight against a Vega who sometimes gets an extra hit of low strong, rather than a Vega that traps you in a knockdown loop.

Flip Kick

In ST, Vega can “store” his flip kick command. First, charge down/back, then hold back. You can hold back as long as you like and you can still do the flip kick by taping forward+kick. It’s so hard for some characters to actually get close to Vega, that he really doesn’t need what amounts to a (Guile) flash kick anti-air while walking backwards. A couple Japanese top players as well as several Americans all requested that this be removed, so it is. The only command for Vega’s flip kick attack is now charge down/back, then forward + kick. I personally never even used this technique, and really don't think he needed it to win.

Fake Wall Dive

Vega does get one new toy to play with: the fake wall dive. First, execute the wall dive (charge down, up + kick), and after Vega touches the wall, press kick again. Vega will hang for a moment, then drop directly down. This is marginally useful in avoiding Ken’s fierce dragon punch or Blanka’s vertical roll.

An earlier version of the fake wall dive allowed Vega to slightly steer whether he dropped forward or away (rather than just straight down) and it dropped down something like three times as fast as it does now. After some players complained that it was too powerful in a playtest, I gave my usual response of asking for someone to beat me with it, or at least make me afraid of it. I chose Ryu and took on all comers, which included many well-known Evolution tournament players. No one beat me one single game with their Vega. In fact, no one beat me even a single round. I was not remotely afraid of the fake wall dive. I’m not telling you this as a form of bragging, I’m just letting you know how balancing happens.

Why was I not afraid? Because doing repeated fake wall dives left my opponents with no real advantage over just sitting there and doing nothing. Yes it’s tricky in that you never know which wall dive will have teeth and which will be fake, but I mostly ignored it and jump roundhoused (or air hurricane kicked) at them anyway.

And yet one thing they demonstrated was important. James Chen showed that in ST with Vega vs. Cammy, if Vega does blocked low jab, cancels into off-the-wall (opposite wall) then holds back to stay away, Cammy can still cannon spike him. In other words, he cannot use the wall dive to turn his low jab into a safe runaway tool in ST. But the same setup in HD Remix with the fake wall dive did allow him to be safe vs. the cannon spike. Even though no one demonstrated anything in real gameplay, the mere potential for more Vega runaway was enough to show that we needed to weaken the move.

It turns out, the move had to be slowed down significantly to prevent it from being completely safe in the sort of situation I explained above. Since then, I’ve seen no one able to run away with the fake wall dive, but it can occasional trick the opponent into attacking at the wrong time, so it seems about right.

Vega’s Competition

A few top players have wondered if Vega is too strong, even still. Time will tell of course, but he does seem about right to me. His most abusive tactic is weakened, and he has a (kind of slow) fake wall dive in return. But what’s much more relevant is the field of characters he must now face.

Zangief is more able to fight him than ever. Guile used to have no real answer to Vega repeatedly sliding. (I wonder if anyone has any tournament matches of me doing something like 12 slides in a row vs. Choi’s or Jeron’s Guile in tournaments.) But now Guile has 2 answers: roundhouse flash kick and the new overhead. Cammy, Fei Long, and T.Hawk all got huge boosts and are just more threatening overall to Vega and to everyone else.

That said, Vega is still Vega. His speed, range, and wall dive keep him in the game, but he should be less dominant than in ST due to his adversaries being more equipped to fight him than before.

--Sirlin

Street Fighter HD Remix: Balrog

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:08:11 -0800

Balrog is generally considered to be tied for the best character in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST). Pretty much everyone ranks Balrog and Dhalsim as top, with some Americans adding in Old Sagat, some Japanese adding in Vega, and a few people claiming Chun Li. But there’s not much debate about Balrog (or Dhalsim) being top.

The knee-jerk reaction is to nerf, nerf, nerf (that’s internet-speak for “reducing the power level” of something). I want to leave the top characters top, so it’s been quite a test of willpower to avoid bringing down the hammer on Balrog.

Before you read the actual nerfs, I’d like you to consider what might have happened. By far the most common suggestion for Balrog was to reduce his overall damage by about 20%. Almost everyone who said anything about Balrog said this. But reducing the overall damage of a character by 20% is mostly just another way of making him 20% worse, and does nothing to remove the tactics we’d like to tone down. So the good news for Balrog players is that he still does a whole lot of damage and is not a 20% worse Balrog.

Throw Loops

After Balrog’s headbutt hold, he can do a mixup where he either walks under the opponent (to get on the other side) or not walk under and say on the same side. He can threaten to do a low roundhouse from either side, resulting in a knockdown. This part is fine. He can also do a low forward or low strong and then attempt another throw, resulting in a loop. This part is too abuseable.

As with Ken, it was a tough decision, but I think it’s more fun if Balrog gets to keep his mixup, yet loses the power of a repeatable loop. His low strong, throw, low strong, throw sequence could be done from literally so far away that some characters cannot counter throw. The change is that Balrog’s throw range is now shorter, and the first hit of the hold does less damage. The walk-under tricks still work, as do the throw tricks after whiffing a short dashing punch, but if you want to attempt a throw loop, you a) have to be close enough that your opponent might counterthrow and b) deal less damage when you successfully do it. Balrog’s relentless offense is so good that a slightly worse throw game should leave him plenty powerful.

Safe Attack, Safe Attack

Another problem with Balrog is this sequence: low rushing punch, then jab headbutt. The low rushing punch is fast, damaging, must be blocked low, and is safe on block. The command for the move leaves him charged to immediately do a Buffalo Headbutt. So not only can you not hit back the low rushing punch on block, but if you even try, you will probably get hit by the headbutt (it’s an invulnerable startup move, somewhat like a Dragon Punch). If you block the headbutt, it too is safe on block. And to make matters worse, he gets a huge amount of super meter for doing that sequence. And to make matters worse than that, he has the best super move in the game. Something has to give!

I thought for a very long time about removing the ability to charge for a headbutt right after a low rushing punch (or some method of making sure you couldn’t do those two moves right in a row). In the end, I have to say that the fun-factor of that sequence is good, and the problem is the safe-on-block jab headbutt. This feeling was corroborated when I asked multiple-time tournament champion and Balrog player Graham Wolfe what the most abuseable Balrog thing is. His answer, “Safe jab headbutt…and Daigo said so too.” (Note to Daigo: If you never really said that, I hold Graham Wolfe responsible!).

The jab headbutt now has more recovery and can sometimes be hit back on block. It actually ended up not that much different from ST though. To keep things in line, the strong headbutt also has worse recovery (and can now go through fireballs), but the fierce headbutt is not changed. All three headbutts also generate less super meter, and the first few levels of the turnaround punch also generate less super meter. Note that all the rushing punches generate just as much super meter as ever though. So when you do low rushes (Balrog’s bread and butter), you have the same priority, same speed, same damage, and same super meter gains as ever.

Super

Balrog’s super is probably the best in the game in ST. It’s high priority, full screen range, goes through fireballs, and is safe on block almost all the time (except notably against Zangief). In HD Remix, I tinkered with it several times to make it worse in various ways, but in the end I reverted all those changes except one: it now does about 50% damage rather than 60%, putting it in line with most other supers in the game in HD Remix.

Turn Around Punch

To be consistent with the rest of the game, this move can now be performed by pressing and releasing just two punches or two kicks, rather than three. I don’t want to allow Balrog to access fierce and roundhouse while he charges turn punches though, so here’s how that works. While you are holding two punches (or two kicks) to charge the turn around punch, you CAN press the third punch (or kick) and get it to work. But once you’ve held the buttons long enough that you’re actually charged for a turn around punch, pressing the third button will do nothing at all.

You don’t really need to grasp that though. The point is that you can either do the move the same way as always with three buttons, or just use two, but no one can really exploit this by charging up a final-punch while doing fierces and roundhouses at the same time.

The New Move That Didn't Happen

Every character in the game got at least something in HD Remix. I gave Dhalsim a mostly-useless new upflame (and made the control motion easier to do) as way of giving him something, even though he is such a top character. For Balrog, at one point I planned a "cross-counter" move like Dudley's in Street Fighter 3. This would make him totally vulnerable to low attacks or throws, but if you hit him out of it any other way, he automatically attacks you. Another idea was to make the turn around punch with the kick buttons have different properies. I thought about making it so holding the kick buttons would immediately make it so Balrog did his (vulnerable) turn around pose, as opposed releaseing the buttons triggering that. So holding the kick buttons has the drawback of locking you in place, but has some advantage such as giving you a higher level turn around punch than you'd usually get for how long you charged.

Anyway, I didn't get a chance to implement these for schedule reasons. You might wonder how that's possible because the game was delayed so long because of the art, the programmer who would have been able to implement those things was put on another project, so I had no resources to make it happen. And even if I did have the resources, I'm not sure if it would have panned out anyway because those ideas are fairly powerful and Balrog is very good already. You'll have to settle for the top character being mostly the same as last time around.

Conclusion

In closing, Balrog remains incredibly powerful. His throw game is barely weaker, but his throw tricks are still intact. His ability to generate super is a little worse, but the power of his super is still intact. His general ability to rush you down is also intact, as is his high damage, so I expect him to remain near the top.

–Sirlin