Insights from Sirlin.net

Introducing: Menelker

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:41:32 +0000

Master Menelker is a mysterious and misunderstood figure, though he's widely known as the most powerful martial artist in the Realm.

Midori and Menelker (The Two Dragons) are sons of the legendary Memnarch. While Midori and Menelker are both skilled martial artists and they can both take the forms of dragons (green and black, respectively), they have diametrically opposed philosophies. Midori believes in nurturing and honor. Menelker believes in winning, and if that happens to involve harsh training or "cheap" tactics, then so be it. A win is a win. Menelker embodies "playing to win."

That said, Menelker has no interest in harming innocents or fighting non-combatants. Instead, he seeks combat from the most skilled opponents he can find, and expects that they will use whatever means they can to win, as will he. Menelker has been known to engage in deathmatches--fights to the death--but only when both parties agree to such serious business.

Eventually, Menelker ran out of worthy opponents. Even the Fantasy Strike tournament would be a just a trifle to him, not even worth his time. Menelker left the Realm in search of greater challenge. During this time, many referred to him as the Exiled Dragon, and hoped he'd never return. Where did he go? We've all heard fairy tales about the Dreadlands to the north, but Menelker dared to see what's truly there.

He discovered the Undead Scourge of the Dreadlands (a playable faction in the upcoming customizable card game) and found dangers greater than any had imagined. There he learned a name that mortals of the Realm do not yet know: Vandy Anadrose, the Queen of Demons. (Or Queen of D's as some say.) The undead Queen has made bargains with beings who don't belong in our world. Even Menelker, a seeker of true power, knows that some things are too dangerous. Bargaining with the Beyond is bound to backfire.

Menelker barely survived this investigation. His very lifeforce was nearly sucked out of him, and half his body is now gray with the pallor of death. He returned to the Realm, saw the worthless clockwork army of Flagstone, and knew that he needed worthy opponents more than ever. This time not to defeat, but to train. Of all the warriors of the Realm, he saw the most potential in Grave Stormborne. Unfortunately, Midori has held back Grave by withholding training in the so-called dark arts. Master Memnarch accepted all maneuvers that lead to victory as valid, and Menelker agrees. Grave needed to go to the next level, and Menelker knew Midori was the real obstacle.

Menelker, The Exiled Dragon returned to challenge Midori to a deathmatch. Midori accepted. Two Dragons fought and then one remained. Deathstrike Dragon, indeed.

Although Grave was consumed with rage, this fueled his training more than ever. While Menelker is a villain in Grave's eyes, he's also ultimately Grave's true mentor. The two went on to have several encounters, and each time Grave would learn one of his own weaknesses, as Menelker demonstrated how abuse "cheap tactics" that Grave was unprepared for.

Menelker's gameplay often gives him access mechanics that previously seemed off limits. For example, look at his Into Oblivion ability from Flash Duel:

No other ability can destroy an ability card. While this may be off limits to other characters, Menelker has no issue with it. While his abilities are intentionally unfair feeling, they are balanced to be actually fair.

Menelker can actually do the same trick in Puzzle Strike:

Removing a bank stack from the game is something only Menelker can do. It has a taboo feeling to it, but actually it's quite fair. It's a bit weak in practice, and his Deathstrike Dragon chip makes up for that by being incredibly powerful, and incidentally the only self-trashing character chip in Puzzle Strike (another taboo tactic of Menelker's). I'll let you research for yourself what that does by checking out our guide.

Next time we'll cover Mistress Persephone, a character who is just as powerful as Menelker, but in a very different way.

Introducing: Bal-Bas-Beta

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:12:48 +0000

Bal-Bas-Beta, or BBB for short, is a clockwork automation--a robot of sorts.

Max Geiger built BBB and imbued him with sentience and personality. (The previous B-B-Alpha didn't work out so well.) Although Geiger is well-known for his skill with clockwork parts as well as his knowledge of science and engineering, the creation of BBB raised suspicions in Flagstone because it seemed a bit too advanced. Did Geiger get help from someone? Or from another time period? There are rumors he has communicated with an ancient lost race that had incredibly advanced technology, though most believe that stories of the Vortoss are just stories. (There are also stories that they are a playable faction in the upcoming non-collectable, yes-customizable card game.)

In any case, General Onimaru saw the clockwork man and immediately recognized its military potential. He ordered the production of an entire army of clockwork soldiers. Unfortunately, producing clockwork soldiers requires significant resources so Quince began scouring the Pandalands, Murkwood, the Golden Plains, and other regions for gold, silver, other minerals, lumber, and so on. Geiger suddenly left Flagstone, though his work was continued by Flagstone's new head of R&D, Dr. Beverly "Nova" Villanova.

While BBB is a friendly and inquisitive being, the mass-produced clockwork soliders that came after him lack his charm. BBB hopes to reunite with Geiger someday.

In a fighting game, BBB is a defensive character designed to keep opponents away. He pokes them with extendable arms and fists which he can retract with chains. In Flash Duel, he is also happy at long range:

Rocket Punch means that at a range of 5 (for example), he can attack with a 5 *or* a 4. Most characters would only be able to attack with a 5 in that case.

He has Rocket Punch in Puzzle Strike, too:

In Puzzle Strike, it lets him sneak in a small crash (of just a 1-gem) whenever you would crash at him or attack him with a red chip. His other chips (Upgrade and Cog Engine) allow him access to more expensive chips. That means he can trade up his chips for more better ones, and he also gets a money boost to buy a bit more expensive chips in the first place.

Next time we'll cover Master Menelker, also known as Deathstrike Dragon.

Introducing: Troq

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 02:38:43 +0000

Troq is big and strong and likes to SMASH.

Troq has a good heart and he means well. He's not the sharpest guy though, so he gets confused sometimes. He likes having smart friends so his brawn and their brains can team up to do some smashing, which Troq really enjoys.

Troq comes from the Golden Plains, and like many regions these days, the area is in an economic slump due to Flagstone's mining and resource collection operations. This led Troq to seek his fortune elsewhere. Troq isn't exactly the most loyal beast, so wherever he can find the best deal is where he'll go. For the moment, that's as a Flagstone footsoldier but Zane will eventually lure him away with bribes of Giant Growth potions. Troq loves to be big and strong.

In a fighting game, Troq will fill the role of an "alternate throw character," alongside Rook. He relies on high damage moves and powerful throws, without a lot of tricky stuff.

While Troq has a Giant Growth card in Flash Duel, I'd rather show you Cornered Prey:

Troq is extremely dangerous if he can corner you, because his dashing strike becomes basically a guranteed round-win. It's not easy for him to maneuver you into the corner, but the threat of it keeps you on your toes.

Here's his Puzzle Strike Giant Growth:

This gives Troq the ability to rush you down, if he can set it up. By first getting some big gems into his hand, he can play them directly to his gem pile with the intention of crashing them at you. His other chip More Shiny lets him get a 2-gem in hand and also reduce his own gem pile size if needed, while his Beast Unleashed chip really powers him up.

If you perfer simpler characters with powerful moves, you might like Troq. Next time we'll cover another Flagstone soldier: Bal-Bas-Beta.

Introducing: Onimaru

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:21:25 +0000

General Onimaru is Quince's top military man. You can think of him like Sun Tzu in that he's a master of the art of war. He is known for his strategic planning, tactical maneuvers, use of terrain to his advantage, his ability to discipline an army, and his ability to know the enemy.

Onimaru is actually an outsider to Flagstone, though he's won many battles in foreign lands and at least one on Flagstone soil against the former regime. Grave was just a boy then, and he lost his father that day. Onimaru claimed the Stormborne family sword as a war-prize, and were it not for the intervention of Mistress Persephone, Grave would never have received his family heirloom.

Many years later, Quince was able to recruit the General. There, Onimaru raised an army and due to his harsh style, the troops called him the Flagstone Enforcer. He also investigated unorthodox forms of military force, including the use of wild elephants and an experimental program to create clockwork soldiers with the help of the then-head of Flagstone Research & Development: Max Geiger.

In a fighting game, Onimaru won't rely on combos. Just the right strike at just the right time is more his style. All his moves in his (still in-development) Yomi deck are actually "Can't Combo" moves, and yet he's still a fearsome opponent.

In Flash Duel, he has one of the most interesting abilities in the game, Clockwork Soldier:

The Clockwork Soldier greatly restricts the opponent's movement. It puts the squeeze on them, letting Onimaru close the distance to them one way or another. This opens up even more potential interactions in the 2v2 and Dragon Raid modes.

In Puzzle Strike, Onimaru shows his versatility with Wartime Tactics:

This lets him reveal a puzzle chip from his hand, then get a one-time use of any other puzzle chip in the bank, as long as it costs the same or less as the revealed chip. Onimaru's tactics are so honed that this gives him access to a wide variety of effects immediately, without waiting the usual one or two turns to draw them.

General Onimaru is a formidable foe to anyone who would threaten Flagstone or its right to rule. That goes double for outlaw barristers and mutant stone golems who would sow the seeds of dissent with their illegal Fantasy Strike tournament.

Next time we'll meet Troq, a lowly foot-soldier in the Flagstone army.

Introducing: Quince

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:50:36 +0000

You can read about the original 10 Fantasy Strike characters here. And now there's a new set of 10! They first appeared Flash Duel 2nd Edition, then they will be in the online version of Puzzle Strike when we launch (no tabletop version available quite yet) and you'll see them much later in Yomi, too. Some will also appear even later than that in an upcoming customizable (but not collectable) card game.

For the next 10 days, we'll meet one new character per day, ending with the official launch of fantasystrike.com on Friday, February 17th, 2012!

Sirus Quince, Flagstone Chief Magistrate

Quince is the head of the Flagstone Dominion, a position he attained through political prowess, the right words, and a wholesome image. There are some who call him Tyrant, but who are they, really? A stone golem and an outlaw barrister? Quince ensures the protection of his people, and protection means sacrificing some personal freedoms. It also means having values--the right values--and stomping out those who don't. Sometimes that cuts the wrong way for an overzealous lawyer like DeGrey, or a bisexual like Valerie, or a scientist doing the wrong kind of work like Geiger, but society gains of course! That's what Quince would say.

Quince is cloaked in truth, but his true power comes from lies and illusion.

Here's one of Quince's cards from Flash Duel:

He often has a trick up his sleeve, and this card is just such a trick. No one else can keep a card even after everything resets for the next round. Quince might stash a 1 this way, because 1s are generally good in Flash Duel. They can be used easily as the strike part of a dashing strike. Rook likes 1s because he has an ability to make them unblockable, so against Rook, Quince would like to just get the 1 out of circulation. He could do the same to a 5 that Jaina wants, or a 4 that DeGrey wants. Quince's Political Prowess can remove one card per round, even, so multiple cards can be set-aside at once as the game goes on. This doesn't seem fair, but then Quince needs only the aura of fairness in his politics, not actual fairness. (He is actually fair in gameplay though.)

Here's one of his Puzzle Strike chips:

Some say Quince has two sides: the lies he tells with the mask of patriotism and the secret truth behind it all. They're just trouble-makers though, as you can see from this chip, Two Truths. Your opponent gets to choose which truth comes to light.

Next time we'll meet Quince's top military man, General Onimaru.

Fantasystrike.com is Launching!

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:56:23 +0000

Hey everyone, I'm excited to let you all know that after 2 years of development and testing of fantasystrike.com, we'll finally be launching the site on February 17th, a week from this Friday. You'll be able to play Yomi and Puzzle Strike online there, and someday other games too such as Flash Duel and a Fantasy Strike customizable (but not collectable) card game. But let's not get ahead of ourselves!

In case you're new to things, Yomi is a card game that captures the essence of fighting games such as Street Fighter. Each deck is a character, and there are 10 to choose from. The decks resemble poker decks, and that makes them pretty easy to learn. Your numbered cards 2-10 are normal moves, your face cards are special moves, and your aces are super moves. The game focuses on the mind-games that happen in high level play in real fighting games, but extracted into a turn-based form so you don't need any dexterity.

Puzzle Strike is a deckbuilding game, featuring the same characters as in Yomi (plus even more). It simulates a puzzle game such as Puzzle Fighter, where you try to clear out gems from your "gem pile" and send them to your opponents. If your gem pile fills up to 10, you lose, but the closer you are to losing the more you'll be able to draw each turn. You build your deck as you play, so it's the same genre of game as Dominion in case you've heard of that, except it's far more interactive and suited for tournament play. Also it has a pretty interesting 3-player and 4-player mode with no player elimination these days!

Online Features

Puzzle Strike and Yomi both have full rules implementation. They both have an interactive tutorial. We have a guide for both games (check it out!), leaderboards, ranked and unraked matches, and the ability to save replays and watch other people's replays. Even League of Legends didn't launch with that, ha!

Rankings

We're going to reset all the beta rankings when we launch. As you play, you'll level up through the "student" ranks at first. During this period, you can't lose any points, so you'll be sure to progress eventually. Also any character you play contributes to your student points, so it's up to you if you want to play several characters or stick to just one. Once you graduate to the "master" ranks, you'll have a separate ranking for every character though, and losses will make you lose points. Eventually this rank system actually converges to 100% skill-based elo ranking, but everyone gets to make progress along the way.

Tabletop vs Online Versions

The online version of Yomi is exactly the same as the physical one in the real world with cardboard cards. Same abilities, same 10 characters, and so on. For Puzzle Strike though, we've evolved the game and actually rebalanced it based on months (or now years, actually) of tournament play AND we've put up the full expansion that hasn't even been released yet in the tabletop world. So you have access to all 20 characters and all the puzzle chips from the base + the expansion in the online version!

Tuned for Serious Competition

Both Puzzle Strike and Yomi are fun on a casual level, but they each also have a ton of depth and strategy if you really get into them. Those years spent on balancing ensure that you can play them for years and still find them strategically interesting. There's a growing competitive scene and frequent online tournaments, so join in! (Casual fun is also allowed!)

Free To Play with Options to Pay

Each week there will be two different free characters in each game, on a rotating basis. As you play, you earn gold that you can spend to unlock your favorite characters permanently. Or you can just buy characters directly, and avoid any kind of grind. Remember that all characters are at full power instantly, and there is no painful period of playing a gimped character until you get runes or something like in other games. Anyway, you'll also have the third option of getting a subscription, which unlocks ALL the characters in all our games, as well as some other perks and access to beta features and even beta games at some point.

The Road to Launch

Over the next 10 business days, I'll introduce one new Fantasy Strike character per day, ending with the exciting launch of Fantasystrike.com a week from this Friday. These are the 10 characters from the upcoming Puzzle Strike Shadows expansion, which you'll be able to play at launch. First up will be head man at Flagstone, Sirus Quince!

Soul Calibur 5: First Impressions

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 23:27:58 +0000

I didn't follow the development of Soul Calibur 5 at all. I got the game and played it one evening so far, so I'm coming at this fresh. I thought I'd give my first impressions.

Overall, I like the game. It's fun, and it's simplified in a good way. So when I give you this long list of complaints, keep in mind I would generally recommend the game.

Button Config

Yeah, button config. Yes it matters. And it's the "wrong way." It's the bad way where you have to scroll through a list to change anything, and know the names of which buttons are which on your controller, instead of the good way where you press the button you want. This is a very real concern for running events, as it slows down events for no good reason. It's absolutely *embarrassing* that any company would release a fighting game in 2012 with the bad kind of button config. Seriously Namco, never ever do this again.

By the way, even though there are several default configs, none of them match what you'd want on the MadCatz TE stick, which is the standard. Have fun setting your kick button before every match (as you scroll through a list to do it). Letter grade on this feature: F.

Online

For some reason, it seems to default to searching for users with a good ping who in the "other" region, meaning they are NOT in North or South America, or Europe, Asia, or Japan? Wtf? I don't know, every time I start up the online I set this to North America. Another case of weirdo defaults, I guess.

After playing someone online, I think it's like only 2 clicks to get another opponent. This is great! I got an endless stream of a opponents who couldn't beat my Mitsurugi, without any clicking around in between matches.

As for the netcode, you know the thing you care tons about, it seemed great? I forgot that I wasn't playing locally, really, it all just worked. There was no

An Evening with Jane McGonigal

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:39:13 +0000

Jane McGonigal spoke last night as part of the California Academy of Sciences lecture series in San Francisco, at the packed Herbst Theater. Come along on my journey of contempt and redemption.

Expectations

My expectations of this presentation were extremely low. I remember her GDC presentation several years ago on the top 10 findings in games that year that covered such breakthroughs as some players "playing to win" and how they actually seek an even playfield of fair competition rather than wanting to buy in-game advantages. Another involved a bunch of data showing that a huge percentage of players spend a huge percentage of time playing World of Warcraft alone. It even used the phrase "together alone" as opposed to the phrase "alone together" that I used in my infamous article. Since so much of that presentation was rehashes of my own articles from YEARS earlier, I had to wonder what Jane is really bringing to the table here.

The Format

Rather than a lecture, the format here was actually an informal interview, so the host and Dr. McGonigal sat on stage with a coffee table between them. I think this format is good, and allows information to flow more freely than in a prepared lecture. There is more room for adaptation, for tailoring answers to go with the flow the conversation, and for the speaker to let their personality come through a bit more.

The host opened by having Jane discuss her controversial statements that the world needs to spend more hours gaming. She said that currently the world spends 7 billion hours (per year? I forget) gaming, and that she thinks it should be more like 21 billion hours. This is a delicate subject because it's so easily taken out of context and misunderstood. I think Jane was only able to explain part of why she believed this in her actual answer to this question, and the rest of why she believes it wasn't clear until much later. The first clarification is that she doesn't mean people who play games now should play them more, but rather than more people should play games. She would like everyone on Earth to play an hour a day of something. She includes even playing a word game on your phone while on the bus, so this isn't all about sweating bullets in Starcraft matches, or whatever. Ok, but why should people play an hour a day?

A Waste of Time

What follows was painful and boring. There was some promise in the initial part of the answer to the above question. The answer is that gaming brings about all sorts of positive emotions. She then listed the 10 positive emotions that gaming has been shown to elicit, from gaming research. Joy, awe, wonder, love, satisfaction, and so on. At this point I would have expected some sort of support for this, like some examples so we know what she's talking about. Instead, a lot of time was spent on this terrible "massively multiplayer thumb wrestling game,"

This Week in Flash Dueling!

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:47:15 +0000

I see the guys at Penny Arcade liked Flash Duel 2nd Edition. Gabe says "it's a rad game." Will Tycho redeem himself in a rematch though? Maybe Tycho should play as the Dragon or something, lol.

Also, Rodney at Watch It Played is doing a series on Flash Duel 2nd Edition. His first episode is up where he covers the game's Simple Mode (the tutorial mode before you get to the character abilities). He does an awesome job of covering several rules nuances and showing how it all works. Here's Episode 1:

I'm really looking forward to the rest of this! I also admire what Rodney is doing in general, by the way. Sometimes in games (both the video game kind and the board game kind) a "review" is so shallow (not the favorable reviews of my games though of course, those are well-researched and glorious!). A reviewer often doesn't have time to really get into the details and depth of a game. The Watch It Played series is going a different route, and it gives full explanations of exactly how a game works, then shows that game being played right in front of you. A "review" isn't really necessary because it becomes evident what is good about the game (or what is bad), and you'll see if those good points match your tastes. Check out other WatchItPlayed stuff on Youtube for other games, I found it very helpful personally. And I can't wait to see Flash Duel in 2v2 mode or against the Dragon on WatchItPlayed!

Oh yeah, if you wanted to comment on this on Boardgamegeek.com, here's the thread about it. And here's another thread about people's favorite characters in Flash Duel.

UI Design in Apple iBooks Author

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:26:53 +0000

Apple recently announced a big push into education, expanding iTunes U's already awesome selection of free online University classes, and adding K-12 as well. Adding a new textbook section, with a whole bunch of features specifically for text books, such as note taking, integrated quizes, and the ability to automatically create flash card tests for yourself. These textbooks have several interactive elements: such as pictures you can zoom to take up the whole page, or swipe across to see changes over time in a diagram, custom javascript widgets right inside the book, and so on.

The thing that interested me most is the authoring tool though. There's a new program called iBooks Author that lets anyone create these books, test them on your own iPad (wow!), and put them up on iTunes for free or for sale. (Note: there was some PR fumble where people though Apple owned your content, but they don't. You are free to publish your content anywhere else too.) Anyway, pretty sweet.

The iBooks Author program was immediately accessible/understandable to me because the UI is basically the same as iWork programs such as Pages. The same buttons for inserting shapes or tables, working with text, working with graphics and so on. It has a few extra buttons for inserting widgets and publishing.

The whole reason I'm writing this is actually specifically the portrait/landscape mode feature. This is the very FIRST thing that I thought of regarding this authoring tool. How the hell are they going to handle that? Doing a layout when you know a fixed screen size/ratio is one thing, but how the hell is this authoring tool going to handle when you turn the iPad sideways? All programs/books do handle that, but this seems like a big problem. All the iBooks I've read before were just plain text, so it's only Apple's own UI that changes when you rotate a book, then the author's text gets reflowed to fit the page, no big deal. These textbooks can have very complicated page layout though, with graphics and text that have to be just in the right place to make it look right.

What's worse is that if you rotated a layout sideways, it wouldn't even fit the same number of words anymore. It would be possible for some words to get cut off when rotating due to how all the images fit in portrait vs. landscape, and now it would mess up all the rest of the layouts in the entire book. You really need to layout the entire book twice, once for portrait and once for landscape. That is decidedly un-Apple, especially if it's going to be in a consumer-level tool. Imagine if your graphic is in on page 6 of one layout, but page 7 in another, and the annoyance and frustration of laying everything out twice. What the heck are they going to do here?

I watched the official Apple video of the event where they announced this stuff. All these hassles I was puzzling about, the presenter swept aside in two sentences. He explained that sometimes you want to get right down to the text, and focus on that rather than all these extras. Viewing a book in landscape mode gives full page layout with pics, movies, and interactive elements as integrated parts of that layout. But turning the iPad sideways into portrait mode automatically changes the formatting, and extracts all those non-text elements and puts them in a labeled column to the left. You can touch any of them to make them full screen, then close them when you're done to return to rest of the book. And this view is generated automatically by the authoring tool, so book-creators only actually have to worry about designing the page layout mode (landscape). You get the portrait mode "for free."

I tried it out with one of the new texbooks on my iPad, and it works well, as promised. It makes sense. The reason I mention this is I thought it was an interesting example of lateral thinking--of solving a different problem rather than the one you're stuck on. I was imagining this whole "you have to layout every book twice, how do make a good authoring UI for that?" type of problem. But that's a sucky problem to have to solve. A simpler solution is to not have the problem in the first place.

I think that comes up in game design quite a bit. Many times I've struggled with the wording of a card in a card game where there thing it's trying to do doesn't fit so easily into the system. Sometimes we come up with a good wording. Sometimes we sort of can't and say we'll come back to it, then later realize that card should be doing a different thing entirely anyway, which just happens to be easier to write text for! So you know, if you're stuck on something, maybe come back at it from a new angle.

The Interconnected Systems of Puzzle Strike

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:48:48 +0000

Here I talked about how it's best to have system where the subsystems aren't so tightly woven so that you can tinker with one subsystem without messing up the rest of them. Well, that's not how Puzzle Strike is. It's very tightly woven, and I didn't fully realize this until we were trying to balance it. This made it unlike any other game I have balanced. For months it changed radically, often multiple times per week, because changes to one system affected all the others. Some playtesters would come back a week later and feel like they were playing a different game. I've said before it's best to avoid such interwoven systems if possible, but I kind of wonder if they turn out even better and more fun *if* they are balanced--it's just that balancing such a delicate web is tough.

In my series on balancing multiplayer games, I talked about how "balance" can mean a couple different things. On the one hand, it can mean making sure that a set of different starting options, like characters in a fighting game or races in a real-time strategy game, are fair against each other. But there is also some concept of "balance" in games where everyone starts with the same stuff. The word can also mean making sure that the game system allows players to play in different ways, using different moves and tactics, and that it doesn't all boil down to just one thing (we'd call that "degenerate").

This is an abstract diagram of the card / chip game Puzzle Strike, not a screen from a video game.

In Puzzle Strike, I had to worry about both types of balance at the same time. You might think any asymmetric game has to worry about both, but actually I haven't really had to before. Street Fighter and Puzzle Fighter already had working systems, they only needed asymmetric balance, the kind that's about fairness. For Kongai, I created the system, but I didn't develop it in parallel to all the characters. I started by making the system, and it was basically fine from version 1. The only things that ever really changed about Kongai's system were adjusting the damage an intercept does and adding a switch-cooldown so characters can't switch two turns in a row. Other than that, all the balancing was about the characters, not the system itself. Same story for Flash Duel. I adjusted the system of En Garde, changing timing, edge cases, adding a push mechanic, etc, but Flash Duel's system was fine from day 1 and all the balancing was about the characters. Yomi comes the closest to Puzzle Strike in balancing system + characters, but because system changes happend over such a long period of time--6 years!--it was not quite as traumatic.

The Different Types of Chips

In Puzzle Strike, there are character chips, puzzle chips, gem chips, and purple chips. (There are also wounds, but those just clog up your deck and do nothing, so we won't worry about them for now.) You can see all 62 chip designs here.

Gem chips count as money when played from your hand.The character chips are the ones that need "asymmetric balance," meaning they need to all be fair against each other. But we can't even hope to fix problems there unless we have a game system in the first place. The puzzle, gem, and purple chips compose that system. The gem chips you play from your hand count as money to buy other chips for your deck. You can use gem chips to buy more gem chips to increase your buying power. You can use them to buy purple chips, the most important chips in the game. Purple chips let you empty your "gem pile" and fill up the gem piles of other players. (Each player has a special zone called the gem pile, and if a player's fills up, he loses. The gems in there don't count as money, they just get you closer to losing.) You can also use gem chips to buy puzzle chips so that you can do a bunch of extra stuff that gives you resources, gives you more actions per turn, slows down your opponents, and so forth.

The main balancing troubles here are that the money system affects the entire game, the way purple chips work affects the entire game, and that puzzle chips compete with the other types of chips for attention. Let's look at each of these situations.

The Secrets of Donkey Kong Country 2

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 23:41:03 +0000

Nintendo has a long history of so-called platform games--games where you jump from platform to platform. Over the last 25 years, these games have evolved, though I would argue that even to this day, Rare’s 1995 game Donkey Kong Country 2 nailed the winning formula like nothing else before or since. (Make sure to click the SNES version if you follow that link.)

Before we go on, here’s a list of platform games relevant to the discussion:

Super Mario Brothers 1 though 3 (NES)
Super Mario World (SNES)
Donkey Kong Country 1 through 3 (SNES)
Yoshi’s Island 1 and 2 (SNES)
Mario64 (N64)
Banjo-Kazooie (N64)
Donkey Kong Country 64 (N64)
Mario Sunshine (Gamecube)
New Super Mario Bros. (DS)
Mario Galaxy (Wii)
New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii, of course)

It’s interesting that Shigeru Miyamoto basically invented the genre with Super Mario Brothers and re-invented it Mario64. These two titles were far and away the most innovative given what existed when they were released, but Donkey Kong Country 2’s handling of secret items deserves special mention. Before I explain why, let's consider the progression of these games over time.

In the early days, platform games were about trying not to die. Dying occurred frequently and the main goal of the game was to get through all the levels. As time went on, we see less and less emphasis on the dexterity of passing levels and more and more emphasis on finding secrets. There certainly are dexterity challenges in all these games (see the no-jetpack sections of Mario Sunshine or that damned Luigi’s coins level of Mario Galaxy), but collecting stars and secrets are definitely the focus of the modern ones.

The most extreme examples of moving away from the old model of “just avoid dying, try to pass the levels,” were WarioLand 2 and 3 for GameBoy where Wario cannot die. If he touches fire, for example, he runs quickly for a moment until he cools off, allowing him to travel more quickly or cross tiles of floor he wouldn’t normally be able to cross. The entire emphasis on those games is puzzle-solving and secret-finding, not death-avoiding.

WarioLand aside, the notion of finding secrets in platform games led to the "dual goal" platform games of today. A casual or younger player's goal might be to simply get to the end of a game. This doesn’t even require completing every level, because of warp zones and non-linear map screens that allow you to skip levels. A more demanding gamer's goal, though, is to uncover every secret the game has to offer. In Mario64, this means finding all 120 stars (only about 60 are needed to "win" the game.) In Donkey Kong Country 2, this means finding all 40 DK coins as well as finding all 102% of the bonus rooms. These dual goals allow a single game to appeal to a wide range of players.

If platform games are becoming more and more about finding secrets, we should define what a "secret" actually is. To a really old-school player, a secret might be a near-impossible-to-find item that's virtually randomly placed. That's not the type of secrets I'm talking about. In fact, a "secret" in the sense of modern platform games is a hidden something-or-other that is actually meant to be

Subtractive Design

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:24:52 +0000

(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

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 06:49:53 +0000

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

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:16:32 +0000

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 23:42:00 +0000

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

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:19:49 +0000

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 19:18:45 +0000

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 08:29:44 +0000

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 08:27:11 +0000

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