Walking And Running Implementation

When analog sticks were born, the way walking and running was implemented in games changed. But before I go into that, it's important to understand the key differences between the joystick on a traditional arcade machine and the little analog stick on your console controller. When you push on an arcade stick, it's pressing down on one or two of four different little buttons that lie underneath the stick. Each button only has two states: pushed and non-pushed. So when you push the stick upward it's going to press on the northern button and when you push the stick up and left it's pressing on both the northern button and the western button.

Now when you push on an analog stick, it's cross-referencing two different axises (a "left to right" axis and a "up to down" axis) and the controller is finding the precise location the stick is resting at, which could be anywhere inside that plastic circle your analog stick is poking out of. With all this extra possibility space, you can alter the way the player tells the character on the screen to move. What I'm gonna talk about here is the three major ways this can be done based on the implementation across a handful of different games. The first variant of this is the most straightforward.

In these images the circle represents the analog stick possibility space. When the stick is not being touched it is resting inside the "deadzone". The deadzone is a very important mechanism on sticks of all kinds because it prevents input from registering until the stick is pushed on a specific amount. The reason you want this feature on a stick is to make it less sensitive to three meddling forms of very minor input:

1. The thumb or finger of the player lightly pressing the stick.
2. The stick being very subtly "stuck" a little bit in one direction.
3. The microscopic bouncing that happens when the player lets go of the stick from a tilted position.

Truthfully, these three things are constantly happening but you don't know it because we game developers have been smart enough to make sure there is a deadzone on the sticks we make games for. Getting back to the this specific implementation, it was used in Viewtiful Joe but is the same in just about every traditional beat-em-up, since they couldn't help it on account of their simple joysticks. By pushing the stick past the deadzone, the character will move in the direction pushed at a specific speed while a movement animation plays at a specific speed. Very simple and again, very traditional. Easy to implement in every case. This next one is a little more complicated.

Devil May Cry and Bayonetta have given the player the ability to walk at a slightly slower rate if they so choose. By pushing the stick past the deadzone but not full-tilt, the character will walk in the direction pushed, and they will do so at a specific speed while a unique walking animation plays at a specific speed. When pushed all the way to the edge the character will run, and they will do so at a specific speed while a unique running animation plays at a specific speed. Slightly more complicated but not particularly difficult to implement, even in 3d. This last one is the most realistic looking of all these three major control types, but also the most convoluted and difficult to implement.

The characters in these games have two different movement animations: a walking and a running. Based on how far the analog stick is being pressed, the animations will not only be cross-faded into each other at different values (which only works with 3d animation), but the character will be moved at a very precise speed somewhere between not-moving and full speed. So if the player is pushing the stick 75% out from its default position in the deadzone, the character will be employing 25% of the walk animation data and 75% of the run animation data and will be moving through space at 75% of the character's top speed. It's why you can do everything from a slow tiptoe to a gallant trot to full-blown running in these games. But it's also very difficult to implement as the animations not only need to look good individually, but they need to look good at varying degrees of animation cross-fade. Personally, I find this all moot since no one ever walks in a beat-em-up unless they are specifically incentivized by the game to do so. Ultimately, we're going with a system very similar to the one used in Bayonetta and Devil May Cry.

There is a little bit more information here only because we will be using up and down in attack mechanics; it would be frustrating trying to push up or down in a combo and have the game think that you are trying to move. So those upper and lower quadrants act as a deadzone, but only when it comes to movement. At the end of the day, you will be able to walk with the character if you so choose and it should be fairly easy to do. It's not the best way of doing it as a general rule, but it is the way of doing it in Aztez.

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.

The worst offender of these modern mechanisms is story, and the cutscenes that so frequently accompany them. Designers have taken the perfectly scant stories of the old arcade action games and erroneously assumed that the player needs a plotline and cutscenes and dialogue to stay engaged inside an action game environment. This simply isn't true, all the player needs is a motivating concept, i.e. save your girlfriend or clean up the streets. None of these require intricate explanations or drawn out custscenes, they just need to be openly stated. It is very important to note that I am addressing beat-em-up gamers here. If you were to kill the story and the cutscenes in a Final Fantasy game, you would alienate the people who play those games and consider those features to be core components of the experience. But no one has ever picked up a great beat-em-up with great gameplay and said "I don't want to play this great beat-em-up because there just isn't enough story." And while we're talking about it, let me just say this; I simply cannot excuse the hugely offensive decision that many designers have made to not let the player skip a custscene.

Feature unlocking is another huge distributor of tedium in action games and it must die immediately. It makes plenty of sense in other types of games for other types of players who are motivated by Pavlovian reward structures and love to see new things come into their possession at regular intervals. But again, the typical action gamer is playing your beat-em-up in the first place because they want to experience the sensation and thrill of combat. Anything and everything that is put behind a locked door in a game of this nature is something the player could have been given right from the start to increase their overall enjoyment of the game. I'm assuming the popular logic here is that you want the player to be motivated to complete your game or to perform certain tasks, and that unlockables act as a carrot in front of their face. This simply isn't true, all the player needs is a fun game. No one has ever picked up a great beat-em-up with great gameplay and said "I don't want to play this great beat-em-up because there just isn't enough things to unlock. There's too many features and mechanics available to me right from the start and I'm overwhelmed with fun!" And while we're talking about it, let me just say this; I simply cannot excuse the hugely offensive decision that many designers have made to make me unlock amazing weapons and gameplay modes for absolutely no reason.

Game structure is a much more subtle problem but no less important, both in and out of the main gameplay mode. There are just too many places in a typical game where the player must sit through something that takes way too long to play itself out. Why must the player sit through a bunch of logo/loading screens and then push a bunch of buttons and watch some irrelevant cutscenes to start playing the really fun game? Why does the player have to complete arbitrary chores over and over again? Why is this vehicle segment or quick-time-event so lengthy? There are too many times that the game puts the player in this awkward position where they are up against a tedium stack and that's when players stop playing. Quit doing this to the people trying to enjoy your game! No one has ever picked up a great beat-em-up with great gameplay and said "I don't want to play this great beat-em-up because there's just not enough time in between the fun parts of this great gameplay." And while we're talking about it, let me just say this; I simply cannot excuse the hugely offensive decision that many designers have made to make me run through an entire section of level just to make another attempt to defeat a monotonous boss.

I intend to circumvent these problems entirely with Aztez. The player is not going to have to sit through anything they don't want to. Anything that can be turned off or shortened CAN be if the player chooses. If a mechanic makes the game more fun, it will be available from the start. The goal here is to eliminate all of those moments where the player just wants to get back to having fun.

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.

Now I want to talk about Super Meat Boy for a quick second. Edmund McMillen (one of the two developers of the game) wrote an awesome post on the Team Meat blog about challenge in games and he broke it down into a really straightforward formula; (% chance the player will die) x (Penalty for dying) = Difficulty. This formula is basically addressing the player concern of "How often will I fail and how much and I going to be punished for it?" Super Meat Boy answers this question in a very distinct way - you die very often and are punished very little. This was a conscious decision on the part of Team Meat and they have specifically constructed all of their levels around this equation.

So what does this have to do with Aztez? It has to do with the fact that we are also going to answer this question in a very distinct way; by making it very difficult to die in addition to punishing you very little when you do. Of course this seems to introduce the problem of having too little challenge, and I absolutely agree that the danger is there. So my perceived solution to this potential problem is to alter the nature of the challenge itself and design accordingly. Instead of challenging the player to not die, Aztez will challenge the player to perform very well (phase 1 of the game). Games like Tony Hawk Pro Skater and Off-Road Velociraptor Safari have done this to great effect; the onus is on the player to accumulate high scores in creative ways as opposed to avoiding a death state. The only problem with those types of games is they are timed and you are restricted to experiencing the game in specific difficulty levels in specific amounts of time. I believe there is a way to circumvent these traditional restrictions and still create an engaging game.

How are we going to do this? Don't know yet! But I'll tell you this much - I'm asking the following questions: What if the player had control over the difficulty of the game on a moment-to-moment basis? What if the player could end the current gameplay segment whenever they wanted? What if the player was rewarded for taking creative risks by having their punishment states delayed, or even eliminated? Help me out here, gamers! :)