1601

Mike has been kind enough to entertain your thoughts, take the convo to another thread. This is Skullgirls Q&A.

Dearest Mike_Z, I noticed that meter doesn’t carry over between rounds in singles play. Is this decision final? Just curious to know if you had it carrying over at all and what your thoughts are on that.

1602

This is music to my ears, however I must note that it wouldn’t necessarily make you some evil capitalist. Your a pessimist, but I’m pretty confident this game is going to be huge, like HUGE, and it would be understandable to make changes that satisfy the majority of the players, even if you disagree with them. That’s what Capcom does when they nerf Wright and Sentinel and buff Zero and Viper. However, I hope you stick to your word and your word isn’t based in your pessimism regarding the potential success of the game. Because a game that attempted balancing from a purely competitive perspective would be epic.

1603

That feels a bit weird to have you say, honestly.

Meter retention - Had it at one point, as well as a ton of other variations, decided against it for initial release. GG doesn’t keep it, BB doesn’t keep it (not that we should look to BB for excellent design choices but they took it from GG anyway). We went through a bunch of setups, since meter is treated differently in almost everything…A2 starts you empty, A3 starts you full, but both carry over meter whereas GG/BB don’t, etc. In the end, it felt more consistent with the rest of the game to treat each round as a separate entity meter-wise, since they already are health-wise, rather than tying your performance together. Witness that the strategy in 3s changes simply by making the match 3/5 rounds, whereas it doesn’t in GG. We start you with Lv1 to make sure supers are still a factor initially.

Though keeping it would make level 3’s more common, so this might get poked later on. And as with Ultras, losing your meter when the round ends also tends to make rounds finish with meter spending, which is entertaining, but that’s a minor point. (It may be why GG decided to go that route, though that’s speculation.)

1604

No need to hop on his nuts like that sheesh. I understand your point (which is valid) but damn that sounds like brown nosing if I ever heard it.

Thanks for your time Mike.

1605

I wasn’t going to post on this again since Mike seems pretty sure of the direction he wants to take (and I appreciate what he said a lot, since even if I don’t entirely agree with him, it shows we’re safe from far worse things than the game being maybe unbalanced at low level), but just for the record this isn’t what I was suggesting at all. I do think it’s a very good idea to address the problems of low level players in some way because you should want to keep as many people playing as possible for the sake of the continued growth of the community, but balance changes that have such a strong impact on high level play too is the absolute worst way to do that, imo.

Sirlin recommends finding out whatever good players are doing to counter the thing low level players have trouble with and making it easier to do; in the event that that’s not possible I think making the ‘cheap’ thing harder to do is a good option too (imagine SF4 Ken with a stricter reversal window and less lenient DP motion - doesn’t affect high level play so much, but would drastically reduce the amount of mashers online). Occasionally some changes to move properties may have a minute effect on high level play but a huge effect on low level play - I guess you could maybe argue nerfing Wright assist is an example of that, since nobody good really uses him anyway, but that’s iffy imo. Anyway, I think the best way to deal with all this is to make it very visible to bad players that the thing in question is beatable. If Cerebella is the thing everyone whines about, release a ‘dealing with Cerebella’ video that they can download in-game or something.

1606

Agh! I always forget to use my sarcasm font!

1607

The Wright nerf is an example of Capcom nerfing a character soley based on the majority of (bad) players. I understand where they are coming from, it makes sense from a business stand point, or even a utilitarian perspective. It bothers me though, I spent a ton of timing building an alternate team based on getting the assist ready and running it, and now I can’t run that team, so a player who wasn’t good is now going to be virtually unplayable.

However, altering something for the competitive community hurts the casual community (and vice versa a lot more than you would think it would be) frequently. Among casual players Arthur is often seemed as top tier (not joking) and Capcom buffing him to certain people seems as crazy as buffing Mags or Wolvie. Sentinel hyper soidum force being nerfed was a bone for casual players, but it hurt Sentinel in the competitive game. I also believe the Zero and Viper buffs were for the casual players, which effected the competitive players a lot. I really hope Mike doesn’t consider requests from bad players’ bad advice just because they oftentimes can be a vocal majority, and it seems like he isn’t, but I wouldn’t hate him for it either (or at least I would understand it).

1608

Just because I don’t answer immediately doesn’t mean I didn’t read it, it might mean (just for example, y’see, the merest hint of a possible alternate reality) that I’d been testing out your suggestion and was waiting until it worked well enough that I could post a screenshot.
It’s a good idea, thanks! Our palette effects system is finally at a point where adding it is easy, so characters now fade to darker when they are on the floor KO’d. It does indeed help.

However, your repost was still annoying - it’s on the same page as the original! - so no screenshot. :^P

1609

I’m sorry :frowning: I thought that if you saw and thought about it, you’d quote it and write something along the lines of “I’ll look into that”.

Still, yay <3

1610

I don’t mean to do the pessimist dance here, but a lot of people like to pretend their value of success defines a whole market when it does not. Almost all the people I’ve seen that think Skullgirls will be wildly successful seem to be wholly ignorant of just how large game markets are.

Also I’m totally convinced Capcom’s design team is completely and utterly insane at this point. For every positive thing they do they do like three negative things. There’s so many failures from a design and UX standpoint that the only weight they stand on is license alone to sell copies. If you are trying to look into meaning for their balance changes. Don’t. They’re utterly baffling no matter what audience they’re trying to appeal to here (even if it’s “all of them”).

Anyway, what’s interesting about this game is Mike is making a game Mike wants. Not what everyone wants. I find when these games hit an audience, they resonate really, really well, but typically aren’t that successful in comparison to other games. Almost every designer’s “dream games” are things that would alienate 99% of the games market.

1611

T_T T_T T_T
dont punish the rest of us just because Vulpes is impatient!

any more development of the all-play lobby idea mike? i know you sounded interested when i fist mentioned it and you brought it up again later but im still curious if its even possible

1612

Hi, not sure how much Mike or other devs venture throughout the forum, but I’m really curious and passionate about this issue and wonder if the SG coders could provide some insight on whether there are any barriers preventing such features from being done. So I’m linking something I asked in another thread. Any corrections to my own misconceptions would be greatly appreciated :smiley:

1613

not sure how often mike ventures on these forums>he’s already posted twice on this page alone

oh yeah, that Mike, always sitting away on his throne of skulls, ignoring us lowly interweb peons.

1614

Hello everyone, first-time poster here. I’d like to start by saying I am really looking forward to Skullgirls and greatly appreciate all the effort and love Reverge is putting into it. Creating games is an incredibly work-intensive, often thankless endeavor and we are lucky to have passionate, engaged people bringing this vision to reality. I’ll be first in line on release day.

I am not the most knowledgeable when it comes to history of the genre, but I have a few ideas that I have never seen implemented and was wondering if they might fit SG.

  • Punish messages. Many games have counter-hit pop-ups but I have never seen one tell players that they got hit because their last move was unsafe. I really believe this could help alleviate confusion about blocking and timing, particularly among newer players.

  • Some indicator of invincibility. This one seems a bit trickier and I don’t have any good ideas of how to implement it, especially considering moves might be invincible only in certain areas or against certain kinds of attacks. To me, one of the biggest entry barriers facing fighting games is how invisible many of the mechanics are. For example, the glowing EX coloration in SFIV gives players no real information about any additional properties that move has gained. Skullgirls makes some attempts to address that from what I’ve seen, with the hitbox viewer in training mode and yellow armor flashes, but the most frustrating thing to new players that I’ve seen is when their move looks like it should connect but they get hit with something invincible instead. I don’t know how much invulnerability there is in SG, or how long it lasts in any given case, but it might help to make it explicit.

  • Double blind select codes. On the occasion that someone requests blind selection, it takes time to find a willing third party to enforce. Perhaps holding start or hovering over “Random” and pressing a two button combination for the character you want could bypass this. There are obviously other factors to consider, such as choosing assists, but it’s something to keep in mind.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

1615

Something to help double blind selection would be way cool.

1616

  • Punish messages are something I’ve wanted for a long time. That and “Stop Mashing” if you get CH three times within a short period. They probably won’t make it into the initial release, but they’re on the list.

  • Invincibility indicator…well, we have whiff sparks, which are one of the things I’ll give credit to BB for as a good idea. Rather than doing invincibility as the complete absence of hitboxes, you do it as a flag on some boxes or the whole character. That way, you can tell if you would have hit someone who is invincible, and there’s a small white spark to indicate that you would have hit. They could probably stand to be bigger (BB’s are HUGE) and they’re pretty hard to see in Youtube vids (I just tried to find an example, hah) but they’re there. The hitboxes in training also change color based on what type of blocking/invincibility you have, though that’s less help in matches.

  • Double blind…<nerdgasm> I had this really cool idea for a character select screen where you divide the screen into 9 areas # then each quadrant into six characters
    1 2 3
    4 5 6
    and you select a quadrant with the stick and a character with a button, so up to 54 characters are all reachable with a single input without scrolling which makes selection way faster, and double-blind is just turn off the cursor and both people can pick at the same time…but people said that was too confusing when I had it in earlier builds. So the lowest common denominator strikes again, and you get to tell the judge who you want to pick. :^P

(Way back at Pandemic, in 2003 or so, I had a similar idea for text input with 2 analog sticks - you divide the screen into 9 areas # then each area into 9 spots # and put a letter/symbol in each spot…then with 2 sticks the left one chooses a large area and the right one chooses a smaller spot, so you can easily choose any one of 81 spots and press a button to accept the character. That allows the entire alphabet, upper and lower case if you don’t want a Shift key, and numbers and most common symbols. It had a moderate learning curve, but in tests people could fairly quickly achieve typing speeds comparable to keyboards once they learn what’s where, which took about 15 minutes for common words, and you didn’t need no guess-my-word BS. But yet again, go go Gadget maintaining-the-status-quo. All © 2003 Mike Z baybee.)

  • MP lobby. Yes, all-play totally works! And it is pretty neato. However, duetocircumstancesbeyondmycontrolitwon’tbeasusefulasyouthinkblahblahfineprintsadfacedon’tblamemeIonlymakethecharacters. ::ahem:: Eventually it will be as amazing as it sounds like it is. Please see Officer Dominatrix in the back room for your reward. Next!

  • asking me to post in the other thread, I’ll do it if I remember. :^P

1617

Two questions:

-Are any characters looking dominant/weak in the current build? Or are things well balanced?

-Is Painwheel a viable solo character? My MVC3 mains are sent and Phoenix (<3phoenix) so a character with a powerup level 3, mega armor, and flight had me splooging on the walls.

1618

If Valentine fills her syringe with poison and tags out…Will her syringe throw poison if she does it as an assist?

1619

Thanks for responding! The “stop mashing” idea is good too; I wonder if there are other ways the game can alert players to their bad habits outside of a tutorial mode. I know Blazblue had the differently colored exclamation points when you got hit by lows, overheads, etc. but those weren’t really too descriptive on their own. This would probably require keeping track of a lot of info during the match, but maybe the game could tell you how you got opened up the most (crossups, throws, whatever) at the post-match menu. At any rate, not the most pressing issue.

1620

Depending on who you ask, the tiers are all over the place. Some people swear by solo Parasoul, Dacid likes solo Painwheel, lots of people think solo Cerebella is OP, I think Peacock with Filia and Cere as a team, some people think Fortune…which I hope means they’re about even and it’s down to personal preference. It’s too early to ask this stuff, really.

Yes, if you have a syringe filled she’ll throw it as an assist. I’m trying to get it so that if you choose to load one as an assist, it’ll alternate with throwing it.