Hmm, whilst this is great, it’s not exactly fun to sit in a classroom to wade through an interactive FG textbook.
I’ve said elsewhere that FGs need to learn from action adventure games like Devil May Cry to provide compelling single player content that gradually exposes you to more mechanics and provides plenty of opportunities to practise them on many enemies. But adding a 20 hour singleplayer story mode is probably beyond the scope of SG.
Instead, let’s steal again from VF4. Imagine a virtual arcade in SG with a variety of AI opponents. Your goal is to play many matches in the arcade and rise up the ladder so you can challenge harder opponents. However, rather than easy opponents being “dumb AI” and the hard opponents being “cheating AI”, instead as you rise up the ladder you face opponents carefully designed to teach you aspects of the game. Plus the usual rewards like unlocking bonus content and so forth.
eg. Bob the noob - he spams unsafe special moves. Learn to punish them.
Fred the turtle noob - he blocks well and plays defensively. Learn when and how to throw.
Anne the intermediate rushdown - very aggressive play, uses simple mixups, but occasionally wont hitconfirm and will do unsafe enders. Learn to block mixups and spot and punish mistakes.
etc etc. As you rise up the ladder, you’ll play these opponents several times as you challenge and are challenged by different opponents. You’ll also face all of the different characters in the game, played in unique styles with varying flaws and weaknesses.
Also there will be special matches where the ruleset is modified. eg.
No special attacks - learn to use your normals effectively.
Only comboes will do damage - practise your bnbs.
Blockstrings are punished heavily - learn safe blockstrings and hitconfirms.
etc.
Of course, this requires a lot of advanced AI coding. (well, depending on how far you want to take it.) But I think its a good mode to ease people into competitive play in a fun and long-term way.
sounds like perfection, but as you said, too much time on AI coding. which (compared to any other genre of game,) should be the lowest priority for fighting games.
I agree it’s not where a majority of the dev’s efforts should go, but a lot of entry level players are scared away from playing online when they run into 3 or so people that know what they’re doing who pubstomp them and retreat to single player mode, if single player AI’s werent so lulzy it’d be a good way to heal their bruised egos without teaching them bad habits in the process
That being said, I DESPISE BB’s AI, they all have such annoying little habits, Bang does nothing but airdash around your head all day long, Litchi/Ragna will psychically DP you every half-chance they get. And ALL of them can psychically maneuver around Hazama’s chains like it’s no effort at all D:. And don’t even get me started on the unrealistic BS Tager’s AI can pull off… and at the same time half of the characters AI’s have no idea what they’re doing at all, you may as well be fighting infants
I hate that most dev’s seem to think the best way to make an AI “harder” is to give them BS like reading your button inputs, so they can perfectly escape every throw, block every mixup, grab you out of every slow normal, and DP every tiny hole you leave in blockstrings… That’s just entirely unrealistic. They do seem to fall for frame traps 90% of the time though…
It IS pretty funny that they’ll fall for the same stupid mixups over and over again, but that’s also teaching bad habits to players that don’t go online enough…
the problem is, AI is AI, there will always be a mix-up that will break them down. always one move that no matter what they get hit by.
i was playing julia in sfxt on hardest with lili, crouching hard punch, a 9 frame startup, i was just tapping it over and over, counter hit after counter hit. obviously SF AI is and always will be terrible, but even with input reading, they still got into a glitch.
you cant rely on AI EVER to stop players from doing bad things. because no matter how many hours and how much genius you put into the code, there will always be a move or situation that you miss out on fixing.
Well the thing about Skullgirls is that it’s the maybe the second or 3rd fighting game to do this period and it has the potential to be more robust than any of the games that did it before. Even if it simple trial stuff…more casual players especially always brag about doing a trial in SFIV so it will be interesting to see that being put into stuff that will actually teach them how to react and deal with situations. Combos don’t really teach you how to win a fight and that’s all that’s been taught so far in most fighters. That’s considering they don’t even really teach you anything past “these are the moves you must do in this order to complete trial”.
The set of games over the last 3 years have just nearly completely omitted anything like what Skullgirls is bringing so even if it’s not totally optimized it’s still something I feel a lot of newer players will get into. It’s not like they’ve had much else to do.
I had them in there initially (which is in fact why your opponent is Parasoul), but it proved just too frustrating for the new players for who the tutorial was intended. Taking them out allowed new players to retain the core message of the tutorial, which is “When in doubt, hold db. When they’re in the air, hold b.” We do teach you what overheads are, how to block them, and how to use them in your own mixups in other tutorials, however; hopefully their role in the game is clear.
Yeah, ideally tutorial mode would instead be single player mode, and the various mini-game-y challenges we throw at you would be interspersed between real fights, and have some story context instead of “hit confirm a c.mk 3 times in a row… you know because.” As you say, though, it was just outside our scope. One day!
Well, a large component of time for FGs is making all of those sprites and animations. The programmers can work on AI during that time rather than twiddling their thumbs (although realistically, they’ll probably be reassigned to other projects instead…)
Hah, great minds think alike, i guess?
Still, I hope the mode where you fight the AI has some compelling reason for replay. That’s why I suggested the virtual arcade scenario, because its not strange to fight the same people many times whilst trying to work your way up a ladder.
Whereas in a traditional story mode, you only fight each character a handful of times (or even just once). That’s not enough practice or repetition to teach a beginner to be comfortable with the mechanics.
Oh, the other thing about FG AI…
Most AI either have the goal of “playing like a human”, or “being the cheapest SNK hard boss possible”.
Whereas the AI that I’m thinking of, doesnt need to play realistically or be all that intelligent. Instead, think of them as a “FG Puzzle”, they present a set of specific scenarios, which you have to “solve” using the FG mechanics that you are learning. So its quite a different paradigm.
if only a game had a tutorial for linking I would be happy.
I love this in fighting games where tutorials showed you everything instead of doing specials and moving
is it confirmed there are gonna be somesort of trials ? I love doing them haha
The training mode already kinda has a semi tutorial for teaching links because you can turn on a hit stun icon that allows you to see how much hit stun an attack does. If you’re trying to link you can look for the hit stun bar to fill up and that’s probably about the time you should link your attack.
Here’s a feature request for SGs training mode, for some future patch or sequel:
Add a slow motion feature!
Sure, it won’t help when trying to learn timing, but often in games with complicated inputs / combos I just want the chance to break it down and get the sequence of commands and motions into my muscle memory. Having a variable slow motion in the settings would be useful, and I imagine it’s a pretty trivial feature to add.
No it wont. The thing I want it for is to learn the order of the commands and the feel of doing them one after another. Just think about training for pretty much any other muscle-memory activity - usually you break down the full motion into individual steps, and perform the steps at a slower pace. Then you try to speed it up and do it more smoothly.
The timing of the button presses feels completely different in slomo than normal speed. And that’s the hardest part… the order is just memory and the feel has to do with timing as much as feel (in fact the two are IMO intertwined).
I’m looking forward to SGs. I have had high expectations for the robust training mode, but as a mid intermediate player with a basic understanding of many fundamentals, I dunno how much improvement I can look to gain as I’m beginning to think that even though this game will be exploring things that haven’t been discussed in any other training mode, I don’t know how much deeper the game will go past what I already know or have been exposed to already briefly from self help. The mere idea of there being a hit/block stun meter though has me excited for finally having a visual aid for link timing. I’m just overall looking forward to lab time with this game I don’t think its going to be so much of a chore or lost cause for me like other recent games have been for me.
This Blazblue player did a really extensive series of tutorials to Blazblue that also cover fighting game fundamentals in extreme depth; they are really long and he does digress a fair bit, but htey cover absolutely everything, I highly recommend watching them if you are unclear about anything in the fighting game genre. Um I’ll add a link when I get home from work.
Anyway I am a little confused as to how you can teach linking in any particular depth. You know a character is in histstun because their charcter is not in the neutral position. If you character is not in a recovery animation (ie in neutral) while their character is in hitstun (ie not in neutral) you can maybe link an attack if it comes out fast enough.
Maybe there is some amazing other tip that I am too small minded to conceive? Other than putting the above point across I don’t know how you would teach linking.
Unless we are talking about SF4 and its amazingly unintuitive you can’t special cancel a normal that was canceled into unless it was a target combo… (but that game, for a ‘n00b friendly’ game, had some odd design choices if you ask me.)
edit 1
Unless the move has cancellable recovery frames
edit 2
Having thought about this more, what would be perfect is a training option that
Displays hit and hurtboxes.
2.Changes colour of displayed boxes when cancellable frames occur. One colour for gatling/magic series/special cancels and another for recovery cancels.
Combined with a hitstun display that skullgirls seems to have, this would leave no one in any doubt as to when you can link.
edit 3
[media=youtube]W-b0iNBjim8[/media]
This is very slooow but it covers absolutely every question regarding fighting game fundamentals.
(although realistically, they’ll probably be reassigned to other projects instead…)