The Ratio Of Sex To Story

We're getting ready to fuse the fun beat 'em up we've made with the fun turn-based strategy game we've made and concern is growing about whether this fusion will be fun or not. The reason I came up with this fusion in the first place is because I desperately wanted to try something new and shake things up in the hopes that this type of game can be way more fun. Since there's never really been a game like this before (there's been games very similar in concept but not in execution) we don't really have a way of knowing if it's going to work. In the wake of this concern I've been thinking about porn, and the ratio of sex to story.

What Happens When Struck

What exactly happens to the entities in a combat play space when they get struck by an attack is important for two reasons: because the player needs to be punished for making a mistake and allowing themselves to get struck, and also because the player needs to feel a certain way when they successfully strike enemies. But there are a lot of factors involved in a struck event both on the player and enemy entity side of the equation, and these properties can be mixed up in various ways to control EXACTLY where the player lands on the emotional spectrum when entities get struck.

Improperly Enforcing Different Skill Sets

Most games train the player in a specific set of skills, and more engaging games condition the player to utilize them effectively. Some games will at some point, enforce upon the player a facet of gameplay that requires a completely different set of skills. Now sometimes this is fun! But far too often (especially in beat 'em ups, where game structure often goes dangerously neglected) the newly required skill set is not properly introduced to the player, and there is a harsh expectation that they should learn it and succeed with it, sometimes in high-pressure situations.  What's worse is that sometimes the newly required skill set is far less engaging, or even contradictory, to the skills the player has been developing up to that point.

A skill set that gets enforced without proper introduction: I mentioned this in my Castlevania combat analysis; the final boss of the game casts an effect on the play space that mires the players approach. The player must utilize a mechanic they have become familiar with, in this case switching the character's "combat mode". They must match the character's color-coded mode to the color of the effect on the ground in order to not get knocked down and away from the boss. You can see it in this video if you'd like. The problem here is that this is completely foreign from the mechanic's traditional usage, and it is most definitely in a high-pressure situation. Even the high level player in that video awkwardly navigates the effect in order to get within striking distance again. The expectation set at this moment is very inappropriate and I personally found it incredibly jarring.

Beat ‘Em Up Sheet Music

When I was trying to establish what exactly made the attacks and combos in beat 'em ups feel so specific and distinct from each other, I decided to scrutinize the animations from some of these games frame by frame. The first thing I did was grab a hi-def capture card from the office so I could plug my 360 in and start recording. I started by evaluating the bread and butter standing combos and understanding what's happening on a frame by frame basis, and my findings were very insightful. I'll save the nitty gritty details for another post, but what I ended up doing was making a printable template that I like to call "beat 'em up sheet music". It's a very simple idea, but it lets you avoid the staggering tedium of drawing out countless hundreds of tick marks on little timelines so that you can get back to the investigation. I'll go into how I specifically used it, but first know you can click this image to download a JPEG of the sheet music so you can print it out and use it yourself.

Difficulty In Beat ‘Em Ups

The idea of difficulty in a beat 'em up seems straightforward, but once you dig in and really pick apart why a particular game feels so easy or so hard, you'll quickly find it's pretty hairy. Keep in mind this is not a discussion about difficulty on the higher game-structure level; for a couple notes on that check out the previous post on Challenge Vs. Punishment. This is about the difficulty on the moment-to-moment encounter level. I've found that you can really evaluate it by posing a few really important questions:

Characters Adhering To Input

One of the most fascinating thing about beat 'em ups (and by extension, fighting games) is the way they manage and deliver input from the player. It's easy to assume that whatever input the player provides gets pushed directly to the character object, but this is far from the truth. More often that not, the input is being parsed by the engine and chopped into manageable sequences before it gets fed to the character and expressed. For example, the necessary motion to execute Zangief's 360 piledriver in Street Fighter 2 is a 360 rotation of the stick followed by a punch. It would seem that the game is waiting for the stick to make the full rotation but in actuality it is only really listening for about 270 degrees of rotation. You may think you're going through the motions when you execute the move on a full 360 rotation but truthfully, it hit 270 degrees and started listening for your punch input. You just did it fast enough that you wouldn't ever notice.

Evaluating Beat ‘Em Ups

I often find myself turning on a beat 'em up I've previously played (or one I recently purchased knowing about its beat 'em uppery) in order to evaluate how things are done across the genre. There are a lot of key items I'm looking at and I figured I would publicize them so that they can be utilized and expanded on. Now before I even get into this, it's important to know that most of these items are not absolute in the sense that there is a right or wrong way to handle it, it's ultimately a matter of designer preference.

I’m Declaring War On Tedium

Over the course of the last year I have gone and devoured every beat-em-up I could get my compulsive hands on. It's been a lot fun because I love these games to death, but it's also been very frustrating because oftentimes I am required to perform very trivial tasks in order to progress. I realize this problem extends deep into many other genres as well, but it's particularly sticky with modern beat-em-ups because the features and mechanics that have been stacked on top of them to make them more appealing and engaging are inherently tedious.

Challenge Vs Punishment

One of the fundamental components of an engaging game (card, board, electronic, party, etc.) is that there is some degree of difficulty between starting the game and arriving at the success state, whatever that may be. While this can be applied to games of all lengths and depths, the bottom line is that a player that goes unchallenged for too long is going to get bored. It's one of the amazing properties we possess as living creatures; we need to go face to face with our environment in SOME way or else we start feeling numb. The geniuses that developed the first arcade games realized that tapping into this evolutionary compulsion was the perfect business model. They realized that by engaging players hard enough with a game they must pay to play, then they will happily pay to play...over and over again. This is why coin-operated games were often times so difficult yet so successful; they managed to find the sweet spot between compelling and punishing. The problem here is that a lot of us game designers who grew up playing those games still think that challenge must be appropriated in those archaic ways. But times have changed. Different kinds people are playing different kinds of games and expectations have mutated, for better or worse.