14 ms·

Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

192 points by skadamat 3y ago

JKCalhoun 3y ago
I kind of noped out of the fighting game craze when they descended on the arcades in the 90's (?). To my eye they had abandoned the twitchy interactivity I had come to expect playing standard arcade games like Tempest, etc. Rather than a fire button and a spinner you had a joystick plus what amounted to a numpad of buttons. It seemed like maybe a game accountants or payroll managers would enjoy. (To this day, though I have built close to a dozen MAME cabinets, I have never included the numpad of buttons you would need to play fighting games. Besides never getting into the genre, I think they clutter up the console and create confusion for other games: Metal Slug as an example, which of these six buttons is the grenade button?) <rant \> Reading this article gives me a new appreciation for the fighting game genre. I had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering. (Still not sure it's my kind of game though.)
- Tyr42 3y ago
  Maybe try something like Yomi which removes the twitchiness from it while trying to capture the ability to read the opponent. (It's a card game from a street fighter dev)
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  > I had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering Very confused how you got that impression from this article. The cards are a just a way to visualize information. Fighting games don't play like a fast-paced card game, they are fundamentally different.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Hmm no they kind of do. The basic insight with most fighting games is that once you are competent you know everything that opponent can do and the list of viable options is discrete and small with fairly standard flowcharts. Tekken is a bit more nebulous than this.
    - haste410 3y ago
      That's not something unique to fighting games. That's the concept of playing the metagame.
    - ZephyrBlu 3y ago
      This makes no sense. For one, a large component of real-time games is mechanics and execution. Also, the idea of being able to mindlessly "flowchart" a real-time game at a competitive level is absurd. It assumes a non-interactive opponent. If it was true there would be no such thing as yomi. There are also a lot of other fundamental differences around resource management, opponent interaction, etc. They are only similar on the most basic level. What level have you played card games and fighting games or another real-time game at?
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        Oh please. You can absolutely flow chart fighting games. That is in fact the entire concept behind combos- sequences of moves that your opponent can’t do anything during outside of more modern combo breaker mechanics. Yeah there’s niche dynamic considerations for making these combos work for slightly different distances and weights and heights and power meters and whatever. But for 99% of the player base you’re going to be best off learning a few bread and butter ideas and then executing on them without much variation.
        irobeth 3y ago
        > That is in fact the entire concept behind combos- sequences of moves that your opponent can’t do anything during outside of more modern combo breaker mechanics. You can flow chart combos, sure, but that's not the whole fighting game; most people who play fighting games competitively will tell you that knowledge of combo theory is maybe 20% of what makes you good at a game The rest is a dance of turn-taking, knowing when you are in advantage or disadvantage state and behaving accordingly, and 'neutral' - your behavior during the times where you aren't performing a combo or being pressured by your opponent Outside of advantage and disadvantage and neutral lies 'oki' - your behavior during the period where you have finished a combo, aimed at gaining advantage or at the very least, preventing disadvantage (by returning to neutral in a controlled form) Samurai Showdown is an example of a fighting game with extremely limited combo/oki mechanics and a heavy emphasis on neutral play -- most characters have only 2 or 3 hit combos which anyone can perform and the entirety of the depth in its gameplay is inside 'neutral' - the spacing between characters, the choice of when to attack and when to defend, when to throw, when to parry, etc. Blazblue is an example of a fighting game with an extremely deep combo system, every character has a unique archetype and mechanic, and combos can last tens of seconds, and set-ups to turn 'lost neutral' into 'lost neutral again' are abundant The difference between a good combo and bad combo in Samurai Showdown can be like 5% of your life bar, meaning if you don't have 'good combos' then you might need to 'win neutral' 1 more time to win the match (compared to if you could perform good combos) The difference between a good combo and bad combo in Blazblue is maybe 50% damage (2500 vs 4500) meaning you need to 'win neutral' maybe 3 more times than if you did a 'good combo' every time you 'won neutral'
- toast0 3y ago
  I think Tekken is 4 buttons, and Neo-Geo is 4 buttons, so I'm not sure your numpad rant quite applies. I've seen some Neo-Geo layouts with a 2x2 layout instead of the traditional swoosh, so I think it would be ok. Personally, I've got lots of room, so if I were a multi-cade person, I'd build out different machines for different layouts. Something for classic single joystick games with two buttons on either side (although that might not be perfect for everything, some games had three buttons on one side). Something for trackballs, hopefully a layout that's reasonable for missle command and two player marble madness. Something with three buttons each for four players (guantlet/turtles/nba jam). A 4-button Neo Geo layout, which might be enough for the two player two and three button games too; would need to try and see. A 6-button 2x3 layout. If I played MK, their 6-button layout with run, although since I don't play MK, I might put the pre-run games on the street fighter layout with the column in the middle both being block; definitely saw that in arcades.
  - reassembled 3y ago
    Japanese arcade cabs typically have control panels that can be swapped out with different button layouts to accommodate the particular game in the cabinet at the time. So the same cab can go from accommodating two players side-by-side playing Street Fighter with two sticks and 6 buttons per player, to a setup with three buttons and only one stick for shmups.
- starkparker 3y ago
  A lot of replies to this feel like they're missing that you're closer to the target audience for this than people already familiar with fighting game conventions. One of the first things researched to establish requirements for this project was compiling and categorizing questions from beginners.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  I just cannot imagine investing the energy, time and resources, especially when you're a kid, with limited spending money, into these games that will just beat you down and take all of your money for weeks on end before you get even a moderate level of competitive skill. I understand the attraction of mastering a difficult challenge for the sake of the challenge itself, but there's just too strong of a pragmatic streak in me to justify that challenge being something that doesn't generalize into any other aspect of life, and is almost completely a time sink. Plus a massive dose of what feels like an intoxicating and gratuitous level of violence and aggression, which I suppose one gets desensitized to after a while but I'm not sure that makes it any better. Always baffled me to see my otherwise quiet, good natured friends stand in front of these machines for hours when there were so many other, to my mind, more curiosity- inspiring games available at the time. To each their own I guess. I chose to take up dance instead, and in addition to satisfying the need to master a difficult challenge, have greatly enjoyed the actual full body contact with one's erm, "sparring partners," that comes with it as well.
- opan 3y ago
  Modern arcade controllers are pretty standardized. The 8 buttons on the right are your four face buttons and four shoulder buttons. That plus your 8-directional dpad means they work for just about any 2D game or 3D game that doesn't need analog sticks or a mouse. The left half of the 8 buttons is where the four face buttons go, in their standard positions more or less, but rotated slightly. Top two are the west and north buttons, bottom two are south and east buttons. This means PlayStation Cross and Xbox A are the same button, but in Nintendo layout that button would be the B button (gets even more confusing when you consider that PS3 can use Cross or Circle for confirm depending on the region). For the other four you have your triggers on the bottom and bumpers on the top, but right is before left. You may think that's backwards and confusing, but I think of it as putting the more important action first / on the stronger finger. You see the same with standard pad controllers vs the mouse. Left click on a mouse and right trigger on a controller both tend to be your primary fire. With that in mind you'd probably just treat it like a standard xinput controller for the bindings. I've pretty much just gotten into arcade controllers this year thanks to the new leverless (4 buttons replace the 4-switch stick) arcade controller trend + accompanying DIY scene. They're fun for fighting games, platformers, puzzle games, shmups, whatever they can work for pretty much. With the modern firmware options you can even emulate an analog stick if required for a game. I've been using them for as many games as I can lately. They even make arcade controllers with extra buttons now to play Smash Bros and other platform fighters (e.g. Rivals of Aether).
BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
One thing that's very tricky about these kind of simplified visual explanations of fighting game mechanics is that you don't capture all the strategic implications of move properties. The visualizations make simple scenarios clear, for example if you block a sweep point blank (or whatever a highly punishable tekken equivalent would be, a snake edge or a hellsweep or whatever), then you are at advantage and can land a strong punish. But many moves that are highly disadvantageous on block are not punishable when used at their furthest effective range, because the opponent does not have a far reaching & fast enough move to punish it. At higher levels of play, this kind of knowledge of move properties is actually used against you. There are characters who have uninterruptable block strings that ends in a disadvantageous move, but the string has significant pushback on block. Players will use these strings to push the opponent to a deliberate spacing where it looks like they can land a long range normal to punish the last move of the blockstring. But the string is designed to place the opponent just outside of the range of that normal, where it looks like it will connect, but it it will not. In this situation, the person who did the "unsafe" blockstring can watch their opponent's character model, visually confirm the startup animation of the attempted punish, and punish _that_ move's recovery on reaction. Tricky tricky!
- cultureswitch 3y ago
  I think I follow the gist of what you're talking about and it doesn't sound all that advanced at all. Deliberately missing out getting blocked to make the opponent think they have an opening is not a particularly high level play in other games. It still baffles me that traditional 2D fighting games and Tekken in particular are so complex and that it is so hard to even pull off a specific move due to control schemes that are maximally unergonomic. Compare this with the simplicity of Mount & Blade Warband which achieves greater depth, in 3D, with a very simple and intuitive control scheme.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    I don't think the game you cite is the same type of game. It's even simpler to control units in Sim City, but that's just because the game isn't about fine-grained, high speed control of one character.
yaseer 3y ago
This is pretty interesting. I play a lot of games, but never got into fighting games. Seeing the strategy "laid out" might be a useful way to understand the mechanics rather than figuring them out with trial and error. Trial an error can be fun (e.g Zelda), but it's always been something that stopped me getting too far with this genre.
- coldpie 3y ago
  If you want to give it a try, Street Fighter 6 is really, really good. Aside from just being an amazingly well thought-out fighting game[1], it's also got a big player base so you'll have plenty of other noobs to play with in the ranked matchmaking mode, and the networking code is perfect[2] so you can just hop on and start having fun. If you do decide to jump in, just remember that you will be terrible at the start. Everyone is. No, you don't have to understand frame data and have a bunch of sick combos and understand all of the mechanics to play online. Just hop in, the game will match you against players that are about at your level. SF6 is my first fighting game, I started at the very bottom of the ranked ladder (like literally, the very bottom) and now I've played more than 80 hours this year and I've just now started breaking into the "good" ranks (Platinum). In the lower ranks I had no combos and never used the super gauge at all and still won and had a great time. Don't stress too much about your rank, just think of it as a way to match you with good quality opponents. Anyway. Can't recommend it highly enough. [1] Here's a very in-depth overview: https://words.infil.net/w04-sf6review.html https://words.infil.net/w04-sf6review.html [2] They use rollback networking, which is the gold standard for online multiplayer games https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/explaining-how-fighting-games-use-delay-based-and-rollback-netcode/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/explaining-how-fighti...
  - lukaszkorecki 3y ago
    To add to it - the frame meter in SF6 training mode is an equivalent of the cards presented in the article, but built into the game.
  - grog454 3y ago
    The second article mentions delay based and rollback both of which seem to be appropriate for peer to peer graphs, but there is a third option: server authority. I created a game with mechanics very roughly analogous to fighting games (nebulous.io) where there is no client side prediction, no rollback, and a 20hz update loop. Clients just render what the server reports (with some smoothing). I never get complaints about fairness, and players can quickly learn to adapt to their latency to servers located in different regions. Its as well now as it did in 2015, when a significant portion of players used 3g or worse cellular connections.
catapart 3y ago
I have no previous introduction to this kind of graphing, so I find this to be very very cool! I'm glad we're mapping out these odd, sort of "combine-able abstractions" like timing coupled with input and previous state, in a visual way. I don't know if this is actually useful for anything, but I certainly hope so! And, if not, it at least seems translatable to some really neat artwork. I'd definitely put up a poster of something that described, say, the hadoken, if it were well designed.
ranting-moth 3y ago
Back in the day me and my buddy spent ages playing Mortal Combat on a PC. I decided to learn all the combos (crazy fast keyboard patterns). The combos gave you disproportional damage wielding power. I spent hours and hours practicing it when we were playing. My buddy won pretty much every single game, while laughing at my combo attempts. Then I mastered it one day. I won every single game. Buddy said this combo shit wasn't fair and refused to play the game ever again!
- SliceOfWaifu 3y ago
  The problem with playing competitive games casually is that the moment one player actually bothers to learn anything about the game, it immediately ruins the experience for the other player if they're unwilling to do the same.
  - ranting-moth 3y ago
    Yep. Even worse when you can pay to get better, like MTG, or Magic The Money Gathering as I'd like to call it. Once someone in your group starts hunting down those rare (and expensive) cards, everyone else will have to do the same or give up playing.
    - scubbo 3y ago
      Thankfully, printer ink (just about) remains cheaper than Magic cards.
      - thaumasiotes 3y ago
        You don't need printer ink. You can print them in grayscale, or cut some index cards to fit into sleeves and write the name of the card you want in pencil.
        yamazakiwi 3y ago
        I use a bag of coins I've collected, each coin represents whatever card I need at the time.
pockybum522 3y ago
As far as a visualization and alternate means of teaching, at least at a getting started level, this is awesome. As someone who has picked up many fighting games and been immediately overwhelmed by having no clue what's going on or even where to start, I just mash buttons. Even just seeing what's possible, how to access it, and basics of how it works is really neat. I guarantee you if someone was trying to teach me a fighting game and had this handy, it would go about twice as well as them saying "push these buttons to do this" which is the usual means. I love alternate visualizations and unorthodox teaching aids. This ticks all those boxes.
- dissident_coder 3y ago
  I highly recommend the tutorials in Mortal Kombat 11 and Mortal Kombat 1 (the time travelling reboot/sequel to 11). They do a really good job of teaching intermediate/advanced mechanics in a way that are pretty straightforward and understandble. I never understood whate "frame traps" or "plus/minus on block" meant until I did the tutorials for MK11 and I've been (casually) playing fighting games since Street Fighter 2. The World Tour mode in Street Fighter 6 also starts you off by easing you into the mechanics, giving you mini missions where you get to practice specific mechanics "safely". The dynamic controls which massively simplify inputs is also a godsend for people who are intimidated by quarter circle inputs and the like.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
jrmurray 3y ago
For an amazing fighting game guide/tutorial I can't recommend https://ki.infil.net https://ki.infil.net enough. Its centered around Killer Instinct but describes general fighting game concepts really well. It has really great visuals/inline videos
jncfhnb 3y ago
Tekken feels particularly bad to play if you don’t know what you’re doing imo. It’s the least approachable. Unexpected shoutout to Thems Fighting Herds, the mlp fan spinoff turned OC quadruped fighting game. Regardless of your care for the aesthetics, the single player story was extremely good imo. Enemies were NOT just random CPUs but unique characters with formulaic strategies. Wolf that just does crouching attacks so you need to learn to block and prefer crouches. Snake that zones with projectiles so you need to learn to approach. Grapple bear so you need to learn to zone and avoid grabs. Something else with mixups so you need to learn to standing block sometimes. And the enemies are pretty merciless. If you button mash without doing a combo they punish you hard from level 1. It is immediately taught that you must be trying to learn the game and not cheese your way to victory with lucky spammy shit or random attacks. The bosses are cool too. Giant non standard shaped enemies with interesting attacks that all respect your usual defensive options while also being vulnerable to hit stun. A lot of fighting game bosses decide to crank up the bullshit rather than making them teaching moments. Idk, I thought it was cool
- SliceOfWaifu 3y ago
  Compared to other 3D fighters like SoulCalibur, Dead or Alive, Bloody Roar, etc, Tekken is completely unintuitive for a casual button masher. Tekken, like Virtua Fighter, requires you to sit down in Training Mode for hours just to learn a single character's basic moveset, BnBs, and gameplan. Compare this to 2D fighting games, where all you gotta do is learn the basic Street Fighter 2 movelist, and you can quickly figure out how a character plays by taking one glance at their movelist. The funny thing about this is that Tekken hardly has any motion inputs, which is what most casual players are intimidated by when picking up fighting games.
  - uncletaco 3y ago
    You know I find that funny. When I want to mash in tekken I just remember each button corresponds to a limb. If I want to do the thingy that uses both legs then press the two leg buttons with a direction. If I want to do a left right left combination I press left right left punch in order. You can mash around with a character to see where it leads you to get really good basic understand imo.
notnmeyer 3y ago
> Tekken is a Japanese fighting game that has been around since the late 80’s. wait, what? the first tekken was released in 1994... wasn't it?
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  The very, very late 80's?
- firebat45 3y ago
  You mean nineteen eighty-fourteen.
snarfy 3y ago
I don't like the flower petals to represent startup time. They show numbers for every other stat. They should just show 10 for a 10 frame jab, not two flowers. And for the uninitiated, frame data is important to know what beats what. If they do a move that is -12 on block and you block it, a 10 frame jab is a guaranteed punisher, assuming they are in range. Conversely if it's +12 on block there is no move you can do that is safe and it's best to block or duck any follow up.
redrobein 3y ago
I'm a long time fighting game fan and recently discovered YOMI Hustle[1] a turn based fighting game. I think it works really well for teaching fighting game mechanics, strategy etc., whilst not having to worry about the execution of the moves itself. It's pretty fun, and there's an old version free on itch with multiplayer support. I recommend trying. [1] https://ivysly.itch.io/your-only-move-is-hustle https://ivysly.itch.io/your-only-move-is-hustle

192 points by skadamat 3y ago

I kind of noped out of the fighting game craze when they descended on the arcades in the 90's (?). To my eye they had abandoned the twitchy interactivity I had come to expect playing standard arcade games like Tempest, etc. Rather than a fire button and a spinner you had a joystick plus what amounted to a numpad of buttons. It seemed like maybe a game accountants or payroll managers would enjoy. (To this day, though I have built close to a dozen MAME cabinets, I have never included the numpad of buttons you would need to play fighting games. Besides never getting into the genre, I think they clutter up the console and create confusion for other games: Metal Slug as an example, which of these six buttons is the grenade button?) <rant \> Reading this article gives me a new appreciation for the fighting game genre. I had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering. (Still not sure it's my kind of game though.)

Tyr42 3y ago
Maybe try something like Yomi which removes the twitchiness from it while trying to capture the ability to read the opponent. (It's a card game from a street fighter dev)
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
> I had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering Very confused how you got that impression from this article. The cards are a just a way to visualize information. Fighting games don't play like a fast-paced card game, they are fundamentally different.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Hmm no they kind of do. The basic insight with most fighting games is that once you are competent you know everything that opponent can do and the list of viable options is discrete and small with fairly standard flowcharts. Tekken is a bit more nebulous than this.
  - haste410 3y ago
    That's not something unique to fighting games. That's the concept of playing the metagame.
  - ZephyrBlu 3y ago
    This makes no sense. For one, a large component of real-time games is mechanics and execution. Also, the idea of being able to mindlessly "flowchart" a real-time game at a competitive level is absurd. It assumes a non-interactive opponent. If it was true there would be no such thing as yomi. There are also a lot of other fundamental differences around resource management, opponent interaction, etc. They are only similar on the most basic level. What level have you played card games and fighting games or another real-time game at?
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      Oh please. You can absolutely flow chart fighting games. That is in fact the entire concept behind combos- sequences of moves that your opponent can’t do anything during outside of more modern combo breaker mechanics. Yeah there’s niche dynamic considerations for making these combos work for slightly different distances and weights and heights and power meters and whatever. But for 99% of the player base you’re going to be best off learning a few bread and butter ideas and then executing on them without much variation.
      - irobeth 3y ago
        > That is in fact the entire concept behind combos- sequences of moves that your opponent can’t do anything during outside of more modern combo breaker mechanics. You can flow chart combos, sure, but that's not the whole fighting game; most people who play fighting games competitively will tell you that knowledge of combo theory is maybe 20% of what makes you good at a game The rest is a dance of turn-taking, knowing when you are in advantage or disadvantage state and behaving accordingly, and 'neutral' - your behavior during the times where you aren't performing a combo or being pressured by your opponent Outside of advantage and disadvantage and neutral lies 'oki' - your behavior during the period where you have finished a combo, aimed at gaining advantage or at the very least, preventing disadvantage (by returning to neutral in a controlled form) Samurai Showdown is an example of a fighting game with extremely limited combo/oki mechanics and a heavy emphasis on neutral play -- most characters have only 2 or 3 hit combos which anyone can perform and the entirety of the depth in its gameplay is inside 'neutral' - the spacing between characters, the choice of when to attack and when to defend, when to throw, when to parry, etc. Blazblue is an example of a fighting game with an extremely deep combo system, every character has a unique archetype and mechanic, and combos can last tens of seconds, and set-ups to turn 'lost neutral' into 'lost neutral again' are abundant The difference between a good combo and bad combo in Samurai Showdown can be like 5% of your life bar, meaning if you don't have 'good combos' then you might need to 'win neutral' 1 more time to win the match (compared to if you could perform good combos) The difference between a good combo and bad combo in Blazblue is maybe 50% damage (2500 vs 4500) meaning you need to 'win neutral' maybe 3 more times than if you did a 'good combo' every time you 'won neutral'
toast0 3y ago
I think Tekken is 4 buttons, and Neo-Geo is 4 buttons, so I'm not sure your numpad rant quite applies. I've seen some Neo-Geo layouts with a 2x2 layout instead of the traditional swoosh, so I think it would be ok. Personally, I've got lots of room, so if I were a multi-cade person, I'd build out different machines for different layouts. Something for classic single joystick games with two buttons on either side (although that might not be perfect for everything, some games had three buttons on one side). Something for trackballs, hopefully a layout that's reasonable for missle command and two player marble madness. Something with three buttons each for four players (guantlet/turtles/nba jam). A 4-button Neo Geo layout, which might be enough for the two player two and three button games too; would need to try and see. A 6-button 2x3 layout. If I played MK, their 6-button layout with run, although since I don't play MK, I might put the pre-run games on the street fighter layout with the column in the middle both being block; definitely saw that in arcades.
- reassembled 3y ago
  Japanese arcade cabs typically have control panels that can be swapped out with different button layouts to accommodate the particular game in the cabinet at the time. So the same cab can go from accommodating two players side-by-side playing Street Fighter with two sticks and 6 buttons per player, to a setup with three buttons and only one stick for shmups.
starkparker 3y ago
A lot of replies to this feel like they're missing that you're closer to the target audience for this than people already familiar with fighting game conventions. One of the first things researched to establish requirements for this project was compiling and categorizing questions from beginners.
ChainOfFools 3y ago
I just cannot imagine investing the energy, time and resources, especially when you're a kid, with limited spending money, into these games that will just beat you down and take all of your money for weeks on end before you get even a moderate level of competitive skill. I understand the attraction of mastering a difficult challenge for the sake of the challenge itself, but there's just too strong of a pragmatic streak in me to justify that challenge being something that doesn't generalize into any other aspect of life, and is almost completely a time sink. Plus a massive dose of what feels like an intoxicating and gratuitous level of violence and aggression, which I suppose one gets desensitized to after a while but I'm not sure that makes it any better. Always baffled me to see my otherwise quiet, good natured friends stand in front of these machines for hours when there were so many other, to my mind, more curiosity- inspiring games available at the time. To each their own I guess. I chose to take up dance instead, and in addition to satisfying the need to master a difficult challenge, have greatly enjoyed the actual full body contact with one's erm, "sparring partners," that comes with it as well.
opan 3y ago
Modern arcade controllers are pretty standardized. The 8 buttons on the right are your four face buttons and four shoulder buttons. That plus your 8-directional dpad means they work for just about any 2D game or 3D game that doesn't need analog sticks or a mouse. The left half of the 8 buttons is where the four face buttons go, in their standard positions more or less, but rotated slightly. Top two are the west and north buttons, bottom two are south and east buttons. This means PlayStation Cross and Xbox A are the same button, but in Nintendo layout that button would be the B button (gets even more confusing when you consider that PS3 can use Cross or Circle for confirm depending on the region). For the other four you have your triggers on the bottom and bumpers on the top, but right is before left. You may think that's backwards and confusing, but I think of it as putting the more important action first / on the stronger finger. You see the same with standard pad controllers vs the mouse. Left click on a mouse and right trigger on a controller both tend to be your primary fire. With that in mind you'd probably just treat it like a standard xinput controller for the bindings. I've pretty much just gotten into arcade controllers this year thanks to the new leverless (4 buttons replace the 4-switch stick) arcade controller trend + accompanying DIY scene. They're fun for fighting games, platformers, puzzle games, shmups, whatever they can work for pretty much. With the modern firmware options you can even emulate an analog stick if required for a game. I've been using them for as many games as I can lately. They even make arcade controllers with extra buttons now to play Smash Bros and other platform fighters (e.g. Rivals of Aether).

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago

One thing that's very tricky about these kind of simplified visual explanations of fighting game mechanics is that you don't capture all the strategic implications of move properties. The visualizations make simple scenarios clear, for example if you block a sweep point blank (or whatever a highly punishable tekken equivalent would be, a snake edge or a hellsweep or whatever), then you are at advantage and can land a strong punish. But many moves that are highly disadvantageous on block are not punishable when used at their furthest effective range, because the opponent does not have a far reaching & fast enough move to punish it. At higher levels of play, this kind of knowledge of move properties is actually used against you. There are characters who have uninterruptable block strings that ends in a disadvantageous move, but the string has significant pushback on block. Players will use these strings to push the opponent to a deliberate spacing where it looks like they can land a long range normal to punish the last move of the blockstring. But the string is designed to place the opponent just outside of the range of that normal, where it looks like it will connect, but it it will not. In this situation, the person who did the "unsafe" blockstring can watch their opponent's character model, visually confirm the startup animation of the attempted punish, and punish _that_ move's recovery on reaction. Tricky tricky!

cultureswitch 3y ago
I think I follow the gist of what you're talking about and it doesn't sound all that advanced at all. Deliberately missing out getting blocked to make the opponent think they have an opening is not a particularly high level play in other games. It still baffles me that traditional 2D fighting games and Tekken in particular are so complex and that it is so hard to even pull off a specific move due to control schemes that are maximally unergonomic. Compare this with the simplicity of Mount & Blade Warband which achieves greater depth, in 3D, with a very simple and intuitive control scheme.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  I don't think the game you cite is the same type of game. It's even simpler to control units in Sim City, but that's just because the game isn't about fine-grained, high speed control of one character.

yaseer 3y ago

This is pretty interesting. I play a lot of games, but never got into fighting games. Seeing the strategy "laid out" might be a useful way to understand the mechanics rather than figuring them out with trial and error. Trial an error can be fun (e.g Zelda), but it's always been something that stopped me getting too far with this genre.

coldpie 3y ago
If you want to give it a try, Street Fighter 6 is really, really good. Aside from just being an amazingly well thought-out fighting game[1], it's also got a big player base so you'll have plenty of other noobs to play with in the ranked matchmaking mode, and the networking code is perfect[2] so you can just hop on and start having fun. If you do decide to jump in, just remember that you will be terrible at the start. Everyone is. No, you don't have to understand frame data and have a bunch of sick combos and understand all of the mechanics to play online. Just hop in, the game will match you against players that are about at your level. SF6 is my first fighting game, I started at the very bottom of the ranked ladder (like literally, the very bottom) and now I've played more than 80 hours this year and I've just now started breaking into the "good" ranks (Platinum). In the lower ranks I had no combos and never used the super gauge at all and still won and had a great time. Don't stress too much about your rank, just think of it as a way to match you with good quality opponents. Anyway. Can't recommend it highly enough. [1] Here's a very in-depth overview: https://words.infil.net/w04-sf6review.html https://words.infil.net/w04-sf6review.html [2] They use rollback networking, which is the gold standard for online multiplayer games https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/explaining-how-fighting-games-use-delay-based-and-rollback-netcode/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/explaining-how-fighti...
- lukaszkorecki 3y ago
  To add to it - the frame meter in SF6 training mode is an equivalent of the cards presented in the article, but built into the game.
- grog454 3y ago
  The second article mentions delay based and rollback both of which seem to be appropriate for peer to peer graphs, but there is a third option: server authority. I created a game with mechanics very roughly analogous to fighting games (nebulous.io) where there is no client side prediction, no rollback, and a 20hz update loop. Clients just render what the server reports (with some smoothing). I never get complaints about fairness, and players can quickly learn to adapt to their latency to servers located in different regions. Its as well now as it did in 2015, when a significant portion of players used 3g or worse cellular connections.

catapart 3y ago

I have no previous introduction to this kind of graphing, so I find this to be very very cool! I'm glad we're mapping out these odd, sort of "combine-able abstractions" like timing coupled with input and previous state, in a visual way. I don't know if this is actually useful for anything, but I certainly hope so! And, if not, it at least seems translatable to some really neat artwork. I'd definitely put up a poster of something that described, say, the hadoken, if it were well designed.

ranting-moth 3y ago

Back in the day me and my buddy spent ages playing Mortal Combat on a PC. I decided to learn all the combos (crazy fast keyboard patterns). The combos gave you disproportional damage wielding power. I spent hours and hours practicing it when we were playing. My buddy won pretty much every single game, while laughing at my combo attempts. Then I mastered it one day. I won every single game. Buddy said this combo shit wasn't fair and refused to play the game ever again!

SliceOfWaifu 3y ago
The problem with playing competitive games casually is that the moment one player actually bothers to learn anything about the game, it immediately ruins the experience for the other player if they're unwilling to do the same.
- ranting-moth 3y ago
  Yep. Even worse when you can pay to get better, like MTG, or Magic The Money Gathering as I'd like to call it. Once someone in your group starts hunting down those rare (and expensive) cards, everyone else will have to do the same or give up playing.
  - scubbo 3y ago
    Thankfully, printer ink (just about) remains cheaper than Magic cards.
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      You don't need printer ink. You can print them in grayscale, or cut some index cards to fit into sleeves and write the name of the card you want in pencil.
      - yamazakiwi 3y ago
        I use a bag of coins I've collected, each coin represents whatever card I need at the time.

pockybum522 3y ago

As far as a visualization and alternate means of teaching, at least at a getting started level, this is awesome. As someone who has picked up many fighting games and been immediately overwhelmed by having no clue what's going on or even where to start, I just mash buttons. Even just seeing what's possible, how to access it, and basics of how it works is really neat. I guarantee you if someone was trying to teach me a fighting game and had this handy, it would go about twice as well as them saying "push these buttons to do this" which is the usual means. I love alternate visualizations and unorthodox teaching aids. This ticks all those boxes.

dissident_coder 3y ago
I highly recommend the tutorials in Mortal Kombat 11 and Mortal Kombat 1 (the time travelling reboot/sequel to 11). They do a really good job of teaching intermediate/advanced mechanics in a way that are pretty straightforward and understandble. I never understood whate "frame traps" or "plus/minus on block" meant until I did the tutorials for MK11 and I've been (casually) playing fighting games since Street Fighter 2. The World Tour mode in Street Fighter 6 also starts you off by easing you into the mechanics, giving you mini missions where you get to practice specific mechanics "safely". The dynamic controls which massively simplify inputs is also a godsend for people who are intimidated by quarter circle inputs and the like.
- deleted 3y ago
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jrmurray 3y ago

For an amazing fighting game guide/tutorial I can't recommend https://ki.infil.net https://ki.infil.net enough. Its centered around Killer Instinct but describes general fighting game concepts really well. It has really great visuals/inline videos

jncfhnb 3y ago

Tekken feels particularly bad to play if you don’t know what you’re doing imo. It’s the least approachable. Unexpected shoutout to Thems Fighting Herds, the mlp fan spinoff turned OC quadruped fighting game. Regardless of your care for the aesthetics, the single player story was extremely good imo. Enemies were NOT just random CPUs but unique characters with formulaic strategies. Wolf that just does crouching attacks so you need to learn to block and prefer crouches. Snake that zones with projectiles so you need to learn to approach. Grapple bear so you need to learn to zone and avoid grabs. Something else with mixups so you need to learn to standing block sometimes. And the enemies are pretty merciless. If you button mash without doing a combo they punish you hard from level 1. It is immediately taught that you must be trying to learn the game and not cheese your way to victory with lucky spammy shit or random attacks. The bosses are cool too. Giant non standard shaped enemies with interesting attacks that all respect your usual defensive options while also being vulnerable to hit stun. A lot of fighting game bosses decide to crank up the bullshit rather than making them teaching moments. Idk, I thought it was cool

SliceOfWaifu 3y ago
Compared to other 3D fighters like SoulCalibur, Dead or Alive, Bloody Roar, etc, Tekken is completely unintuitive for a casual button masher. Tekken, like Virtua Fighter, requires you to sit down in Training Mode for hours just to learn a single character's basic moveset, BnBs, and gameplan. Compare this to 2D fighting games, where all you gotta do is learn the basic Street Fighter 2 movelist, and you can quickly figure out how a character plays by taking one glance at their movelist. The funny thing about this is that Tekken hardly has any motion inputs, which is what most casual players are intimidated by when picking up fighting games.
- uncletaco 3y ago
  You know I find that funny. When I want to mash in tekken I just remember each button corresponds to a limb. If I want to do the thingy that uses both legs then press the two leg buttons with a direction. If I want to do a left right left combination I press left right left punch in order. You can mash around with a character to see where it leads you to get really good basic understand imo.

notnmeyer 3y ago

> Tekken is a Japanese fighting game that has been around since the late 80’s. wait, what? the first tekken was released in 1994... wasn't it?

stronglikedan 3y ago
The very, very late 80's?
firebat45 3y ago
You mean nineteen eighty-fourteen.

snarfy 3y ago

I don't like the flower petals to represent startup time. They show numbers for every other stat. They should just show 10 for a 10 frame jab, not two flowers. And for the uninitiated, frame data is important to know what beats what. If they do a move that is -12 on block and you block it, a 10 frame jab is a guaranteed punisher, assuming they are in range. Conversely if it's +12 on block there is no move you can do that is safe and it's best to block or duck any follow up.

redrobein 3y ago

I'm a long time fighting game fan and recently discovered YOMI Hustle[1] a turn based fighting game. I think it works really well for teaching fighting game mechanics, strategy etc., whilst not having to worry about the execution of the moves itself. It's pretty fun, and there's an old version free on itch with multiplayer support. I recommend trying. [1] https://ivysly.itch.io/your-only-move-is-hustle https://ivysly.itch.io/your-only-move-is-hustle