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To Have or Give a Gameplay Mechanic? (Read 3087 times)

Started by Nep Heart, December 31, 2019, 12:00:11 am
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To Have or Give a Gameplay Mechanic?
#1  December 31, 2019, 12:00:11 am
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 A debatable subject (if not controversial depending on how you prefer to look at it) that I have seen around at both MFG and MFFA from various sources that had me curious about viewpoints on the topic to a point I've seen it influence the direction of how an author designs their character in the creative process. The question is do you believe a character should benefit from an interactive gameplay mechanic or should the opposing character that they're fighting enjoy it? Some examples based on my observation of people's opinions on these very specific gameplay mechanics would include dizzy systems, guard crush systems, guts system and a lot more. There are characters who only benefit from these mechanics themselves (so, as from the examples mentioned, only P1 can dizzy and guard crush P2 while enjoying marginal defense boosts based on how low their life is), there are characters that only grant these boons to their opponent (which means only P2 can guard crush and dizzy P1 while P1 has to apply additional scaling to their attacks to emulate P2 having a guts system).

 As for my opinion on the matter, I personally prefer it that P1 utilize these mechanics to their own benefit. Why? First off, I don't really believe in the idea of giving P2 mechanics that they normally do not operate in much in the same way non-interactive mechanic is only owned by P1. With exceptions such as necessary fundamental interactive balances such as damage scaling that P2 can't really emulate, I don't think P2 should be benefiting from things they weren't design with using in mind.

 Second, there is a potential risk of mechanic overlapping that can't really be reliably predicted and accommodated with too many character variations that have been created with new ones continuously being made. It would kinda suck if P2 already has a built-in guts system while P1 applies guts scaling for P2, meaning their attacks suffer from triple scaling when you factor the overlapping guts system of both parties and P1's damage scaling system combined, rendering combos extremely ineffective as a consequence.

 Of course, this can cause some compatibility issues, but I think that can be said for any personal mechanic really since it's a long known fact that mechanic clashing is an inevitability of a highly customizeable engine like this... we have to live with it and we do.
Re: To Have or Give a Gameplay Mechanic?
#2  December 31, 2019, 04:33:30 am
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P.O.T.S. recommended aerial recovery, even if it goes against source, for this very reason. If there's a possibility of going against a Guilty Gear character you should be able to play by their rules at the minimum. It's really more like that the creator is responsible for making their character viable in a crossover setting.

It's funny you posted this thread because I had just brought a copy of MONSTER to my casuals night on Saturday, and as I was explaining that jumping was completely unsafe because one hit while in the air will put you into a no recovery fall I was thinking about whether or not I was really right in adding it to the beta I was working on. But hey, if it's a big part of the way the game plays you can't ignore it. If you didn't add a BURST because it seemed unfair then it's not really GG anymore.

Of note I don't think guts is important unless you're also applying the proper scaling. Potemkin's guts and damaging dampening are set at their levels for a specific reason.
Re: To Have or Give a Gameplay Mechanic?
#3  January 10, 2020, 11:38:02 am
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Just defence or parry are perfectly fine to implement. However something like dizzy can ruin either side. If you let your character be dizzied. No matter how you code it some combo heavy character and and will reliably manage to dizzy you and kick off another combo. 9r you dizzy them you gain an advantage as their game has no dizzy and this isn't something they're able to come back from.

Its why most kof characters are given air guard.


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Re: To Have or Give a Gameplay Mechanic?
#4  January 16, 2020, 12:51:24 am
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 It's actually pretty funny that you brought that up since I'm recently playtesting my most recent project against Shinra's Marilyn Sue for the kicks and I can consistently put her into a dizzy infinite because of my own character's target dizzy system and Marilyn's self-dizzy system (the latter's being way too punishing on the character) meant they stacked.

 Another situation was when I was attempting to fight Muteki's Guilty Gear characters using 586's EFZ characters, which got really ugly and made it an uphill battle because the characters I was using in this situation had a guts system for P2 that is integrated into their damage scaling system and the opponents had their own built-in guts system... so, combos did less damage than what even a single normal would do outside of that situation and I sometimes found my attacks doing single digit damage with attacks that would have done 2 to 3 digit damage. I think this screenshot sums it up best on guts stacking...



 Those situations made me think back to this thread and reminded me again why I'm not a big fan of giving P2 systems that they'll have a surprisingly good chance of actually owning those systems anyway (they're not as uncommon as people want to believe), leading to that terrible system stacking situation.
Re: To Have or Give a Gameplay Mechanic?
#5  January 16, 2020, 05:03:35 pm
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Yeah, it's a System by System thing. You also have to take into acount how powerufl your character is overall, like having a system that nerfs an already weak character is bad, like kof charcters and guard crush, generally spaking self guard crushing kof characters are under a heavy disadvantage, as they might end up fighting against chain combo characters (doujin games, mvc, guilty gear, etc..) which woudl break their guard very easily. On the other hand, a kof character breaking other character's guard is not that bad, and it might actualyl amke the charcter more competitive against those other types of games.

Ideally, you put a configuration file in your characters because how good having a feature is, depends a  lot on the game the person has.
Re: To Have or Give a Gameplay Mechanic?
#6  January 18, 2020, 04:35:10 am
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The mechanic contrast you described gives me yet another reason to tweak the characters in my roster.
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Re: To Have or Give a Gameplay Mechanic?
#7  February 12, 2020, 03:48:05 am
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I think its ok for characters to separate systems as long as they have basic system mechanics to stop from getting trapped in infinites and fall  juggles states. Usually both characters have a system that can give them an edge of the other which keeps the match interesting   
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Re: To Have or Give a Gameplay Mechanic?
#8  February 13, 2020, 10:33:36 am
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Mixing characters with different system is like having a kickboxer fight against an arm-wrestler, each one using their skillset
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Re: To Have or Give a Gameplay Mechanic?
#9  February 19, 2020, 06:49:04 pm
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I feel like that's going to be a YMMV, given the state of MUGEN. It's hard to make a character and try to compensate for systems being on AND off a character, unless there's some sort of identifiers like the one Messatsu made for "character traits", where you can set whether your character has a parry, guard crush, guts system, etc.
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Re: To Have or Give a Gameplay Mechanic?
#10  February 21, 2020, 01:10:45 am
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My opinion is mainly balance. I like to implement the same mechanics to every character so that every character in my roster have a baseline of the standard for what they do which is why mugen have common states, and why tools like add004 is a really good tool because it gives everybody a baseline of mechanics like parry/just defend, guard crush, and a dizzy system. If there comes a situation where a character goes against another character without those baseline mechanics, it would potentially lead to problems like infinite since those characters don't have nothing system wise that are similar to each other.
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