Fighting Edge

Design By Genre: Fighting Games

December 23, 2009 10:57 PM

Ultimate Game Design: Building Game Worlds
Tom Meigs, 2003

Fighting games of all flavors continue to be popular, with standout titles like Tekken 4 and Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance leading the way. Let’s look at some of the design details that influence the fighting genre:

• Motion-captured fight performances
• Controller tuning
• Fight arenas
• Fighting performance and combos
• Prop utilization
• Multiple fight settings
• Expanded fight modes

Similar to sophisticated sports moves, fight games include elaborate physical performances from fighters. Again, for the sake of motion fluidity, these performances sometimes begin by utilizing motion capture. Design-wise, every single move required for motion capture needs to be planned and accounted for to build the moves required by your fighting game. Motion-capture sessions can be very expensive, so you must undertake serious session planning to insure that you will motion-capture all the moves required by your game design. There can be hundreds of these motions and in-betweens (motions between motions, or motion segues). You can learn more about motion capture by visiting the House of Moves web site (www.houseofmoves.com).

Many teams extrapolate each move destined for motion capture from the game design document into a spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel, or they use asset-tracking software like NXN alienbrain (www.nxn-software.com) to build a motion-capture list. You will probably want to consider planning a “make-up” session to capture moves that were omitted, changed, or replaced from your initial capture sessions.

A large part of the “feel” of a great fighting game is in the game-controller processing; namely, how quickly button presses “fire off” or “translate” into controlled fighting moves. The game controller gets “scanned” for input by the game engine repeatedly many times per second, and building flash fighting response times often comes down to tuning the controller and animation handler code to minimize any lag in move execution. Fluid fight character control becomes a performance-engineering issue for the game code as it reads in controller input and translates this information into character movement. Next comes animation tuning in making sure that fighter model animation transitions (from one move to another, such as from a fighting stance to a torso grab) can be made without interference, dropped frames, or bad animation “hook-up” transitions (how motions end and begin; how they flow one into another).

Fight arenas have expanded in modern fighting games form the very popular fixed-view scrolling fighters, to fight games within complete environmental arena built upon more elaborate camera systems and environmental interaction. This has opened up the physical fight space and made fight games seem much “larger”, but it has also made new demands on background resources, challenging artists and designers to create a wide variety of compelling fight arenas. Fight arenas now allow for fighting characters to “wander” through the scene from area to area as the fight progresses. This has compelled designers to build up far more sophisticated fight scenarios incorporating multi-area fight scenes, weather effects, and so forth.

Fighting performance has become more complex, while staying true to the idea of multibutton combo attacks and unique character abilities. Fighting strategy has continued to challenge players to “last through the long round” as they must learn to balance high-power attacks with life energy loss and damage taken over even-larger fighting fields. Fighter characters are capable of large numbers of attacks, each of which must be polished for performance.

Grabs, throws, weapon use, and special-case moves must be carefully planned as their execution on opposing characters can be tricky when you have character of vastly different physical sizes fighting each other (for example, think of Yoda fighting Count Dooku in Star Wars Episode II, or a dwarf fighting a giant). A dwarf punch or grab hits a giant’s shinbone. A chest-high grab for the giant versus a dwarf collides with nothing.

Programmatically, and as part of your toolset, you will be tuning collision boxes or collision areas to trigger certain events. Collision boxes determine where the two fighting actors or characters “collide” with each other. This occurrence will trigger an event. Among other uses, these events trigger physical animation reactions to punches, kicks, grabs, and weapon use, or display events like blood-spray particles, sweat sprays, or tooth chips. Ouch!

Fighting games are starting to incorporate more prop use. Fight characters can grab items in the scene (such as bar stools) and use them as weapons. This kind of action calls for the same kind of scripting that you might use in any other third-person action game.

Multiple fight settings have created a demand for much more elaborate fight levels, as the fight drifts or wanders through an environment. Gone, it seems, are the days of the relatively fixed-view fighting game as the genre continues to grow.

Expanded fight modes allow fighters to pair up with computer-driven fighters in tournament modes, and bring single-player action elements to fight games, rather than just a one-on-one setting or a simple tag team. The fight genre remains a very popular genre, yet it deserves plenty of room for growth into the future. Fight games with far greater dimensionality loom on the horizon.

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