Sirlin.Net Game Design

Time 2020-09-26 11:03:40

Web Name: Sirlin.Net Game Design

WebSite: http://www.sirlin.net

ID:60352

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Net,Sirlin,Design,

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The Fantasy Strike fighting game is now free to play. I’ll explain why this is a landmark for the genre.First, this is something we’ve been working on for years. The original vision of the game was always to capture the essence of the genre along with all its strategic depth and difficulty, but to make it radically easier to understand and control than most of the rest of genre. And then really open it up by making it both cross-platform and free-to-play. We hope by doing this that we can bring a lot of new players to the genre and show them why it’s fun and interesting. I’d love for the genre to be even bigger.DevelopmentMaking a game free-to-play is no small thing. It’s very expensive to do because the developer (me and my team in this case) must go through all the time and expense to make the game itself AND must then take on a completely separate, huge, and expensive project of developing all the supplemental content and features that can actually be sold. So it’s not surprising that this hasn’t been done much in the fighting game genre yet. We wanted to really push the envelope of the genre in numerous ways, many of them detailed here, but it took us until now to finish the development of the free-to-play aspect.Isn’t This Standard?You might think there are numerous free-to-play games, so it’s no big deal. There are, in genres other than fighting games. Within the genre there have been a few attempts, but they are at the other end of the spectrum from what we’re doing. Also, it’s important to understand there there is a spectrum of what ‘free-to-play” really means, and we chose the very extreme end of it.Games like Heroes of the Storm and League Legends (both in the “MOBA” genre) are free-to-play. But their model is to have players slowly grind to unlock characters, and then charge money to unlock characters one by one. Having access to all characters is extremely expensive and/or extremely grind-intensive in these games. This is pretty standard as f2p games go. An extreme outlier is DOTA2, a game where you instantly have access to play ALL the characters. No grinding to unlock them, and no need to buy them. You can just play them for free, and they monetize on cosmetics and extra features. That’s very unusual, and hardly any major f2p games work this way—but Fantasy Strike does.Fantasy Strike’s free-to-play system involves giving everyone immediate access to ALL our characters, including the two new characters we just released (Quince and Onimaru). You can play them or any of our characters right now, for free, in online casual play, online ranked play, in practice mode, and even vs the AI. The things we’re offering for sale are several different types of cosmetics (that don’t affect gameplay or give any competitive advantage), a “core pack” that enables several different game modes, and an optional subscription called Fantasy+ that has even more features and cosmetics. It’s best to check this post for details about all that.Shout outs to other fighting games that have tried various kinds of free-to-play. I’m not mentioning them to slam them at all, quite the opposite. In each case, they took a risk and got the genre a little closer to really fully trying this model. I just want to clear up any confusion about where they are on this spectrum compared to Fantasy Strike.Killer Instinct was originally free to play with Jago only (just one character), and offered a $20 pack (or $5 per character) to unlock their season 1 cast (with no way to grind to unlock). They later added another character or two free, in a rotating fashion, I believe. Basically this was a demo that gave you a taste of the game with one or two characters. Dead or Alive 6 works similarly. A couple free characters, and you can buy the rest. Brawhalla (a Smash-like fighting game), allows a few characters for free, a grinding process to unlock more, and has a “core pack” for $20 that unlocks all characters. That’s pretty awesome, so again, shout outs to them. We decided to make our characters $0 and use our $20 core pack to add more game modes though. We’re also aware of Rising Thunder, shout outs to them too. Their game was only ever released in alpha form, where it was free, but never finished as a commercial project.Time To Try ItThis is all a grand experiment, and a very risky one. We were the first traditional fighting game to have crossplay between Switch and PS4, the first to show “frame advantage” inside visual effects inside each hit during gameplay, and now I think we’re pushing the envelope again by bringing this level of free to play to the genre.I love fighting games, and just want to show you all how fun they can be when you get to the actual strategy part of them. So try out Fantasy Strike and see how quickly you can get there.More info on this huge update.List of notable features from our launch last year. For the last few years, I’ve thought about my tabletop games Puzzle Strike and Yomi. I have not been thinking about new editions of those games, but rather entirely new games that are inspired by those games. I’ve done a whole lot of work on that, but I really need your help at this point.The status right now is that my patrons on Patreon have access to all of the new Puzzle Strike-inspired game’s materials. They’re having a great time playtesting that (both print-and-play and online virtual tabletop versions) and you can too if you join. I’ve just started rolling out content for the Yomi-inspired game to my patrons as well. I will continue to do this for sure no matter what. If we are able to get a lot of interest—which means you joining to support us too—then we will also make a digital version of that Yomi-inspired game.Here’s a preview of a little bit of the Puzzle Strike-inspired game:You can join my Patreon here to see more of these games as they develop.Make an Awesome Digital Yomi-ish Game?I have high hopes that if we do make a digital version of the Yomi-inspired game that we’re now equipped to create much better production values than we did on old Yomi’s digital version. We’re also able to do higher production values than in Fantasy Strike. As for the gameplay, I like it even more than Yomi. Also, both the online play and even single player experience can be better than in our previous digital card games. But software development is very expensive and I’ve reached my limit. We need a bare minimum of $20k/month to sustain that development, and really more like $30k/month. That is doable and is being done right now by other designers. So please, if you would like to see this happen, let’s make it happen. As I said, I will continue to roll out the tabletop content to my patrons no matter what. Even better if you join and we can get this going.More About These GamesBoth of the new tabletop games I’m working on have a lot in common with each other, philosophically. They play nothing alike, but in both cases, they take the core thing about the games they’re inspired from, then take a different fork in the road. Both these new games mark the same shift in my tabletop design toward asynchronous play. That is, they let you get through your turn without having to go back and forth with the opponent(s) several times, yet still retain their strategic depth. This is very helpful for creating the possibility of play-by-forum, of asynchronous play in a digital version, of pass-and-play in a digital version, and even if only ever played as a physical tabletop game…it’s just a lot faster to get through the game without needing to break the action of your turn.Both these new games have cleaner rules than my previous games. Fewer fiddly edge cases that rules that can be stated more simply and intuitively than before. I have always strived to do as good as I can on that issue, but it was really Pandante’s 2nd Edition that was the key for me. I’m usually checkmated by situations where a rule seems fine, but then playtesting shows it absolutely must have some small change to stand up to rigorous play. Then it needs a second fix and a third band-aid. No matter how hard we try to revise it to not need those fixes, it really does need them, and nothing can be done. In Pandante 2nd Edition, I finally took the more bold step of giving up on trying remove these band-aids (can’t…) or state them more cleanly (only slightly helps). Instead, by changing some fundamental working of the game, the entire realm of the problematic rule is avoided in the first place. No band-aid needed because the rule itself is gone and obsolete. (Btw, you can get that Pandante 2nd Edition here. It’s great!)That’s also what I’ve done with these new games. The most annoying areas of rules aren’t “fixed” because these are not new editions of those games. Instead, these are different games that simply chose different rules-waters to play in—ones that happened to “just work”. No need to wonder if crashing zero gems gives you money or not in Puzzle Strike. No need to wonder how you play “no-card” at all in Yomi, what that even means, or how you handle the timing of it. That stuff is all gone.Both these games are also more flavorful than their predecessors. The Puzzle Strike-ish game achieves that by coming alive with actually showing you the gems the game centers on manipulating. It all has a lot more “table presence”. The Yomi-ish game takes mild things that differentiated characters before and really amps them up. Projectile characters really feel like they’re zoning you compared to before. Special moves generally have whatever special properties they need, rather than my old insistence that they be rationed out in some certain way. And if a character needs some extra cards, or even an extra deck to work, so be it! Whatever is cool and flavorful is how it should be.ConclusionPlease help me be able to afford the production values these games deserve, and have some fun seeing how they progress, too. Tell some friends to get on board so we can make an awesome digital version of the Yomi game. Also feel free to drop in our Discord chat and you can ask other people how they feel about the whole process.Thanks for your consideration. Today, Bernie Sanders dropped out of the US democratic primary election for president of the United States. It’s a dark day. So dark that I feel compelled to give context for anyone who hasn’t been keeping up. The amount of corruption and the unevenness of the playfield is truly disgusting.Joe BidenBut first, Joe Biden. To say Biden is a garbage candidate is putting it really lightly. He is the literal worst possible choice that the democrats had available, checking every box you’d want in order to lose an election. He has no chance against Trump and is the least electable, most risky choice, yet was sold to us on the strength of the exact opposite: that he is somehow the most electable and safest. There’s so much bad to say about him that I’m going to have to just give quick highlights. If you plan to vote for him, you should know these things.Sexual AssaultBiden has credible allegations of sexual assault against him by Tara Reade, for starters. It’s possible you are not aware of that because, incredibly bizarrely, there has been almost total radio silence across the entire mainstream media about this. The total lack of coverage by established media contrasted with the explosion of talk about it on social media brings into sharp focus just how corrupt the coverage of this election has been. If you think for a single second that similar allegations against Sanders would not have been covered wall-to-wall on every cable news channel, you’re not being honest. It’s obvious and conspicuous the protection Biden is getting. We are not seeing from the media a good-faith effort to inform the public on issues facing the candidates. We’re seeing mainstream media with a specific agenda, and that agenda is helped buy burring this story right now.If you have heard about the allegations and think they don’t count because Ms. Reade wrote a positive thing about Russia once, I’ll remind you that that does not make sexual assault ok. And if you think that she is a “Russian operative” because of that, I’ll remind you that actual Russian operatives would not write things about Russia that could expose them as being Russian operatives. The point is, her claims are credible, and while I don’t know if they are true, we should believe women in general and take their claims seriously. This isn’t an isolated incident with Biden either. It’s a pattern of being way too handsy for decades and several incidents that go way past the line, including a literal sexual assault.The sexual assault situation alone, regardless of anything else, should be disqualifying for him.Mental DeclineNext, Biden’s mental state is clearly in decline. It’s uncomfortable to talk about that because my intent is not to shame him over it or to be mean-spirited about it. It’s obvious though. He is a gaff machine. He kind of always fumbled words, so that alone isn’t the issue at hand. It’s that the severity has drastically increased. Saying the wrong name of the state he’s in during an important campaign speech, mixing up which was his wife and which was his daughter in another. Getting lost in his own points quite often. His handlers know this and have used a “hide the candidate” approach, correctly strategizing that simply allowing him to speak is the worst thing he can do.A person with his kind of mental decline is not a good choice for President of the United States, to put it lightly. But even if it was somehow “ok,” it will definitely not be ok during the general election. Trump will easily decimate him on this, probably just letting Biden ramble and get lost in a point and jump in with “Joe do you need a break? I know you’re not all there.” Yes, I recognize that’s rich coming from Trump. The point is that Biden’s mental unfitness for this job is going to be a serious issue (and one that NO other democratic candidate had) come time for general election debates.Biden’s mental state alone, regardless of any other issue, is disqualifying.Medicare-for-All vs Paying-More-for-People-to-DieNext, Biden outrageously does not support medicare-for-all (M4A). Outrageous, you ask? Yes. This issue would take multiple articles to fully disentangle, because the nonstop lies about this policy from almost all sides have been truly historic. I’ve never seen a policy so universally lied about, so it’s entirely possible you are simply unaware of what is even going on with it.Under M4A, you have no premiums, no deductibles, no co-pays, and no point-of-care costs of any kind. The mainstream media has done its very best to hide this very basic fact from you. Ok so it would be “free.” Surely there are big catches. Like you wouldn’t get to choose your doctor, and it can’t really be free I mean what about ambulance rides, what about cancer treatment? You would be able to choose your doctor much more freely than now, in fact. Any doctor you currently visit, you could still visit, then in addition to that ALL other doctors become “in-network”. So you would have vastly more choice. Ambulance is covered, cancer treatment, dental, vision, practically everything. It is far superior coverage to anything you could possibly have right now.Even if you believe you currently have “good medical coverage”, it’s not as good as that. Even if, somehow, “everything” were covered by your current insurance, you still have a for-profit insurance company who could simply deny your claim on a life-saving treatment you needed, at any time, if they felt like it “wasn’t worth it.” But not with M4A.Also, tens of thousands of Americans die every year as a result of not having medical coverage. And TENS OF MILLIONS of Americans have no health insurance. This is horribly immoral, and we’re the only developed country in the world (if we can even be called that) that simply lets people die when they can’t pay. We also pay massively more for care than any of those countries. Something like twice as much per capita yet still are far behind the rest of the world.So sure, M4A is objectively vastly superior in the coverage (covers everything, not subject to whims of a for-profit company to deny you treatment) and it’s free of any premiums, copays, deductibles, and point-of-care costs. And it involves reasonable drug prices rather than insane ones. But it must be paid for somehow, and we can’t afford it. Actually, it SAVES TWO TRILLION DOLLARS over 10 years. The leeches and vultures of our disgusting system have siphoned off so much money (from multi-levels of bureaucracy, from being able to massively raise prices, from lobbyist changing the laws to make it a disgusting amount of profiteering) that we’d actually save money by just giving everyone healthcare.ANY candidate who opposed medicare-for-all is saying that tens of thousands of people dying every year from preventable things is fine with them, even though letting them die will cost trillions more, because they really really really want their donors to continue profiteering off those deaths. It’s disgusting and outrageous. I personally can’t imagine ever voting for any candidate ever again for the rest of my life who so openly advocates deaths as these “centrists” who oppose medicare-for-all.Joe Biden opposes medicare-for-all. Why? He has ties in the form of major campaign advisors who were lobbyists for the healthcare insurance industry. Outrageous corruption and a callous disregard for human life. Joe Biden recently shockingly went so far as to say that if he were president and somehow, against all odds, the senate passed medicare-for-all, that he would VETO it. Similar to what a cartoon villain would do.Also factor this in: despite a historic level of lies and propaganda from monied interests specifically designed to deceive you about medicare for all, the MAJORITY of the country is still in favor of it. Before the global pandemic of the corona virus—before that!—it was the #1 issue to democratic voters with something like 80-84% approval. And 55%-60% nationwide if I remember correctly. So it’s not a centrist stance to say we should pay trillions of dollars needlessly to have tens of thousands of people die in our current system. Actually, the centrist stance is M4A and Biden has a fringe stance that is deeply unpopular.Joe Biden’s opposition to medicare-for-all is, by itself, absolutely disqualifying, disgusting, and morally monstrous.Lying About Civil Rights ActivismNext, Joe Biden has shocking history of lying. Yes, I’m aware that Trump is likely a literal pathological liar. Let’s not use whataboutism here. Trump being bad is a separate issue and right now, we’re examining why Joe Biden is a garbage candidate.Over 30 years ago, Biden lied repeatedly about his civil rights record. He lied about which specific black leaders he met with, which churches he went to in his activism efforts. He lied about going to Selma, and so on. Then in 1987, called out on these lies, he admitted that these things were not true. He admitted then that he had not actually done any activism at all, hadn’t gone to those places or met with those people at that point in his life, but that his time as a lifeguard in a predominantly black neighborhood had given him perspective on the movement. I’m sure it did. But that’s not a reason to lie about it.You are probably thinking, so what if he lied 30 years ago? Fair enough, people change, but how about this? Starting last year he began repeating the same lies from back then, dozens of times at dozens of speaking engagements. The height of his latest lies were when he outrageously claimed to have been arrested in South Africa when he was trying to visit Nelson Mandela, an event that did not happen. He then compounded this lie by saying later on, Mandela visited congress and thanked Biden for trying to visit him in prison, in the previous lie. The size of these lies is staggering. The lack of coverage on it in mainstream media is very telling too. This is straight up stolen valor that diminishes the work actual activists have done.The outrageous lies Biden has told incessantly about his civil rights record are, by themselves, disqualifying.Miscellaneous Other DisqualifiersHonestly I could go on a long time. I’ve given at least a few broad strokes. Sexual assault allegations, mental decline, fringe and immoral and impractical stance on healthcare—during a global pandemic, and insane lies about civil rights. How about a few more quick bullet points:Biden was the single strongest driving force behind making 94% of the Bush era tax cuts for the rich become permanent.Everything about Anita Hill.Biden has blood on his hands from his Iraq war votes, then lied about his support of the war later.Biden voted to let states overturn Roe v. Wade and said that decision (which allows abortions) “goes too far.”These things make Biden unfit to lead, but more to the point right now, they make him amazingly weak as a candidate. He has an overwhelming number of disqualifying weaknesses, and he no actual policies that generate enthusiasm. He is not a inspiring on climate change. He is not inspiring on gun reform or worker’s rights. He is anti-inspiring on the #1 issue facing voters right now of healthcare. The thing that probably should be the #1 issue is that money in politics has deeply corrupted the system into one of legalized bribery. He is overtly for this corruption though, both using it and arguing in favor of it.I don’t know how else to tell you this: he can’t win. None of this is news. He was always the least electable candidate and still is. Why, then, is he the nominee at all? To say “because that’s who the voters chose” is itself a deception. That’s not a fair characterization of what happened.Why Did This Happen?In my opinion, there are three main reasons this disastrously bad loser of a candidate appears to have won the nomination. I will tell you the reasons, and I think this makes a whole lot of difference in who is at fault here. When the loser loses, be careful who you blame. It’s really easy to blame the wrong people, which then would actually be doing work on behalf of the true guilty parties.1) The Media.The mainstream media (CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPO, etc) have always had an establishment bias and hated progressives. But the masks really came off this time around. Months and months of non-stop negative coverage of Sanders, in bad faith, with no real basis, was beyond anything it had done before. WaPo doing 16 separate hit pieces on Sanders in the span of 16 hours. MSNBC manufacturing “news” segments simply to smear him such as “body language experts” saying Sanders moved in a mean way during a speech once, Chris Matthews saying no one should vote for Sanders because the real metric should be who would help you on the side of the road if you had trouble and he says Biden definitely would but Sanders wouldn’t. There’s way too much to cover here. It was insanely biased wall-to-wall smears while claiming to be neutral and unbiased.These smears were almost all on things unrelated to policy (with the exception of medicare-for-all, which was just lied about) because there is no good way to attack Sanders on policy. His policies are actually super basic, standard in the rest of the world, and incredibly popular with American voters when you poll them issue-by-issue. So the non-stop media attacks had to be on manufactured things like the false narrative of “Bernie Bros” (note: same narrative we now know Hillary Clinton’s campaign planted in numerous press outlets in 2016).The establishment democrats, donors, and elites in media were acting to keep their “good thing” going. Sanders plan to end corruption in the DNC, end corporate donations to candidates (which are bribes), put and to the whole scam of high paid consultants who leech off the system, and worst of all, to tax the rich fairly…absolutely terrified these people. All these elites just happened, coincidentally, to act maximally against the candidate who would tax them while propping up any establishment candidate who could maintain the status quo. So much for “news” coverage.I can’t emphasize enough how extreme this stuff was. Sanders historic wins in the early primaries were downplayed universally by the mainstream media. Biden’s wins were trumpeted to build as much momentum as possible by the mainstream media. This stuff had a huge effect on older voters, who really ended up controlling the outcome. About 70% of voters over 45 years old favored Biden in this last set of primary elections while about 70% of those under 45 favored Sanders (but the youth vote didn’t show up in nearly big enough numbers). It was social media vs the outrageous bias of establishment media, and this time, establishment media won, using over-the-top propaganda. Imagine if there had been even remotely fair coverage. Instead, a huge number of Americans were told over and over and over and over again by cable news that Biden was safe and electable (another way to avoid talking about his deeply unpopular policies) while Sanders is “radical” and bad in every possible way.2) The DNC.Members of the DNC were FAR more afraid of Sanders than Trump, and for good reason. If Trump wins, their jobs will remain similar, and so will their gravy train. Sanders, on the other hand, made it clear he will end their corruption. He would reshape the party on day 1 of being the nominee by banning corporate donations and it would also be necessary (really really necessary) to outright fire most of them and replace them with people who aren’t part of that corruption. Their very jobs depended on opposing Sanders and wow did it show.The DNC has a charter with a pledge of impartiality, which is an absolute joke. We know—for a fact—that they massively violated their own charter in 2016. Leaked e-mails from Wikileaks show that Debbie Wasserman Schultz (head of the DNC at the time) intentionally gave Hillary Clinton the debate questions ahead of time, but not Sanders. They show that she intentionally scheduled the low number of debates and their times in order to favor Hillary Clinton as much as possible. I think it was something like 94% of the money that flowed through the DNC at the time actually went through Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Not to the campaign, but she acted as a clearinghouse for DNC money in general. That means that downballot candidates across the country, who need DNC money to support their campaigns, were actually beholden to Clinton in that situation. An insane situation and advantage. The super-delegate system is also insane, and exists only as a thumb-on-scales cheat the subvert the will of the voters, and DNC used it maximally to undermine Sanders and favor Clinton.Oh and by the way, in 2016, Debbie Wasserman Schultz transitioned from head of the DNC directly to being on Hillary Clinton’s campaign, just to rub it in our faces how much of a farce the “impartiality” clause of the DNC’s charter really was. They have no interest in picking the candidate the people want.Back to super delegates, the DNC has less insane super delegate rules now, so it now puts the thumb-on-scales less than before with that particular mechanism (why do it at all??). But more to the point, you don’t have to wonder if the DNC massively favored Biden and stacked the deck absurdly much to prop him up. They did it overtly this time. They openly discussed how the hell they can band together and stop Sanders once he was doing well. There was a massive coordinated effort on the part of the DNC, going against their own charter, to torpedo a candidate that the people wanted because it would be bad for their donor class and for their own jobs.THIS move is the main reason for the democrats losing in 2016. Do not go blaming someone who stayed home when given a choice between Clinton (a deeply flawed candidate and one of the most unpopular in history) and Trump (uh, same). Instead, the blame should go on the corruption of the DNC with an assist from the mainstream media that CREATED that situation.We’re now in the exact same situation with the exact same bad actors (mainstream media and DNC) causing it again. In an actual fair contest, Sanders would be the nominee. Instead, they made it as unfair as they possibly could to prop up a candidate who will lose, who has numerous disqualifying flaws, and who no one is excited about. The idea that voters will turn out for Biden is laughable. And when they don’t, don’t blame them. Eye on the ball: the DNC is at fault. Mainstream media is at fault.3) Election fraud.Regarding voting machines, it's difficult to reach any conclusion other than enormous election fraud via voter machines flipping votes when you look at this data. The point being if you try hard to explain this on-the-level, I literally don't know how you can.What it’s saying is that in every county where there’s no accountability in votes, no way to verify the votes are legit with a paper trail, Biden won by a lot more than exit polls would predict. In every county where there is a real trail to verify votes, Biden didn’t come out way ahead of expectations, and Sanders did a bit better than expected. Further, that the magnitude and frequency of this is so huge as to make basically impossible to be chance. SOMETHING is going on. And further, that if you try to come up with non-corrupt explanations to tie it to some underlying correlation, the only things people can come up with would have run the other way, not the way that favors Biden massively.While I can’t definitely say there’s election fraud, it sure looks bad. And the “joke” here is that who do you even accuse? In other words, “who benefits?” Biden’s camp does, of course. But that doesn’t mean they did it. The republicans would benefit hugely, putting up the literal weakest possible candidate in the general election against their man. Putin would also benefit. Russian hackers trying to sew discord could hardly do better than making the weakest candidate win the democratic primary so that Trump can keep doing constant crazy things. Sadly, the DNC is the most likely entity to have flipped the votes on those particular voting machines. But I don’t know.The End GameThere was definitely a massive effort to subvert the fair election process here by the DNC and the media. Possibly election fraud. But put yourselves in the shoes of the DNC and think of the end game. Clearly their most important goal, above all else, was get rid of Sanders (NOT to beat Trump, that’s a distant second for them). But once they accomplish that...surely they know Biden will just lose?One possibility is they are incredible incompetent idiots and that’s the end. Yeah, he’ll lose, the end.Another possibility is the plan all along was put in a vice president running mate who somehow massively changes the game enough that a win is possible. Maybe.A third possibility, and the one that seems most likely to me, is that from day 1 of this sham, it was always clear to them Biden was unable to win the general election. The “electability” thing was a disingenuous scam. The real end game is to crush Sanders, then at the actual convention, say that, surprise, Biden’s health is declining so we’ll need to pick someone else. Then they will pick someone else, ANY non-Sanders person they can find, and whoever it is has a better chance of beating Trump than the Biden. Is that person Cuomo? Is it Michelle Obama? Is it Bloomberg? Is it the ultimate insane bad play of Hillary Clinton? I don’t know. But I have to think these people are not so stupid as actually plan to run Biden.ConclusionBiden is going to get really low turnout, and that’s the fault of the terrible entities that put us in this situation. It’s THEIR fault. Fixing this in the far future will come from taking THEIR power away. Fixing this is not telling some random female voter who couldn’t stomach voting for yet another sexual assaulter that it’s HER fault. Fixing it is not telling some dude who says if your’e not for medicare-for-all in a pandemic, then he can’t vote for your basically murderous healthcare stance. Fixing this is not about shaming voters. This is an extreme situation where media and the DNC bent over backwards to do what effectively screws us all. Hold THEM accountable.Let’s try to build up alternative media who is outside of the incredible bias shown by the mainstream media. Support The Young Turks. They are completely clear what their personal opinions are, unlike every cable news host who claims to be neutral (then goes all in on propaganda). They provide very good and informative news coverage. They call out good and bad moves on a case by case basis, regardless of “which side” did the moves. They constantly show clips of insanely biased coverage from Fox news AND from so-called left-leaning mainsteam news. They are not “the Fox news of the left.” They are the opposite. They are good good faith actors in world of bad faith coverage.They are also the biggest such alternative organization so they are our best hope at pushing back on this problem with the media. We should want them to grow and the power of cable news to wane. Growing any other such news organization (similar to TYT) that’s a real challenger would also be great. Right now though, TYT is the is the main actually challenger in play, and they’re doing good.Here’s a link to be a TYT member. Yeah that’s an affiliate link, but it’s not about that. Sign up without that link if you even barely doubt my motives or sincerity. Or watch their coverage for free, they offer a lot of it, just a lot more for members.Regarding reducing the power of the DNC, your best bet is to support the candidacy of any Justice Democrats you can. They are a group who pledges not to take corporate PAC money so they can actually represent the people instead of donors. Several of them are already in congress right now (AOC and The Squad for example). If they had greater numbers, they could steer the ship away from corruption.And no matter how popular any given policy is (for example, federal background checks on guns poll at like 90-94% approval yet can’t even get a vote in the senate), nothing will happen until the money-in-politics problem is solved. It deeply corrupts everything to the point that government serves lobbyists and donors (in that case, the NRA) rather than the people. If you want to do something about that beyond supporting Justice Democrats, look into Wolf PAC.Should you vote for Biden? I sure wouldn’t hold it against you if you didn’t. The fatal shot has already been fired, and I care more about holding the actual guilty to account. I’m crowdfunding several projects all at once right now and asking for your help.Join NowHere are things I’d like to do:Add more characters and features to Fantasy StrikeCreate new tabletop games, and possibly more content for CodexCreate digital versions of those tabletop games with good production values.I’ve already started on these things, but finishing them is another matter. It costs tens of thousands of dollars per month to pay the various people we need to do art and programming for these kinds of things.If you join my patreon (at silver or above, aka $10+), you’ll get access to what’s in-development right now. As of the time of this post, that means you’ll get to play development versions of characters in Fantasy Strike, and access to a new tabletop game that you can print-and-play and try for yourself. About twice per month, I’m going to share new content / characters / games etc. Usually substantial and playable each time. You can try it out as we go, shape its development, and make it possible to even finish this stuff. If you enjoyed Puzzle Strike, Yomi, and Fantasy Strike, then I really think you’ll be excited about seeing these new developments take shape.The situation is that I have a TON of stuff in the works that’s playable and fun, but without your help, I can’t actually afford all the art and programming necessary to bring it to life. That goes for physical tabletop games, digital versions, and content in Fantasy Strike. Also, zero of the money raised is going into my pocket: ALL of it goes to paying artists and programmers.There’s already a lot available to patrons right now, and a ton more is coming. Please help me be able to afford the production values these games deserve, and have some fun seeing how it progresses, too. Also feel free to drop in our Discord chat and you can ask other people how they feel about the whole process.Thanks for your consideration. Fantasy Strike is an interesting case study in game balance for an asymmetric game. I did the entire balancing process without any data at all, and now, after it’s all done, we have the data. Meaning, we were collecting data, I just didn’t have a way to actually look at it until now, after the whole balancing process is basically complete.Relying on ExpertsI find it much easier to balance a competitive game by going off the opinions of experts than looking at data anyway. Experts can get to the bottom of issues more quickly, and with a much smaller sample size than a data-driven approach needs in order to be good enough quality to rise above statistical noise. In some games I’ve worked on, I’m one of the experts (Fantasy Strike, Street Fighter HD Remix, Puzzle Fighter HD Remix). In other games, I’m not at all (Yomi, Puzzle Strike, Kongai) so I rely on players who have expert knowledge about balance. I’ve found both ways can work just fine, it’s all a matter of knowing which experts to listen to. On any given issue, you can always find someone who says X and someone who says the opposite, so it’s pretty critical to be able to evaluate which arguments actually make sense, and factor in whose opinions on such complex things have turned out to be right a lot before.Looking at the DataAnyway, now that we have the data, how did it all turn out?First, a reminder about what success even looks like. Like in any such game, it’s a struggle to keep every character within a reasonable power range versus every other. It’s normal to have 8-2 and 7-3 matchups (meaning, if two experts played 10 games in a specific character matchup, we expect character X to win 8 and character Y to win 2, etc). The question is how many of those matchups there are. I tried to give some perspective about what percentage of 7-3 and 8-2 or worse matchups we expect to find in these sorts of games in this post about Game Balance and Yomi.In Yomi, the matchup chart at the time showed literally zero matchups of 7-3 or worse, which was incredible, and I was unable to even name another game with 10+ sides that has done that. It’s unreasonable to expect that of ANY asymmetric competitive game, and would be an impossible standard to hold any fighting game to.But…we did it. Here’s the empirical matchup chart based on hundreds of thousands of games played over the last year:I’ve highlighted the matchups of 7-3 or worse in red. Just kidding, there aren’t any.You might think that an empirical matchup chart like that can hide balance problems because it’s including a bunch of low-skill players, and maybe when the top players play there’s really unfair stuff that no one can deal with. That’s a good point. It’s worth noting that an empirical matchup chart that includes ALL players is still worth looking at because that’s, you know, the experience of the playerbase overall. So it’s a relief to find out just how tightly balanced that chart is. But yes, a chart that’s just experts might look wildly different, so let’s look at just the “master league” players (as well as the top 20% of elo players in casual matches).There still aren’t any 7-3 or worse matchups. It’s pretty similar to the other chart and a shockingly narrow range of balance to anyone who is familiar with these types of charts in other games.If anything, I actually think some of these matchups are truly closer than the data shows. Two of the most lopsided matchups in the game according to that chart (reminder: none actually show as lopsided there since nothing is even 7-3) are Jaina vs Geiger and Lum vs Valerie.Geiger is probably the #1 most losingest character against me personally, so I was curious what my own stats are. When filtering the above table of expert player results for just games that I personally played, I found that my Jaina vs expert Geigers is 6.7 - 3.3 in Jaina’s favor (compared to 3.4 - 6.6 the other way around). Admittedly a small sample size there, but I feel like it’s a case where more Jaina players just need to step it up.I have more to say about Lum though. He is probably the most difficult character to play well. The largest number of different situations happen when Lum is on the playfield because his random sets of items create all sorts of opportunities to take advantage of things if you know how, improv, and act fast. It’s no surprise that even amongst the top 20% of players, they still don’t really play him well enough.The chart above lists Lum vs Valerie as 3.7 - 6.3, yet if we only consider the matches I personally played as Lum against those same top players, the number becomes 6.75 - 3.25 in Lum’s favor. And unlike the previous example, it’s not a small sample size. I guess that would actually make it the most lopsided matchup in the entire game in the opposite direction that the chart shows, so it’s hard to know the real truth. It’s also interesting that players routinely call out that matchup as very very bad for Lum, yet I have often accepted challenges in it, win them, yet I haven’t changed anyone’s mind apparently.The bottom line is that the above data shows 89% of matchups are in the 6-4 to 4-6 range, with ALL the remaining matchups just barely worse, and 0% in the 7-3 or worse range. And some of the ones that are barely worse seem likely to be within that 6-4 to 4-6 range too, ultimately. (Based on my play at least! Or wait, they’d still be least close matchups, just in the opposite direction? Well, who knows.)PopularityIn Yomi, we found an amusing inverse correlation with character popularity and character win rate. Midori was the least popular, yet most winning character while Setsuki was the most popular, yet least winning character. And in Fantasy Strike…the same thing happened again, almost.Here’s the Fantasy Strike results from highest win rate to lowest:Midori 59%Rook 54%Lum 53%Valerie 51%Argagarg 50%Grave 49%DeGrey 49%Geiger 47%Setsuki 46%Jaina 45%Now here’s the chart by character popularity:DeGrey Setsuki ValerieGrave Jaina Rook Geiger Lum Argagarg Midori In the Fantasy Strike story world, Midori is a martial arts teacher, while Setsuki is a ninja student. It seems that in the games, masters play the master while students play the student.If you’re interested in playing Fantasy Strike, it’s available on Switch, PlayStation 4, and Steam.Join the Discord chat to find out about weekly tournaments or to ask for matches and strategy advice. Evo is considering new rules for which controllers are allowed in their tournaments. Their call for feedback on rules is here. Their actual rule document is here.In my opinion, Hit Box controllers should be banned. I find discussions of this topic often muddled by bad arguments which makes it difficult to get to the substantive part. I will explain the forces at work.The BaselineTo be clear, before saying anything at all about Hit Box controllers, I think pads and joysticks should be legal. This is hopefully obvious because these have been the standards for 20+ years. Fighting games have a long history of joysticks, the games are designed for them, tournaments were like 99% - 100% joystick users for years.Gamepads must be allowed as well because they are the stock controllers on the consoles these games ship on. It would be too bad of a situation to tell new players that using the default controller of their console is BANNED, and no one is calling for this.I state these things to specifically call attention that the reason these controllers should be allowed is that they are and have been the standard for decades. It actually doesn’t matter if one has some sort of advantage over the other in that we can’t feasibly ban either of these types of controllers even if we wanted to (and I don’t want to). The point being, it’s a GIVEN that we’re allowing these.And later in this discussion, you don’t get any cleverness points for saying “but one of those two allowed types of controllers has an advantage over the other THEREFORE we should allow anything!” No. The reason these two should be allowed is that, like it or not (and I like it!), they are the 20+ year standards.Hit Box FactsHit Box controllers offer a material advantage over other controller types. Part of the difficulty in discussing this is getting mired in a debate about whether this is true. It is absolutely true, and we should move on. It allows inputs faster than is humanly possible with the other controllers, like going left, then right in a single frame, or doing 360 motions so fast that you can do a standing 720 with a consistency that’s impossible otherwise. There’s a reason that players who use characters that need to do a bunch of difficult tiger knee motions (d, df, f, uf) have used Hit Boxes: because it’s just easier to do those hard (very fast) inputs consistently that way. Hit Box’s advertising emphasizes these benefits as well.The material advantage these controllers offer should be a given. That, in itself, is not a reason to ban it without considering the full picture.Next, the natural consequence of allowing new hardware that gives a material advantage is that competitors will eventually be forced to use it. It’s actually wrong to view it as “just a choice that 1% of players choose.” The natural consequence is that more and more competitors will have to use it until it basically obsoletes other choices. Oh you use a stick or a pad? You’re just bad, and you shouldn’t. Now you’re at a hardware disadvantage. This, in itself, also isn’t a reason to ban it. You’d have to decide if that outcome is good or bad. But it IS what will happen, so we have to acknowledge that reality.Where to Draw the Line?Another ridiculous argument that often comes up is the claim that there should be no line at all and Hit Boxes should be allowed because EVERYTHING should be allowed. I wish that were not a strawman, but I’ve had to answer it multiple times now. That’s a very very extreme opinion that is divorced from the reality of every other sport. There needs to be some definition of a line about what’s allowed and what’s not and the question is WHERE is the line, not if we should throw out the concept of lines.Other sports face this same issue. I’ll give two examples.In NASCAR racing, a driver might think “I could go faster if my car had a jet engine on it.” Yes, and if that’s allowed, then everyone must use a jet engine too. The rules people decided that that would be transformational and that it would be some other sport. They want to have a race using something more similar to the kind of cars they had before. So there are limits on what’s allowed that exclude things like jet engines.In golf, there is the pretty close parallel of a “new, weird” kind of putter. It’s longer than usual and you can anchor it to your stomach as you use it. At first, it looked stupid but soon players realized it offered a material advantage. Anchoring the putter this way allows for more precise control than had been possible before. Is THAT the reason to ban it though? Not exactly. It could be allowed if golfers wanted that, meaning if they wanted the entire endeavor of putting to be replaced by this new, different thing. Again, don’t fall into the trap that it’s a “choice.” If golfers are ok with replacing current putting with this new thing, they could allow it.This came to a boiling point after a streak of four out of six major winners were anchoring their putters. Tournaments decided that they didn’t want the sport to transform such that putting would be entirely shifted to this new kind of putting, so they banned it in 2016.What to Do About Hit Boxes?So with all that in mind, the situation is ultimately simple. The Hit Box controller does give a material advantage, and it will eclipse the other controller types if it’s allowed. If you’re ok with that happening, then you should advocate allowing them. I, personally, think it’s a terrible idea. Having to tell new players who use gamepads or the vast majority of fighting game players who use joysticks that you’re all doing it wrong sounds pretty awful. Having to tell them that you now must, for reasons of competitive advantage, switch to this—honestly pretty weird—new thing is just a very extreme thing to do. When we choose where to draw the line, I think a reasonable place is to draw it is to include the hardware that’s been standard for the last 20+ years WITHOUT obsoleting that very standard by including some new (weird) thing with a hardware advantage. So Hit Boxes should be banned.(Disclaimer: Hit Box controllers do NOT need to be banned when playing Fantasy Strike specifically. The game is designed with keyboard in mind, and does not feature any joystick motions like qcf or 360s, etc. Hit Boxes do not offer a material advantage in Fantasy Strike, so they are fine and welcome to use there. Allowing them really does just give one more choice, rather than cause an inevitable shift that would force everyone to use them.) I’ve been working on things behind the scenes for quite some time, as has our team behind Fantasy Strike. Starting in October, I’ll begin showing this content to our patrons at patreon.com/sirlin. I plan to show something new about every two weeks for at least the next year. There’s that much in store. It’s really a lot of stuff and it will take a long time to roll all of it out, so come along for the ride.Most of this content is for new tabletop games. If you’re a fan of Puzzle Strike or Yomi, I hope you’ll like these new things too. Some of it is for the video game Fantasy Strike which also has some exciting things coming. For all this stuff, it’s playable and fun already, yet it’s still far from a public release. So by joining the patreon you’ll get to see my new games (and Fantasy Strike additions) way before everyone else, and you’ll get to help shape how it develops too.The first new thing I’ll show patrons at the start of October is something for Fantasy Strike that’s been in the works for many months by my whole team. The thing after that is a tabletop games thing that I’ve been developing for years. It takes a long time to make things, so you’ll finally get to see what’s been brewing.Thank you to our current patrons, and to any new ones who join now. You really are supporting my ability to continue to make these games and the rest Sirlin Games team is also very grateful. Making games is very expensive, so if you’d like to see more of my kind of games come to be, please consider supporting so I can make more things for all of you. Fantasy Strike is available now on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Steam (Windows / Mac / Linux).There are several notable features and innovative things about the game, so I’ll summarize them here. Innovation can come in many different flavors. Sometimes it’s pushing forward design in a new way, or usability, or technology, or even in introducing features or ways of doing things from one genre and applying them to another when it hasn’t been done before.The things I’ll cover are:Depth vs Complexity — Preserving depth with only a fraction of the complexityUser Interface for Friend Matches — One-click challenge / spectating, rare or unique in fighting gamesNetcode — Pushing the technical envelopeFrame Advantage Visual Effects — The first fighting game in history to do thisFrame Step Mode — Possibly unique in its implementation, high value featureInstructional Videos — Rare inclusion within the game itselfRanked Mode Builds Tournaments On-the-fly — pushing the envelope on this rare feature Team Battle Format — Unique implementation in the history of fighting games and has very good propertiesYomi counter mechanic — A new form of throw-escapeSingle Player Content — Just a few notesDepth vs ComplexityWhile this post is mostly about concrete features, it’s worth noting that Fantasy Strike has managed to deliver as much or MORE depth than some other major fighting games while needing only a small fraction of the complexity to do it. I’m aware that this is a subjective claim, that people will be skeptical, and rightly so because so many other fighting have done a questionable job with “accessibility.”Often, other fighting games have put in beginner training wheels meant to be discarded later, or simplified things in a way that had no regard for depth or expert play (and then ruins it), or perhaps viewed the entire prospect of “accessible” as “features that beginners use against each other only.” This is none of that. It’s a serious attempt to capture as much or more depth that genre commonly offers while viewing “accessibility” as a process of getting everyone to the real, expert-level game as soon as possible. To get everyone understanding what’s going on, equipped to make decisions, and with execution tests low enough that the better decisions are what determines the winner.It sure was a lot easier for us to achieve this kind of depth given that we were able to play the game for four years such that everyone testing it was able to execute everything they wanted all the time. We were, at all times, “playing the real game” and so tuning the dynamics to ensure interesting decisions (read: depth) was that much easier than if only a few people in the world could do optimal punish combos, etc.I think explaining more about this, no matter how well-written, will not convince people as much as if you experience it yourself by trying to get good and seeing how much there is to the decision making involved. So I’ll leave it at that and move on to more objectively measurable items. But I do think that we’ve pushed the envelope in the realm of “high depth, low-complexity.”User Interface for Friend MatchesThis is the kind of innovation that isn’t new to the world, but it IS new to fighting games. For some reason, playing against specific people in fighting games is generally cumbersome and involves a lot of steps and UI that we do not need.Imagine if you wanted to call someone on the phone. How would you do that? Would you create a lobby, then set the rules of the chat, then either create a password or friend code and invite a chatter, then place yourselves into virtual seats for your chat? No, you would not. You would touch their name on a list and call them.In Fantasy Strike, you just click on anyone in your in-game friends list to challenge them. You don’t have to know or care which platform they are on, either (unless it happens to be a Switch vs PS4 thing, because Sony prohibits us from allowing those matches). You just click on them to challenge, and that’s it. No more UI than that is needed. When they accept, you are put into the same UI flow as if you were playing next them in the same room. You can play single-character matches or team battles, just like in local play.It’s not an oversight that there’s no lobby system here. It’s intentional that you click once to challenge, they accept, then you are playing. Playing against friends in other fighting games can feel painfully outdated by comparison. Check out this chat log of me explaining my quest to add a friend, and hopefully play them, in Street Fighter 5.“What if you want to WATCH a friend play?” you ask. Even then, a lobby is not the cleanest way. In Fantasy Strike, you can open your friends list, see all the friends who are in a game at that moment, and in one click, you can start watching their game. That’s it. Even if they aren’t currently playing game (maybe they will in a few minutes), you can still start watching them this way, and the next time they are in an online game, you’ll automatically start watching them.Also, when you watch someone play, you automatically keep watching them play more games until you leave or until they kick you out. Even if they play multiple different opponents in ranked matches, then multiple different opponents in casual matches, then multiple different friend matches, you automatically follow them and watch all that with no further input after your first single click.Has it ever been done in a video game? Yes. Has it been done in a fighting game? No, not to my knowledge. And if it somehow has, then bravo to whoever else did it. All I know is the standard method of watching people play in the genre is a lot more cumbersome than that, and I’m happy to push us forward. Someday, maybe UI this clean can be the standard, rather than the exception.NetcodeFantasy Strike’s netcode is a different kind of innovation. Above I was talking about the user interface involved in playing online, but here I mean the technology that powers the online play itself.Fantasy Strike uses GGPO’s rollback-style netcode, which at this point is not an innovation. It’s just…the bare minimum you should expect from any fighting game. The alternative would be to use input delay-based netcode, which means when you press a button, you do not see your character act on screen until your network signal reaches your opponent, then their signal reaches you. Waiting for that round trip makes everything feel slow and unresponsive.Rollback style netcode allows you to instantly see your moves on screen, very much like if you were in offline play. The trick is that sometimes your opponent will “rollback” to a different state. This is generally rare and usually not that noticeable, and even in laggy cases where it is, input delay would be a lot worse.So what’s the innovation then? Well, the devil is in the details. All implementations of rollback netcode (even involving GGPO) are not created equal. I’ve played other fighting games with rollback netcode and the results varied WILDLY. It’s not like there’s an on/off switch and if you set it to on, everything is great. There’s tuning, there’s optimization. The frame data of the game also matters and Fantasy Strike happens to lend itself well to online play, which isn’t exactly an accident either.After spending almost 2 years improving the technical implementation of our netcode (shout outs to Thelo for his amazing technical work!), I’ve experienced the results myself: online play that is smoother than I even thought would be possible. I can play a friend in Kyoto, Japan for example (I’m in California), and we sometimes forget it’s even online play. I also regularly play people in Australia. And there, yeah, I know it’s online and there are rollbacks vs Australians. But it’s still better than I’ve seen before. I’m honestly surprised by it, and somewhere along the way, our various tweaks seemed to be greater than the sum of their parts.So while this is another subjective area, all I can say is from my experience (confirmed by numerous others in our playerbase), this really does seem like a technical innovation that is pushing the envelope of fighting game networking. Not just that we use rollback netcode, but that our specific technical implementation is exceptional.Note that my comments are specifically about the Steam version. The console versions we think have very good netcode as well, but their CPUs do get strained by rollback computations. So the smoothness of the console version’s online is similar to other fighting games with good netcode, but the Steam version (with a decent CPU) is truly exceptional.Frame Advantage Visual EffectsI covered this feature in more detail here. No other fighting game has ever done this, and it’s really incredibly useful. Every hit shows you visual effects that let you know who will recover first and by how much.The point isn’t to react to that in real-time. It’s not about that. It’s that by surfacing this usually-arcane (but VERY IMPORTANT) information, it lets everyone understand what’s really going on. You’ll notice some moves leave you a minus frames that you didn’t realize. You’ll notice others leave you at plus frames. This is also all computed dynamically, so some moves can be minus or plus depending on how you time them and space them. It’s really useful to see that THIS time you did the move, you ended up being super safe. You’re getting instant feedback on your timings.Yet it’s all intentionally a little bit camouflaged. It’s there if you’re looking for it, but not crazy distracting. I’ve actually felt other fighting games felt lacking since I’ve gotten used to having this feature. And by the way, our practice mode also lists numerical values for frame stats and advantage time on all moves as you do them. That HAS been done in a few fighting games before, but not many. I recently bought a major fighting game for $60, went to training mode, did a move that I felt was minus frames on hit and tried to turn on the data display to see how minus it was. But there wasn’t one. And the game felt really unfinished to me. This is a basic feature that feels really lacking when missing…yet it’s missing in MOST fighting games.Frame Step ModeIn practice mode (aka “training mode” in most fighting games), there’s a dedicated button to pause the action at any moment by entering frame step mode. In this mode, you press another button to advance the action by one frame, or hold that button to advance several times in a row.Furthermore, and very importantly, you can do inputs between frames. For example, if you want to press the C button the next frame, then hold C while you advance the frame. This lets you precisely input anything you want on any frame. You can also do this for the opponent/dummy character. There is no extra UI needed to do inputs for the dummy, you just use the player 2 controls and they immediately work. So you can choreograph any situation you want between the two characters, precisely, one frame at a time, with exactly the inputs you want on each frame.This is incredibly useful and I’m not sure why it’s not a standard in fighting games. I’m not aware of any fighting game that has done this. Maybe there is one, and if so, great job to them. I’ve personally relied on this feature as a developer for the last four years (we put it in immediately at the start of development) and it now feels really lacking when I play other fighting games without it.This feature is made even more valuable by the frame data displayed in practice mode, by the way. Every time you do a move, for either character, you instantly see that move’s frame stats. You know this move has 10 frame startup or whatever, and you can see if some other move leaves you at +4 frame advantage on block, etc. Having precise numbers for everything on-screen as you do things allows you even more precision in testing any scenario you want.Instructional VideosI’m sure there’s some fighting game that includes instructional videos. I can’t actually name one off the top of my head though. We have an interactive tutorial that covers the very basics to get going, and that’s common. But we wanted to also tell you all the properties of the moves for every character, and show you how those moves form a coherent strategy for the character. There are some things that a video is just more efficient at accomplishing than an interactive tutorial, and this is one of those things. In just 5 minutes, we can educate you a whole lot more with a character spotlight video than any other way.It’s slightly unusual for the developer to make videos like this. We did though, and during development, several players told us that these were REALLY useful to them. They were emphatic about this, saying that it made all the difference to them. Explaining how a character’s moves work and what that character’s game plan is gave them a starting point when they didn’t otherwise know where to start. They said that helped them enjoy the game a lot more. Because of how strongly players said this, we decided to put them inside the game itself.It could have just been a text list of videos to launch. But if we’re putting them in the game itself, I wanted excellent UI for the video player, as well as a slick interface for selecting each video. So we have this Netflix-like interface, which kind of jokes that each character has their own tv show. That would be cool, but it’s really how you select which character spotlight video to watch.Ranked Mode Builds Tournaments On-the-flyMost ranked modes do matchmaking by computing your matchmaking rating number, then finding an opponent for you with as close of a number as possible so that you’ll have as close to a 50-50 match with them as possible. That’s fine and normal to do, and there’s nothing wrong with that.But…is it really the best, most fun way? I’ve found that tournaments offer a kind of excitement that this 50-50 style of matchmaking can’t. Back in the old days of arcades, it was exciting that sometimes you fought someone better than you or worse than you. And even in the current days of e-sports, tournaments obviously do not run on this 50-50 concept. In the first round of a tournament, does everyone fight someone of equal skill? No, and in fact the concept of seeding exists specifically to prevent that from happening. Ideally, the best two players who enter a tournament do NOT play each other in the first round.As you go through a tournament, you are matched with people who happen to have the same number of wins as you that day (roughly speaking), which is a totally different concept of “same skill as you”. As you go, there is a rough correlation where each new opponent is probably more skilled than the last, and that is exciting, and then on top of that there’s variation in who happens to be playing better or worse today than usual, and that’s exciting too. There’s a texture you get from being matched like a tournament that’s compelling.Fantasy Strike ranked mode is a rough simulation of this excitement. We do not build out entire brackets before the tournament starts, as you normally would, because that would greatly slow down matchmaking. We’re not willing to make that tradeoff. So instead, we build the brackets on the fly. First match, you’re matched randomly with anyone else in your league (bronze, silver, gold, etc). If you win, you are then matched with someone else in your league who also just had one win. Because the brackets are built on-the-fly, you are never waiting around for a bracket to fill, or for other matches in the bracket to finish. You also have no time pressure in that you could play your first match now, then your second match tomorrow if you like. It has all the flexibility of a standard queue, but the exciting texture of a tournament.This kind of thing has barely been attempted before in fighting games, most notably by Street Fighter 4. Our system is so much easier to understand though, and has great UI to support it. There’s no need for multiple kind of points and arcane formulas. Here’s the complete breakdown of the rules:If you win, you get one star for a first round match in a tournament, two stars for a second round match, and three stars for a third round match.If you lose, you lose a star.Get enough stars and you go up in rank.In bronze league (the lowest), if you lose, you don’t lose any stars.In diamond league (the second highest), you do not gain a star for winning a first round match. This means in a full diamond league tournament, the total number of stars given out EQUALS the total number lost by its entrants. There’s no grinding here. You have to really be better than everyone to advance in this difficult league.In master league (the highest), we dispense with the stars and just show you your actual rank amongst all players. For example “you’re 3rd best in the entire game.” Winning and losing is governed by standard elo.This system is easy to understand, easy to see what’s going on when you see the score screen after a tournament, gives everyone a sense of progression (even bad players!), gives everyone a real challenge (hello diamond and above), and reveals the harsh truth to the elite players.Full disclosure: Mario Tennis uses a similar system of on-the-fly tournaments, but we were not inspired by them. Our system was already in development long before their announcement. We think it’s really cool they did it too though. (And again, this style of ranked play is practically non-existent in fighting games.)Team Battle FormatMany other fighting games have a team battle. But none of them work the way it does in Fantasy Strike, and these details matter a whole lot. The very specific way it works is actually innovative and is a general contribution to game design that many other games could use.The standard way to handle a competitive mode is players use double blind selection of their characters for game 1, then the winner can switch characters in game 2, then the winner of game 2 can switch characters in game 3.That system is pretty good, and for a couple decades I had to defend it against new players who would point out issues and come up with other systems that were actually worse in ways they didn’t realize. The good of this system is that if you can play multiple characters, you get to. And that if you end up in a lopsided matchup, you do not have to stay in it. But the bad part is counter-picking, and more importantly, the effect that has on the matchups actually played.I built a fighting game career on counter-picking. That is, picking a character specifically suited to beat my current opponent. I did it, I think, WAY more than average. I play multiple characters in every fighting game I play so I’m always able to do this, even at the pro-tournament level. I say this to remind you that I am no stranger to this. Quite the opposite.Is it bad though? Well, the effect of it is bad. The part where you get to switch out of a bad matchup, that’s fine, but the net effect of the whole thing is as follows. Players generally end playing mostly a small set of matchups only, and it’s the set of most unfair matchups in the game. In a 3-game set, whoever loses game 1 will switch to the most unfair matchup they can for game 2, then either game 3 will be that same lopsided matchup, or if the other player won game 2, then they switch to the most lopsided matchup the other way. Over time, as players learn more characters, well over half the matchups played end up being the same few most-lopsided ones over and over.Even if a game were impossibly well balanced and had like 100 matchups that were all 5-5, but 20 matchups that were 6-4 or 7-3, then you’d hardly ever play the 5-5 ones compared to the other ones, even though at first glance MOST of the game is the fair ones.Notice that this isn’t just about poorly balanced games. Even the best balanced asymmetric game will suffer this fate. And if you remove the execution barrier so that learning new characters is just the strategy part (rather than strategy + execution) then the problem becomes worse. Even more people will counter-pick more often and things will devolve even more extremely into just a few matchups—the most lopsided ones in the game, whatever they are.Furthermore, it creates a very brittle system for game balance. Imagine a character that has all 5-5 matchups, except ONE very unfair 9-1 matchup (oops). There could be 20 5-5 matchups here…or 30 or 40 or however many characters, but all it takes is ONE bad matchup to torpedo that entire character in the competitive metagame. In a game with standard counter-picking, that player will face that unfair matchup most of the time. As the game matures, they could get closer and closer to playing that one matchup in 100% of their sets, once the rest of the community is wise to this counter-pick. That’s pretty miserable and you’d hope such a character with almost all fair matchups would be more viable than that.Fantasy Strike’s particular brand of team battle solves this. You do not play a small set of the most unfair matchups. Instead, you play an even spread of matchups across your characters and theirs. You are not locked into a single unfair matchup the entire time (as you would be normally without counter-picking). And if, theoretically, some character existed that had one bad matchup but all other fine matchups, they are still completely viable. These are incredible properties for a format to have. And furthermore, though you do have to play three characters, it’s impossible to lose the match without getting to play your “best” character. So if you do lose, it means you played your best character and lost, so blame yourself and not the format.The rules are as follows:Choose a team of 3 characters,play a best-3-out-of-5 match.Each game, play a new randomly chosen matchup.You'll go through all your characters before repeating.Must win with all 3 of your characters to win the match!That’s it, and we have clear UI that shows how this process works between each game of the set. Maybe the exact workings of this team battle seem very “inside baseball,” and I know it’s a lot of detail, but it’s dead simple to actually play. The take-away is that a system that gives players and spectators the maximum amount of matchup variety without any of the potential drawbacks I outlined above, and that also avoids the common problem of these kinds of games drifting to be mostly about a small set up lopsided matchups…well it’s quite a breath of fresh air to play.The Yomi Counter MechanicThe yomi counter is a new form of throw escape that’s not been used before in any other fighting game.For some background, in the old days of fighting games, throws were very powerful. So powerful in the Street Fighter 2 series for example, that even at the pro level, even when players know a throw is coming, it’s still really hard to get out. Over time, game developers responded to cries of “throws are cheap” by making throws weaker and weaker and weaker. More startup, less damage, less range, and the ability to escape them, after the fact, for 0 damage.I think this has, overall, been the wrong approach. Throws need to be good because they serve an important function in gameplay: to beat blocking. So weakening throws might please some players, but it hurts game dynamics. I think the better approach is to make throws very strong, as strong as back in the old days, but to answer a more specific criticism that players had. If you KNOW the throw is coming, shouldn’t you be able to get out? The alternative—that you STILL can’t get out—would be very frustrating indeed.In Fantasy Strike, you cannot escape a throw after the fact. Once it starts, you will be thrown. It’s intentional that you can’t get out on reaction because if you could, throws would be useless. BUT you can always get out of a throw that you expect. The command is the simplest one possible: let go of all your controls. That includes letting go of block, so it’s dangerous and risky. You’re opening yourself up to a combo, by doing this. If you had the right read, letting go when you would get thrown causes you to reverse that throw and do a special animation against the attacker. In essence, you automatically throw them and you get full super meter for it.This type of throw escape is good because it a) allows throws be very powerful without anyone being able to complain they can’t get out, b) makes the input for throw escape as easy as it can possibly be (“let go of the controls”), and c) makes you inherently risk something by trying it, so there are real decisions involved.Opponent let go of the controlsso they yomi counter YOU if you try to throw themAnother note about yomi counters is that they do NOT work against special or super throws. That would feel bad, but also this difference allows for more threats and more decision-making. You can JUMP out of all special and super throws, but you can’t yomi counter them; you YOMI COUNTER out of all normal throws, but you can’t jump out of them.Single Player ContentThis an an area that we didn’t exactly “innovate” in, but it’s still worth mentioning. We have an arcade mode at all, which SF5, a game that launched at $60, famously did not. And it has fantastic art (and voiceover and some visual effects btw) for story intros and endings. Here’s an example of a Fantasy Strike story scene (top) compared to Street Fighter 5 (bottom):We have four survival modes. You fight different numbers of enemies in each, and in one you fight cool looking metal bosses with a lot of hit points and crazy moves. In the others, you fight a cool looking shadow boss every 5th opponent. One technical thing we pushed hard on is this: when you beat a survival opponent, the next one jumps in IMMEDIATELY. There is zero loading time. This was technical challenge, but I felt it was absolutely necessary because I cannot stand the excruciating loading times in many of the survival modes I’ve played.We have a daily challenge mode that is kind of like an endless survival that you can only play once per day, and it shows how well you did against everyone else that day.The most innovative mode takes its inspiration from card games like Hearthstone. It’s called Boss Rush, and you build a deck of powerups as you go through it and fight increasingly difficult AI bosses.Boss Rush is where we can stop worrying about making things competitively fair and just let you do ridiculous things that are fun. You fight a series of eight (CPU-controlled) boss characters, and they get increasingly difficult. Part of that is their AI becomes smarter, but they also get crazy powerups like bombs dropping from the sky, dragons flying by, rivers with dangerous fish washing across the screen, and so on.In order to deal with all that, you get powerups too. Before each fight, you pick one of three powerups. And before half the fights you get to pick a second, really powerful gold powerup from a random set of three. All of these are cumulative over the course of your run. So you’re building a “deck” of powerups and you get to think about synergies and combos amongst them.The mode is like a rogue-like in that you keep your deck until you lose. If you lose, we throw your deck away and you have to start over with a new run. Can you make it through all eight bosses? Playing as every character?Closing ThoughtsMy summary here is that while the actual gameplay of Fantasy Strike is fun, solid, and, I think you will find, surprisingly deep, we put a ton of work into everything that goes around that. Work that has to do with the game as a piece of software: the user interface, the technical side of online play, the loading times, and so on. In many ways, it’s an attempt to fix issues on many fronts that have bothered me in other fighting games for decades. I want us all to do better.I actually hope that a lot of these things will just become standards. Imagine if it were normal to simply click challenge on a friend to play them. Imagine if you could tell the frame advantage of your moves all the time, easily. Imagine if intercontinental online play felt pretty good instead of a total disaster. Imagine if a competitive play system had forces that encouraged the widest variety of matchups instead forces encouraging the same few lopsided matchups. Let’s hope these kinds of innovations find their way into other fighting games in the future.

TAGS:Net Sirlin Design 

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Game design for tabletop and video games from the designer of Yomi and Street Fighter HD Remix

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