So I was thinking yesterday that I should use my blog more. Get some ZOb action going on. Here we are.
Then this morning I was thinking about heats. In drag racing, each match up is called a heat. Heats is also the name of the Getter Robo title track. This was an important click, as it quickly led to the following idea.
I want to see a new Tech Romancer type game, but with a specific hook. Instead of normal fighting games “best x out of y”, I wanna see it with either tennis style “have to win by 2 matches”, or even just a 2-3 in a row to win (the Next Tetris does this, and it’s got a kind of amazing balance to it which I guess I’m trying to recapture here). What you get is that each match could theoretically go on forever when it’s a super even match up.
BUT HERE’S THE RUB!
After each bout in a match – or rather, after each HEAT – both players get ability points. The winner gets 2, the loser gets 1. Players imedeately are able to use those points to power up one of the aspects of their character (their mech suit in my mind, because why would you have the characters be people when you could have them be giant robots?).
I could see 4 aspects: attack, health, speed, and technique (classic~).
Attack is simple. It makes your attacks do more damage.
Health, similarly, just increases the amount of health your character starts a HEAT with.
Speed increases general speed of the character, attack animations, dodge distance, etc. I guess.
Tech corresponds to how fast your special / charge gauge builds up. All special moves (not just super moves) require charge. So more tech means you’ll be firing more lasers and such. I actually get the feeling that it’s not built up over time, but it goes up every time you block an attack. I bet there’s even an ex-block that requires special timing, and when used correctly gives a boost to collected charge.
So there you go. As a match wears on, each HEAT gets more powerful. I imagine the ratio of ability points is what would be tweaked to make sure that the swing of character power across a match is subtle. There obviously has to be some kind of power shift if one player is winning more matches, otherwise matches will go on forever. We just need to shove it to one side eventually.
Yet, I would love to keep in the idea that a match could go on forever, but just gets to a ridiculous point. A heat where one player could literally kill the other with a single hit from start, if only he could hit the other player who is now basically voiping around the screen. You just need to make sure that the balance is right. The amount of ability points and the bonus that they give shouldn’t be enough to make this situation happen after only 3 heats. But if it happened around 20 heats later, that might be alright. In real time, if each heat is about 90 seconds, we’re talking a half hour of solid fighting to get to that point. Then to max out every ability, it would take2 hours of fighting. And then both players would be GODLIKE.
But I also wonder if there should be a max to stats. Let’s think about it. If there isn’t, then maybe it’s more then broken. Both players dump every point into health forever, eventually no one gets hurt enough ever. Well, then we can put a timer in, and it would be hilarious to find that at time out, one person won because they only lost 1/255 of their health, while the other lost 1/250. Silly, but it still comes to a conclusion, it’s ridiculous, and it’s an edge case because players would have to be playing for a long time to get there, and ignore all other stats. (it’s the length of time to get there that makes it an edge case).
Both players dump everything into attack. Well, this is what we call sudden death. Every Smash Bros. game has done that, and I love it (partly because that’s one of the only times I rock house). Not a real problem, again because the time to get to that point, people will want a sudden death anyway.
Speed is an interesting point. As that gets higher, a character may actually become impossible to play. Think about Tetris. Speed goes up over time, it get’s harder to control and make discrete actions. In a fighting game, it would be “press left, you’re against your side of the screen, press right, you’re in the enemy’s face, jump and you’ve already landed.” Although capping that stat at a certain speed would be the easiest way to fix it (and give us as designers a way to adjust difficulty), if we make speed only adjust certain things. Attack speeds, recovery frames, jump height and dash distance/speed. More technical fighting thigns, so that’s cool. Would probably work fine. I still feel like normal movement speed should get faster, but it could be some smaller ratio based on the stat, or only that could get capped at a certain speed, while the rest is only limited by frame rate (imagine each punch being at 60 frames per second!) If the stat getting to high is a punishment, then it’s not what I wanted to see out of this. I just want it to get ridiculous.
Tech would be silly. Block one hit, do a super. Of course, still on the idea that supers them selves are more about covering more of the screen (MvC style) rather then doing more damage, so that way it keeps more focus on the attack stat. So with tech, yeah now you’re hitting the whole screen all the time, but still doing only nominal damage. The same kind of damage that a normal attack would do, but you’d just have to be in melee range to hit with. This makes sense. Yes.
Now remember, these examples are all worst case scenarios. This is at at the 20 heat mark, where most heats probably wouldn’t get past 5, with general skill match ups being what they are.
In fact, if we consider match making, I would make it a separate mode. Like the “ranked” matches would be a ladder style play, so you’re always matched with someone either 1 or 2 levels wither above or below you. Then you either move up, or stay where you are, and all the matches are inherently off balance to facilitate shorter matches. But I’d also do a “DEAD HEAT” search mode where it matches you with similarly ranked players, just to try and get even matches that go on forever. Maybe this is a super broken matchmaking idea and is something no one would want, but it’s something I would like to see. In theory, at least.
2 more things to consider. First, with each heat, you would probably need some kind of “blind reprogram” option. Much like in football games or general character picking, some way to allocate your skill points without the other player knowing where they are. I’m sure in many places you wouldn’t care. Casual battles, or battles where you’re trying to achieve those edge case ridiculous matches. You could do the normal kind, where each player gets to blank out their selections, make selections without on-screen feedback, or make their selections, but then make false selections afterwards. I would like to see it almost as a puzzle mini game. Like the Fallout 3 hacking minigame, hide the stats and their numbers inside a jumble of code, so that way each player has to figure out their own puzzle to get ahead, and aren’t afforded the chance to watch the other player or they would miss out or mess up their own allocation. Again, this could be aggravating to some players, but I think it would be neat. Different, at least.
The other option is about starting stats for different characters. It’s normal for some characters to be inherently more healthy, or hit hard or such. So that wouldn’t be anything new. But, Depending on how wide the variance starting is, it would have to be a careful balance so that it doesn’t start at too strong of a swing, or to weak of a swing so that over a short amount of heats that swing would be pointless. Maybe this is just some weird paranoia I have, but it’s something I feel is worth considering. I don’t think I would mind the difference between characters being solely based on appearance and moveset. Specfically, hit location, style, etc. Look at the move sets in Touhou 12.3th and BlazBlue.
But yeah, that’s basically my idea and the thought so far on it. Of course, I still don’t know how to code. But if anyone else likes it…welp, new project time.
F*R*A*G: Everyone will only get half of the initial comparision. This was a unique click.
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