Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

janezhang.ca

192 pointsskadamat95 comments

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!

If you’re interested in this, can I recommend Dave Sirlin’s excellent “Playing To Win” series? One of the few articles that I’ve read that permanently changed the way I think about games, both from the player’s and the designer’s point of view.

Edit: https://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win This is the overview but read the whole thing start to end, seriously.

Target audience: Beginners who have some familiarity of Tekken and have already chosen a character to specialize in.

It's not meant for high levels of play. We have to start somewhere. I think it is perfectly a suitable to help beginners think about +/- frames or other situational info before getting into matchup specific strats.

I always go at it roughly like this: Figure out what buttons to use in what situations, get executions of special moves down first, learn a few bnbs/block strings (and other offensive strategies), oki situations, then once I really master the character do I worry about match up specifics, mind games, etc.

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.

Motion inputs aren't arbitrarily difficult. They're intrinsically tied to the game's balance. Basic special uppercut moves like the Shoryuken use the forward->down->downforward motion to ensure the player cannot hold back to block during the motion. The player must commit to use their strong special uppercut move frames before they've actually unleashed it. Guile's Sonic Boom projectile requires the player to "charge" the move by holding back for a couple of seconds before being able to unleash it. This creates a risk factor, since the opponent is then incentivized to cross up Guile to make him lose his charge. However, this is where Guile's special uppercut, the Flash Kick, comes into play. The Flash Kick can be simultaneously charged along with the Sonic Boom, to disincentivize the opponent from attempting to jump over Guile. Mapping any of these moves to a single button press is a balancing nightmare. Street Fighter 6 has a "Modern" controls option that does exactly this, and it comes at the cost of a big chunk of the character's available movelist. Even with that huge tradeoff, the Modern versions of several characters are still considered high tier. Even then, you hardly see any Modern control players in the upper echelons of Ranked matchmaking because, ultimately, it's way easier to learn the motion inputs than it is to have a solid gameplan.

Street fighter isn't bad at all but some games and some characters are just absurd for no particular reason. Ivy in later Soul Calibur games is a good example, she has two command throws with pointlessly arcane inputs that even have a second, better mode when you do them frame perfect. So everyone who plays Ivy just grinds and grinds until they can do it in their sleep. There's no particular balance reason for that (also Soul Calibur has a block button so the usual balance rules don't apply), it's just a "you must be this tall to play this character" barrier.

You just said yourself that doing them frame perfect yields a better version of the move. The input is difficult because of the potential reward. It's like doing perfect EWGFs in Tekken. I played Ivy in SoulCalibur II, and could do the Summon Suffering input pretty consistently if I buffered it during another attack. It led to a fun mixup since the other player would hear my joystick switches actuating as I did the motion, and crouch to avoid the throw. Instead of finishing the input, I'd hit them with her 2 A+B overhead instead. God, I love SCII. It's a shame the sequels kept trying to reinvent the wheel with the gameplay.

> You just said yourself that doing them frame perfect yields a better version of the move. The input is difficult because of the potential reward.

I also said the other half of that: that the result is that people grind until they can do it 100% in their sleep, and thus all it forms is a "you must be this tall to play this character" barrier.

Unlike the example in Street Fighter it actively works against having a balanced game, since now you have to nerf the move because the people who ground it frame-perfect are too strong, which wouldn't have affected anyone who didn't stick their nose to the grindstone but now they get to eat the nerf too, so the character ends up about level with other characters when you're frame-perfect, which isn't demanded of other characters. We saw this exact antipattern happen with Ivy in Soul Calibur 6.

There's an argument to be made that the arcane input provides a tell to the opponent when it's used outside of a buffered section in some other move's lag, but that same argument would work with a less pointlessly arcane input, like a double half circle.

I don't get what you mean by "you must be this tall to play this character". Equating height to skill is a false equivalency. You can't get taller by practicing. Either way, it sounds like the devs just messed up the initial balance. It ain't the fault of the players who were serious about learning the character. That's the modern conundrum of games in the post SFIV era; constant balance patches before the full meta has been explored. Personally, I'm often dissuaded from trying to learn top tier characters in new games because of the fear that all the muscle memory I build will be useless when the game gets patched. It's gonna be interesting when Street Fighter 6 gets its first big balance patch a year in, and all the Ken and JP players take to their keyboards to complain.

Conversely, characters like Carl Clover in BlazBlue. The difficulty of controlling 2 characters seperately but in tandem is challenging but not difficult to input inherently.

Once you get used to the input style the complexity makes the character and thus the game more fun and interesting.

It is a simple concept, but I'm calling it "advanced" in the sense that people don't really do stuff like that except in the higher ranks of ranked play, because its effectiveness depends on your opponent actually being aware that they "should" be pushing a button in a certain situation.

In lower ranks, people are more concerned with the other strategic aspects of the game; there is a lot of stuff going on all at the same time.

> 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.

The mechanical difficulty of certain actions is a deliberate design choice. The game tests not only your strategic decision making, but also your ability to execute difficult inputs, both under pressure, all at once.

"I think I follow the gist of what you're talking about and it doesn't sound all that advanced at all" could probably go down as a copypasta, perfectly emblematic of someone speaking confidently and dismissively about something they've never done, seen, or even studied very closely.

In Mount & Blade you don't make nearly as many decisions or utilize raw mechanical skill, it is mostly strategy and preparation. Mechanical challenge is part of what makes fighting games, fighting games.

>Compare this with the simplicity of Mount & Blade Warband which achieves greater depth, in 3D, with a very simple and intuitive control scheme.

Most of M&BW depth is outside of the combat system (whereas fighting games are generally only comprised of a combat system) thus making them hard to compare directly. Simplicity is a not a good first principle for developing a successful fighting game combat systems historically. Simple = Less Skill Expression

Did you just compare Tekken to Mount & Blade Warband? Ummm, not even the same thing man. M&B does just basic collision detection, there’s no combos, counters, supers, throws, finishers… get out of here with that nonsense. I get what you are saying (simple systems craft complex experiences) but that’s not a good analogy. Use Mortal Kombat instead.

I played a lot of tekken 1, but never enough to join any tournaments (had one heard of any in the internet less early 90s)

But what I remember being very special about tekken was how easy and logical the moves where.

It was one button, one limb and more or less only buttons that controlled limbs involved in a move was used. It was quite easy to learn many moves without consulting the manual because they flowed well with the characters.

This was in stark contrast to street fighter and mortal combat where things were as cryptic as cheat codes.

>> I played a lot of tekken 1, but never enough to join any tournaments (had one heard of any in the internet less early 90s)

Our local Aladdin's Castle regularly held tournaments and I had friends who ended up making all the way to the national level through those

This is why I always like soul calibur. The control language of the game is consistent across characters and when you go to perform a move, you generally understand what’s going to come, only variables like range, height and speed change (thanks to the dynamics of the weapons). Stances play a part too.

Probably considered “cute” to the fighting game community, I think it’s a great option for those of us who don’t care over the minutia of frame counting.

Tekken never was a 2D fighting game. M&B doesn't have more than 5 moves with any weapon IIRC.

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.

Pulling off moves is very easy. Pulling off specific sequences of moves is not.

That's not true. Geese Howard's pretzel move is very difficult on its own. Even high level players mess up EWGFs. Complicate all this even further by playing in an arcade with a square gate. And not to mention the extreme moves like pentagram input from arcana hearts 3.

Some inputs are hard but I don't see this as a problem. There are many characters in most FG's so I don't see a problem with some characters having challenging or even extremely challenging inputs. Some players enjoy that challenge, and if you don't, you don't have to play that character, you can play one that fits your playstyle.

Much More the exception than the norm

Just play Dhalsim boom you can punish the block string with a standing low kick that closes the distance.

Now laugh as they call you anti fun.

I really would, but I could never land those TK teleports consistently (assuming that's still a thing in 6)

Teleport is now just 3 punches or 3 kicks (no motion), so TK teleports are actually very easy.

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?)

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.)

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Fencing is the same way, especially foil. I personally find the lower levels of olympic play the most interesting, because by the time you get to the semifinals and finals, most of the competitors have surpassed human reaction speed. At that point, the game boils down to a lightning fast game of rock-paper-scissors.

Each fencer basically decides whether they're going to make a straight lunge, a parry-riposte, or a disengage-lunge. A straight attack loses to a parry, a parry loses to a disengage, a disengage will lose to a straight attach due to right-of-way.

> once you are competent you know everything that opponent can do

This reads a little like saying "you are competent at chess when you know all the moves the pieces can make"

In Chess, knowing your opponent's available moves might make the difference between an absolute beginner and a 300 rated player

Knowing some opening theory might make the difference between 300 rating and 1000 rating

But I don't know that I'd call a 300 rated player 'competent', or even say that they 'know how to play' versus 'know the rules of Chess'

It's consistency in knowing what are good options and what are likely choices that makes a competent/good/great player in any game (most fighting games are perfect information, too!)

No, it’s not like chess. Chess has much more entropy. Moves are made one at a time. There’s much, much more stateful considerations to the game.

In fighting games only a handful of options are particularly relevant at any time. often times characters’ entire thing revolve around one move, like a fireball. It’s not to say that spamming fireball is a viable strategy, but all decisions need to be made in the context of remembering that they have a fireball more than anything.

>often times characters’ entire thing revolve around one move, like a fireball

People absolutely hate when a character's entire thing revolves around one move. They're usually a low-tier character, and when they aren't low-tier they are just annoying to play against.

Only beginners tends to complain about that. It's usually extremely easy to deal with people who spam a single move.

one notable exception to this is the grappler archetype, where their 'close proximity command grab' is a massive tool which you always need to respect

the mere presence of the grappler causes a pressure on your decision-making process, since you always have to respect this option from them

but even here, the grappler has more tools than just 'grab you', they have an entire neutral kit still, as well as specials oriented around space control and 'trapping you' in the range where their grab is effective

You didn’t read what I wrote

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?

People absolutely flowchart fighting games at a high level. Combos are, unsurprisingly, completely non-interactive in most games, but there's also a term specifically for non-interactive offense: setplay https://glossary.infil.net/?t=Set%20Play

The goal of an optimal strategy in fighting games is generally to reduce the amount that you have to read your opponent as much as possible, ideally to zero. Obviously the developers don't want this to be fully possible, but players generally try to get as close as they can. Even at the highest levels, you can have rounds that go like: canned opening -> combo -> setplay -> combo -> setplay -> combo.

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.

> 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'

> 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

Yes, this is why it's not at all interesting to talk about things that apply to 99% of the playerbase. Because mindlessly spamming one thing really, really well is an effective strategy against the vast majority of the playerbase in any game.

If this is the level that you think about games at then yes, all games are very similar. The nuances in shape and feel of a game's meta are what make it different and interesting, but those only start coming into play at a pretty high level of competence relative to the rest of the playerbase. At least top 20%, probably more like top 5-10% or higher.

Shrug. Watch the finals of different game tourneys and see the best of the best and tell me it’s not bread dripping with butter still.

There are interesting edge cases that only the pros can make use of, but it’s still samey.

MtG, mentioned earlier, tournament play is very similar. Unless they're draft, they usually devolve into all the decks everyone knew about on Top8 several weeks before release. People can say there's very conscious strategy or tactics, except there's not. Because of the mass share, aggregate reviews, and mob think, it all homogenizes quickly each season.

4 of with 36 non-land, and 24 land in mid-range, means you're really only choosing 9 cards unless its a weird deck. Often the whole season devolves into something like "[Delver's the best/Sword Crow's the best/ect...], all other choices are failure." Hasbro doesn't really care unless sales go down. Hasbro's only motivation is selling cards. If humans buy, Hasbro sells.

Standard Draft still tends to devolve into most pursuing 1st strat, 2nd strat, ect... depending on what gets grabbed nearby.

EDH or Commander is usually viewed as the most variety, simply because there's far too many combinations with only 1 of each among 100.

You can flow chart chess games as well. It's just reductive to think that's all there is to it.

>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

This can be applied to any high-skill competition, basically - from FPS to F-1.

Inevitably true on some level. Although I think card games and FGC share a deeper similarity on the number of discrete steps that one player will plan to execute ahead of time as a sequence.

I’ve long imagined a fighting game where rather than combos, the receiving player has an array of defensive options that vary from trying to mitigate the damage, roll out, or seize the initiative back after each hit more like a kind fu cinema fight. Make the whole damn thing a constant mind gamr

You're imagining the Guilty Gear series, which gives you a variety of defensive options in the system - you can jump, double jump, or super jump to avoid something with different take-off timings, jump arcs, and speeds; you can block, instant block, or faultless defend to change the amount of chip damage, block stun, and pushback in an effort to throw off your opponent's timing; you can dead angle while blocking to try and recover initiative; you can backdash or throw out a move that's invulnerable on startup in an attempt to get your opponent to whiff.

Nah. Guilty Gear is cool but I mean fundamentally a fighting game with no hitstun.

That's not something unique to fighting games. That's the concept of playing the metagame.

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)

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

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.

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.

But if you've played another fighting game before, Tekken feels clunky as hell. If you don't know all of your character's common strings, you quickly find yourself in situations where you're just stuck in move recovery for ages. There isn't a common design pattern of making every stopping point in the string feel natural.

I think that in contrast to Soul Calibur, this happens because the attacks are so fast. Watching for every string to stop at every move makes block punishing too hard in Tekken, if everything in the string was around the same level of frame disadvantage on block. Soul Calibur, by contrast, has most moves enough slower that you can identify the string ending in time to block punish when possible. But as a side effect, attacks in Soul Calibur can recover when they look like they recover. (For the most part. There are always weird exceptions.) So as a result, even when you don't know the game, attacks feel far less clunky than Tekken.

Combine that with Tekken's really bad movement (until you learn the mechanics that exploit the way input is handled), massive move lists, and very little input portability between characters, and you get a really frustrating experience that's mostly unique to starting to play Tekken.

This is exactly what I meant.

Tekken is easy to win for a button masher. Once in a while, a button masher will beat a top-tier opponent. In SF/MK, a button masher has zero chance of winning against a top tier opponent. The skill curve is much steeper.

What are you talking about? Tekken is basically Knowledge Check: The Game, and the very first level of knowledge check (df+1) is going to be completely unbeatable for someone that doesn't know how to respond. In Street Fighter, you can guess right and jump over a fireball 6 times in a row and win.

Say what? Jump over a fireball and you eat an uppercut. Unless a beginner can throw a fireball or another countering special move, they have no chance. Tekken's knowledge check only applies if you know everything about every character. If you don't, a beginner can simply surprise you. Tekken is also prone to juggles and rushdowns and highly damaging combos generated by pressing just one button repeatedly (Hwoarang? Eddie?). This is coming from someone who has played every SF since SF 2 and every Tekken since Tekken 2.

> Jump over a fireball and you eat an uppercut. Unless a beginner can throw a fireball or another countering special move, they have no chance. > Tekken is also prone to juggles and rushdowns and highly damaging combos generated by pressing just one button repeatedly (Hwoarang? Eddie?).

Or, just preemptively jump earlier and get lucky? The neutral game in Tekken is much more complex and those are all, AFAIK, unsafe strings that will get you blown up. Combine that with the fact that tekken is 3/5 instead of 2/3 by default, and you're never going to win a game against someone that's competent if you don't know what you're doing.

> This is coming from someone who has played every SF since SF 2 and every Tekken since Tekken 2.

I'm a fairly competitive player in the games I focus on: I consistently make it out of EVO pools, and take games off of top players. I haven't played much Street Fighter since SF4, but I can still take games off of good players just playing basic guessies. I've actually put time into Tekken, and the defensive responses are all nonsense, and if you don't know them, you will just eat shit until you die. No button masher is going to be able to respond to Kazuya 50/50ing them with hellsweep and ff3, because the response makes no sense (step to his left??) and is not even a button you can mash.

Knowledge checks can work against somewhat experienced players - there are so many moves in Tekken that you can be completely overwhelmed by a masher, since you will face stuff you've never seen before. Street Fighter is a more compact game and you are less likely to be surprised. What will a masher do, spam DI and jump-ins? You've seen it 1000x already.

It does not apply to top-players, obviously, but for players in the middle of the distribution curve Tekken can be hell.

Eehhh.. Tekken is far larger but that doesn’t mean random playing will result in sufficient surprise to win.

Thanks for warning me on Tekken. I was really digging the character design and all in the upcoming Tekken 8 but given I possess dexterity of a 10 year old, I should probably skip it and fighting games in general.

Dexterity is not the issue. For Tekken it’s just knowledge and experience. There’s a ton to learn and practice. It’s huge. Much higher than stuff like street fighter. And I’m not talking about fancy tech. I mean the basic controls and move lists. You will not likely get to a point where you know everyone’s moves.

The reason to play fighting games is strictly that you like the idea of honing the skill and playing competitive 1v1 matches to improve. Progression and reward is pretty different from other genres in this sense.

I wouldn't consider myself to have good dexterity at all but have been able to play fighting games and work my way up the ranked ladder. I'd say if Tekken 8 looks cool, give it a try.

The main problem with Tekken is that it doesn't really document its systems with tutorials or a manual. Fortunately, YouTube will teach you more than enough. Tekken also tends to reward legacy knowledge more than most fighting games, so you'll probably find that Tekken 7 tutorials get you farther than you expect.

Tekken 8 just released a free demo on PS5 (comes out on other platforms in a week). Try it out. You might end up liking the game.

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.

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

For an amazing fighting game guide/tutorial I can't recommend 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

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.

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.

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

[2] They use rollback networking, which is the gold standard for online multiplayer games https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/explaining-how-fighti...

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.

I suggest you read again about rollback input based deterministic simulation, it is the superior option by far, especially for competitive, you have in practice “no lag”.

That you never got any complaints doesn’t means your solution doesn’t have plenty of issues, also 20hz is pretty low.

There is a reason why no multiplayer fighting will even be considered competitive if they don’t use rollback netcode in this day and age.

This?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=software.simpl...

You think this is roughly analogous to a fighting game?

Yes. Although I'm not going to quote my exact wording. Feel free to scroll up and/or familiarize yourself with the game if you're having trouble understanding.

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.

> 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?

You mean nineteen eighty-fourteen.

The very, very late 80's?

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!

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.

No game is perfectly balanced & no players are perfectly balanced either. I don't know about mortal kombat, but home versions of games had handicap features built in for situations like this. You can also do some out of game handicaps like "I get one free move" or "you can't use this special move".

If nothing else, the variety keeps things interesting.

There is a difference between balance and ignorance. Handicaps don't work very well if one player has stronger fundamentals than the other. It'll just be a slippery slope of stacking handicaps until one player ragequits. Instead of trying to Harrison Bergeron the situation, your best bet is to just play a different game or find a way to motivate the other player to learn as you did.

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.

Thankfully, printer ink (just about) remains cheaper than Magic cards.

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.

I use a bag of coins I've collected, each coin represents whatever card I need at the time.

Just do it mentally and keep the game in your mind.

"I summon the Whoore Of Babylon, 70/30 flying. You're finished".

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.

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