Devlog: Game 5 [005] Combat System (1) - Poise and Clarity
In my Devlog series, I discuss development of my ongoing game projects.
It turns out there's a lot to think about in making a 3D combat game - additionally so when designing something new! While today's post is about "Poise", there's a number of topics to Game 5's system that come to mind...
Attack, Defense, Weapon Attack...
Badges
Ranged Combat (Guns) and Ammo
Bumpslash Combat (Swords)
Critical Hits and Room Design
Movement Options (Walking and Jumping)
HP Values and Level Design
Money and Item drops
Enemy Design and Respawning
Boss Design
Difficulty Settings
Scrapped Ideas: Action Button Attacks, Sliding, Groundpounding, Movable Gun Reticle
Each one of these are problems that we've did some thinking on and are playable/programmed. The main thing that isn't tested is how well the stats things hold up over a whole game, but things are feeling great on a 'balanced around level 1' viewpoint!
Anyways...
What does Poise do?
Poise... it's just one component of our combat system, just a single number! But it's really important. Why..? Check out this video for a sense of what I mean.
If you can't watch the video, it consists of three things
1. Attacking a Regular Bugdog with low poise
2. Attacking a Goliath Bugdog with medium poise
3. Attacking a tiny, bouncy bugdog with high poise
Keep an eye out for two things:
1. How far back the player is bounced
2. How far back the enemy is bounced
Both the player and the enemy have a poise stat. When two things attack each other in this game, the thing with higher poise will be knocked back less.
When the player gets knocked back, they can't change their movement direction for a fixed amount of time. You can jump in order to avoid a hazard that might be behind you, though.
When an enemy has lower poise than the player, it becomes easier to attack while against a wall, which will perform a critical hit.
(For people interested in numbers, here's how I designed numbers for poise... the base poise for anything is 100. Based on the difference between attacker and defender, the poise formula will output a knockback time and knockback speed for the player, and a knockback speed for the enemy. This is enough to suit most situations, but if need be I can still do things like let an enemy artificially extend knockback time on the player. Or, some enemies have 'knockback reductions' that stop them from sliding much faster (or maybe they are extra slippery!) Basically, the formula is pretty simple and allows us to easily add edge cases to make enemies more interesting when needed.)
So why have poise?
Poise generates richness
That is, it adds another dimension through which the player needs to be spatially aware. Your distance from walls or pits matter - you could get knocked back, or you could try to knock an enemy towards a wall. It affects the order you take on the enemies in a given room.
Other examples of 'adding richness' - for example, if you added jumping to Zelda, that would require you to be aware of height. Since some Zelda enemies have ranged attacks, then you might need to stay aware of parts of the screen that aren't just near the player. Etc. Whether richness leads to overcomplicatedness really depends on a game's implementation, level design, what the richness is coming from... etc.
I would say the best combat games combine multiple types of spatial awareness - a fighting game has moves with different hitboxes, and being near the center vs. back of the arena is important. Dark Souls and Demon's Souls' best boss fights often incorporate the arena in an interesting way - Ornstein and Smough's pillars let you hide (temporarily), Taurus Demon's bridge and towers offer different ways to engage the boss and yet make you feel panicked/cramped, etc.
The joy of combat in a game is the way it lets you embody the player character - having the added aspect of 'environmental awareness' is another way of reinforcing that embodiment.
I don't even think it's a mere matter of 'fun' or 'power fantasy'. Sure, those things are inseparable from combat discussions, but I think there is something serious at stake. When it comes to engaging with the fiction of a game, that embodiment is a key part of making the whole game 'click'. The memorability of a game's worlds, the stories, the experiences you have, part of those leaving an impression, you can enhance that with a well-thought-out combat system. I don't think the combat has to be a metaphor for some story theme, but I do think there should be some mutual enrichment going on with a game's component parts.
Recently I played a demo of a castlevania-like and for 20 minutes I was just whipping the same enemy type... it had sexy anime girls, though, I guess, and you could unleash a powerful yelling attack that killed all the enemies in one hit for some reason. Recently I saw footage of a game where you spam like 50 really flashy attacks at a 3D boss while movie-style dialogue plays and the HP bar slowly whittles down while combo multipliers fly out of the screen... I couldn't tell what was happening, and it made me sort of sad.
Poise is customizable
Poise resonates well with weapon and simple stat systems. A heavy weapon with a wider hitbox will give you additional poise. (However, it will stun you from moving slightly after each attack! While you might not be knocked back as far, you'll still be vulnerable).
Or, a light weapon like a dagger could have additional poise, with small range and lower attack - to simulate the sense of quickly stabbing.
Maybe there's a strong sword with a negative poise modifier. You get the attack benefit, but have to be more careful... and so on!
Or, we could have armor that increases poise but lowers your speed... and so on.
Poise also lets me do terrible things like adding a "very hard" mode where we force your equipment configurations into terrifying set-ups to give you a very hard time! Ha ha ha!!! Have fun fighting God with the squeaky boots badge!!
Poise helps convey the game's world
Poise also is part of the stats system I outlined in an older post. It grows as you level up, as do stronger enemies. So when you enter a higher-level area it becomes a little trickier to play through. This creates a different mental perception players of different areas in the game.
Poise has clarity
This is more a matter of taste, but Marina and I enjoy combat in games that has 'clarity'... what that means for me, in the context of game combat, is that you're very quickly and directly understanding the player-enemy relationship, and the costs/benefits of your moves is easy to parse.
Game 5's Poise is clear, in the sense you can feel and see the poise relationship of an attack within milliseconds. The Goliath Bugdog in the video doesn't just look big, but it feels big, and you know that when you strike it, you need to be a little more aware of what's behind you. Maybe it's best to save it for last? Or should you get it out of the way early, but carefully? Because poise is clear, it combines with the other aspects of the combat system to feel expressive - even if things look simplistic, there are quite a lot of ways to approach any one enemy encounter.
Why clarity? A short praise of Dark Souls and rant of games that Definitely don't exist
Here's examples of non-clarity in combat. What if how hard you're holding the L2 trigger affects your poise amount? That would be less clear. It would be hard to use well in the heat of combat. What if each weapon had four types of bump attacks with slightly different animations and hitbox sizes? When would you decide to use one over the other? That's unclear, and it's easiest to just stick to what works.
Clarity in combat allows the designer lot of room for complexity in the more interesting areas (enemy design, composition of enemies within a room, twists on combat mechanics). You can sort of throw any idea into the mix, and since it's built on clear fundamentals, you can make strange stuff work.
Dark Souls is a pretty 'clear' game, even if the dodge roll is kind of janky in terms of the concept (makes no physical sense) and learning (you need trial and error to know when to use it). You have light or heavy attacks, and four options for dodging (run away, shield, roll, parry - with intuitive levels of risk). Most enemies are balanced around dying in a few hits as long as you're at level curve, so you can judge the risk of a situation pretty well!
When it comes to action games, I feel like too many stats are the enemy. Imagine a hypothetical, nonexistent game where you you have up to 7 armor items, each which you can level up and give 3 stat modifiers with 4 significant digits. You might "have to use the fire attack on the grass monster 10-500 times depending on whether or not you are using a 3 or 5 star character". Again, this game definitely doesn't exist, but let's try hard to imagine these horrors together!
In combat systems like that, you rarely get a sense for a combat encounter's danger. When you're too strong, everything dies immediately. What's the point? Oh, grinding for materials... to get stronger... so you can kill everything immediately? Weird. Lol... well, good thing this game doesn't exist!
At a balanced level, despite their budgets, sometimes these (imaginary) games only have like 4 enemy types. You might have to use a single strategy against one of them. That's like if Mario just made the goomba and called it a day. It would be truly amazing if a game existed that could get me to spend $1,000 to fight 4 enemy types!
And when you're too weak? Pure misery: you'll be doing 3 damage and might, might be able to kill an enemy if you cast fire against it every 25.443 seconds. It's even worse when you HAVE to use a certain style of move on an enemy, then you feel like a fool, performing the same move in the same way, just to chip off 5 HP... haha, well, surely no game is making people do this..
Combat in these games can be based around drawn-out cooldowns, so the strategy is to fiddle with numbers so that you can engage with the combat system as little as possible. I feel like a combat system that urges you to figure out ways to not have to deal with it has failed. It's almost like a game doing this has the combat purely exist so that it can sell you something else or something. What an idea...!
A combat system that makes you think about 4 other ways to potentially spend your time to eke out a 2.5s faster win - has failed.
Anyways, because Dark Souls's combat system is so clear, it can make all sorts of enemy types in weird level shapes and generally it works.
Even though Dark Souls has problems (mainly due to its upgrade systems, I'd say - the game is unplayable or at least much harder than it needs to be, for someone not reading a build wiki), they don't really stem from the game's core combat ideas. Weapon switching, while very diverse, is still 'clear' in that weapons always only have a few attacks. (I actually think later installments became weaker design-wise when they incorporated too many moves. It became hard to get a sense for when one move was useful, or not, even if it did look flashy...)