Aztez Weapon Effect Sprites
While I went into great detail about the entire system of effects in the Impact Effects post, I just wanted to quickly share the sprites I made for the Sword Swing and Sword Slash effects so you can see exactly what's playing out when you watch our characters attack each other. It took a good amount of iteration on these to get the effect I wanted and the great feedback I got from people I showed it to was instrumental. Anyway, the sprite for the sword swing effect looks like this:
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.
Meaningful And Elegant Defense
If attack mechanics are the yin of combat then defense mechanics are the yang; at least whenever you're engaged to things that can attack you back. The coolest thing about defense mechanics is that there are so many ways to handle the "problem" of enemy attacks but the crappiest thing about them is that they're so easy to render meaningless. In more games than I'd like to admit, you're given defensive maneuvers that you simply don't use (for any number of reasons) or you try to but they don't help you. A good defense mechanic looks good and feels good, but must ultimately be functional. Enemies are going to attack no matter what and in the interest of elegance, there should be as few ways as possible to deal with this. Having too many is confusing, having too few is frustrating, and having any at all that are meaningless are buttons wasted. Furthermore, the usefulness of the given defense mechanics are going to directly and heavily influence the difficulty level of the game.
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.
Alpha Channel Problem In Unity
I just thought I would throw this out here because Unity has this unusual quirk and it has driven me (along with some other very talented developer friends of mine) to the brink of cosmic insanity. If you have ever created a texture in Unity that has an alpha channel but the alpha information in Unity is completely incorrect, then it's most likely because you have "empty pixels" in your RGB channels. What are empty pixels? Just think about anytime you've erased all the way through your layers in Photoshop and you can see the white and grey grid underneath. You can see that grid because you've removed color information from those areas and Photoshop just wants you to know that. Unity understands those empty pixels and will create an alpha channel for you if you have them in your image.
A quick and easy way to to test this out:
- Create a new layer at the bottom of the layer stack.
- Fill the whole thing with an arbitrary color.
- Re-save it and check it out in Unity. You should now see an alpha on the texture in Unity that looks like the alpha channel you intentionally created.
This happens because Unity has two different ways of recognizing transparent elements in a texture. One of these ways is through the alpha channel, and the other way is through empty pixels in the RGB channels. When it sees both it simply defers to the empty pixels. So all you have to do is fill those up with something so it knows it needs to look at the actual alpha channel. I hope this saves you some furious self-hair-removal. :)
GDC 2012 Highlights
I just got back from the Game Developer's Conference and like usual; it was amazing! As far as Aztez is concerned, I had some very relevant and insightful conversations with some very talented people and I want to share them with you.
It turns out that there is no known doctrine for the creation of beat-em-up games. I had a really great conversation with David Sirlin (please investigate his body of work! He has a lot of really interesting things to say about competitive gameplay and is also a talented designer) about what a beat-em-up looks like under the hood and how fighting games and beat-em-ups are very close relatives. I expressed to him my deep concern that legitimate reference material on the creation of deep combat systems does not appear to exist and he reassured me by saying that most of the designers out there who have made seminal beat-em-ups did the exact same thing I am doing now; intuitively reverse engineering the good combat that has come before them. It's a bummer that there is no reading material on the subject, but that's all the more reason to continue doing what I am doing and to keep exposing it publicly.
I also talked to Robert Velazquez (one of the lead in-game character animators on God Of War 3) after he gave a great session on Sony Santa Monica's animation and design pipeline. I asked him very directly if there were any combat designers that would be willing to talk to me about combat design and he said there very well might be! It turns out there are a good handful of them on the God Of War team. I'm going to contact him shortly about this and hope that one of the uber-talented combat designers there is willing to impart some knowledge on us as we move forward. Hopefully they'll recognize how serious we are about making sure that Aztez is deep and impactful.
Anyway, GDC is over and it's back to business as usual! I'm gonna spool up the blog machine once again, but know this! It's about to get pretty technical around here as I start to talk a little bit about the combat engine we're trying to build! As always, we encourage discussion and the sharing of knowledge so make sure you jump in there with us and help us make Aztez as great as it deserves to be!
Agricultural Stuff
Something I put some serious TLC into is the floating gardens, or "chinampas", in the background water. Because of the heavily aquatic nature of Tenochtitlan, floating gardens like this were integral to Aztec farming. I wanted to make sure these crucial objects were represented so I actually went and modeled some of the vegetables you would have seen in a place like this.
