Fight Man Game Design Chat: RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

King of Posters
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I’ve been playing EXAMU’s hot new eroge-licensed fighting game, NITROPLUS BLASTERZ, because I’ve got a thing for buying and at least trying pretty much any 2D fighter that comes out. In a sea of recent fighting games, possibly the most since before the Capcom Dark Age of the early 00s, it stands out as perhaps the most unremarkable, but for one thing: the extremely aggressive meter gain.

Super meter’s always been a “comeback mechanic” in fighting games. Some games build it almost entirely from getting hit or blocking attacks (like Street Fighter 4’s Ultras), while others like Guilty Gear give a far greater reward to the player on offense. Most split the difference, or reward different resources for different behaviors, like Under Night’s Vorpal gauge, which is given periodically to the player currently making the “smartest decisions,” be they on offense or correctly defending.

The resources each player has play a big factor in pacing the match, and especially in games where one or more resources other than life are retained between rounds, pacing the entire set. In Guilty Gear, your Tension (super) gauge is reset to 0 whether you win or lose the round, but your Burst is still however you left it. This encourages players to burst early in the first round, since the round will likely last long enough to mostly or entirely recover it, and it makes players more careful about (and possibly easier to provoke into) using their burst to “save their life” late in a round. A good escape that you can turn around into a come-from-behind victory is a good use of resources, but if you blow it and lose the round anyway, you get to start the next one in an even weaker position than just being down on the scoreboard. It also encourages going nuts with your Tension meter when you’re near the end of the round: you’re going to lose it anyway, you might as well use it to try and turn it around.

Okay, that’s enough setup. Let’s look at what Nitroplus Blasterz does that’s weird.

Here’s a properly-creepy screenshot I stole from the official site for reference and to break up the wall of text:

ss_01b.jpg800×450 153 KB

  • BURST – Here called “Blast” because that’s the new trend (Dengeki does it, too). You always start the round with this, and you get exactly one per round. Aside from letting you escape combos, it functions like the power-up modes common in fighters these days, giving you slight life recovery, increasing your attack power, and allowing you to perform otherwise impossible combos by cancelling special moves into rolls and so on. You can activate mid-combo to “pop up” the opponent with a hitbox, which is also a popular trend right now.

  • ASSISTS – Unlike in most recent fighters, these have a “warm-up” time before they can be used AND a “cool-down” time after they’re fired off. Lengths vary, but they tend to take a long time to prepare and recover, and have power closer to supers than the “assists” you might expect in Marvel, Aquapazza, etc. Activating them during a combo will cause your character to instantly return to neutral, like a Roman Cancel, which is important since most assists take a while after they’re called to start hitting something.

  • SUPERS – Where the real damage from the combo is made. Here’s also where the problem lies: regardless of who’s attacking and who’s getting hit, both players gain this at exactly the same speed. This means the first player to spend meter is potentially at a big disadvantage: level 3 supers do a ton of damage in this game, even with the heavy scaling in longer combos, but if you have three stocks, it is a sure thing that your opponent does, too.
    Worse, if you screw up and DON’T take the round with a combo that uses all of your meter, you probably built three stocks for them again over the course of the combo, and now they’re one clean hit into a solid combo to take the round in return.

Since none of your resources carry over between rounds, match flow gets really, really weird. All of your resources – Blasts, Assists, and especially Supers – can be used to create long, highly-damaging combos, making it risky to use them OUTSIDE of kill-combo situations. Sure, picking the Cowgirl assist and spraying bullets at your opponent gives you cover to approach and set up a mixup, but with recharge times, it’s probably more valuable to save her for when you get a clean hit when your opponent is at less than half life. If it were just “you wasted your meter on a bad read,” it would be one thing, but if you land a meter dump combo and fail to take the round, you’ve refilled your opponent’s super meter and given their assists time to recharge.

The “issue” here is not that the game encourages Comebacks; that’s just every modern fighting game. Look at Ultras in SF4, or X-Factor in Marvel 3. It’s how immediately it punishes sub-optimal combo design and execution, and makes an extremely aggressive game enter a strange “stop-and-fish” state 2/3rds of the way through a round. Why cash in resources to create a better situation for mix-up or pressure when you know that, eventually, one of you’s going to get a hit that takes the round?

…

I think I was trying to make a point about how the player resources in these games affect the flow and thought process of players. Something like “really lopsided reward for one particular facet of player skill and game knowledge can have bad effects at low and high levels of play,” maybe? It’s totally BULLSHIT when your buddy kills you with a mashed-out A->B->C->Level 3 Super at low levels, and it’s still bullshit at mid-to-high levels where both players are too scared of Certain Death to use half of their tools in the neutral game. But I probably failed to get that across, so, I’m going to hit post now.

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I have no idea how this game plays. Do you have any good match videos for reference?

I imagine it plays like Aquapazza since they’re by the same developer.

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More like Arcana Heart with the Homing Dash movement stripped out.

Let’s watch some of the Examu Cup! (1h55m if the embed doesn’t keep the timestamp):

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Persona I scoff at your assumption that this plays like Aquapazza. SCOFF!

Examu stated the idea behind starting each round with assists on cooldown was to cause rounds to accelerate into an exciting and chaotic climax toward the end and I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume this same concept was applied to the meter gain. I’m not sure that alone is an outright terrible decision- I’m sure it’s possible for something interesting to come out of it- but the overall game systems of Blasterz’ combine to make the kind of game I’ve always associated with the doujin fighting game scene. You have very free range of aerial movement and you’ve way too many options to convert your hits into kill-combos. Blasterz is a game with legitimate 30 second combos thanks to the strong assists (which is a cool idea by itself), the roman canceling out of assists, the combo extender bursts, and the guaranteed level three supers thanks to the equivalent meter gain for both players. It just gets formulaic real fast. If you watch a lot of match videos you’ll the hammer girl do the same combo to win almost every match. Same for the wire girl, and moe girl, and that other moe girl. While a meter reset on round start sounds like something similar to Super Turbo or GG the ability to convert off any ol’ random hit means you’re always able to do the same things to end every round.

There is a similar issue in Melty Blood where you can convert most random hits into your optimal combos. You’ve got a different optimal combo for meter gain, oki, and corner carry, but you can choose whichever one to do after any hit. So combo improvisation is kind of a bore.

An interesting thing to note is that Blasterz was literally released into arcades before it was even completed. The character select screen had lots of blank placeholder icons for already-announced characters that just hadn’t been completed into a playable state yet. I’m not sure if this was for financial reasons or what but I wonder if the game system would have been adjusted with more playtesting before release.

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This is the one sentence version of what I spent all those words trying to say.

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I’m a little scatterbrained, so I might have to come back and revise this later. Also, you play the most anime games.

So all meter games are, fundamentally, ways of pacing the players. If you have a meter set to build in X way you can be guaranteed they will have tools A, B, and C at times Y and Z. Builds when taking damage? Will be used as comeback material. Builds when on the offense? Will be used to continue pressure. Builds in various neutral activities? Will be used for burst attempts at getting in or getting a hit that would be normally impossible. Meter expended in limited amounts of time? Used aggressively or to give pressure that wasn’t there before. Etc. It’s an easy way for a designer to control both the pacing of the matches and what skills get used when, so as to build a match up to a powerful sequence of events.

Like, kind of what I’m getting at for modern meter heavy games is that’s transparently used as a way of making the game simpler to design, rather than simpler to play. Something that’s easy for developers to work with to dictate what the players will do.

Since nothing carries over between rounds in that game, this sort of massive pendulum swing sounds absolutely intentional. I’m wary of coming to immediate conclusions about things like “Oh, you have no choice but to save all your meter to do a kill combo,” because sometimes setups can evolve such that it’s definitely better not to… but.

Watching the video, it looks like damage scaling is really absurd, so it’s not as worth it as it could be, but also that you basically do not build meter in neutral. Very little from having your attacks blocked, a ton when combos actually land. So this is definitely a “players trade Progressively Bigger Combos” sort of game, basically leading upwards until someone gets something big enough to close it out with, with players reserving stock specifically for that. I’m not even sure if there’s a good way to burn meter in neutral, it seems like meterless attacks are more than strong enough for footsies to make it not worthwhile.

More than overpowered, it just seems like kind of a boring flow? Slap each other around a bit, then get some actual damage potential. No worry about having to deal with managing meter long-term, builds relatively quickly. It’s definitely an intentional flow, as created by the meter pacing, but every round is going to play out identically because it dominates too much of the flow.

Essentially, a spectator focused game.

As an aside, really lopsided rewards are a problem in even big games; if anyone remembers vanilla SF4 there was one really iconic match I can’t find atm which was Daigo vs a Sagat, and Daigo’s Ryu was super aggressive right up until the Sagat’s Ultra meter filled, then he just backed way the hell off because any random hit was now going to be both 60+% damage and thrown back to the opposite corner of the screen. Whoops! They had to scale that back because at no point is the risk worth it once that happens. UMVC3’s X-Factor is massively overpowered but it also serves the purpose of counterbalancing the early game being too strong on killing single targets, so it works out.

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Right. It’s less “this thing is overpowered” or “this thing doesn’t work,” but “this thing works exactly as it’s meant to, and that makes this game feel shallow – and worse, dull.”

Persona 4 Arena tries a pretty deliberate flow control method, too, with Awakening, but it doesn’t “devalue” the rest of the match in that same way. You get a big defensive boost and free meter for entering low-life, as well as new supers, some of which dramatically change the way match-ups unfold. But it doesn’t strike me as nearly as much of a “dominant force”; maybe that’s because the change to both players is more sophisticated than “okay, we’re one completed combo from taking the round.”

(I really like Dengeki’s use of your resources/assists. French Bread has been doing a really smart job in it and UNIB, encouraging ways to use resources besides just raw damage and using resources to highlight “best practices” for newer players.)

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There’s an interesting comparison to be made here to an earlier Examu game, Arcana Heart 3, in terms of meter systems. AH3 has a pretty unique build up in power, mainly because it takes place across the entire match instead of just over the course of a single round. To begin with, having meter is insanely important in AH3 for both offensive and defensive purposes, more so than most games, since most characters need a bar just to do a basic combo and because there are strong universal defensive options tied to meter. So, everyone begins the match being able to to store up to a single stock of meter. Furthermore, meter automatically regenerates as long as you’re not at full. If you ever want to store more than just that one stock though, you have to save meter until you’re at your maximum limit. Once you’re full, you get something that more resembles traditional “meter gain”, increasing your maximum meter limit as you hit them or get hit. The maximum limit is maintained across rounds and goes up to three bars. The difference between having one stock and two stocks is huge in terms of degrees of freedom, and once you have three stocks, you gain access to your level three super which, depending on character, can be game changing.

What this works out to in practice is that you have to strike a balance between using your meter for comboing/defensive options and saving it so you can have more options in later rounds, but it also provides a nice feeling progression in terms of power level as a match goes on. You start out being able to do a combo or get out of a bad situation, but not both. Later on, you can get out of that bad situation and counterattack into a full combo, or you can start running those two bar combos, or stronger pressure, etc etc.

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Hi, I’ll ramble some about stuff while half asleep.
I’m gonna talk about other games I know since I can only speculate on the nitroplus match vids, considering I’ve never played it. I also like AH3 but I just really really suck at it.
Well-implemented meter can be one of the most interesting things in fighting games, but can also be one of the most damaging. Everyone’s already touched on this to some degree, but meter is really important in what it incentivizes and who it turns into the attacker/defender. In every competitive game ever, in every situation ever, outside of absolutely perfect mirror matches, there is a ‘correct’ defender and correct attacker in terms of optimal play. If both players are defending or both are attacking, likely one player or another is making a mistake in assigning these roles or just simply is unaware of the concept. So your meter systems can control this situation and give you an alternate avenue to pressure the opponent into an uncomfortable or undesirable role. A classic example is 3s yun whiffing normals to build up the dreaded genei jin, so you want to attack him but honestly at the same time you want to be nowhere near yun and it’s just this scary scary situation that is very dominated by a metered resource. Speaking of that, whiff normals are often derided as promoting overly reactive & slow gameplay, but this is p reductionist. Again, for one player to be the defender, another must be the attacker. And there’s a very simple issue at work with the problems with whiff meter build in the games that do actually have a problem with it: it’s simply better than moving forward to attack. This isn’t a problem in mvc2, for a pretty simple reason: you can move forward and build meter at the same time! Someone might bring up storm’s ability to run away off the top of the screen against lower tiers without them being able to catch her and then she chips them with hail. But that’s a specific balance issue with her going off the top of the screen. And if anything, it prevents those horrible runaway matches from going to time over by giving her meter. Guilty Gear solves it too, by tying it to forward movement. This adds a whole 'nother can of worms in that you get some snowbally things in some matchups where one character wants meter to get going forward and attacking but is unable to do that without the other person making a mistake. MVC3, while being a game that I enjoy quite a bit, has a much less interesting meter system because it only builds on hit/block, meaning that a lot of meter usage is relegated to “colorful animation at the end of my combo” world. Outside of a few extremely absurd exceptions of course. I’m generally of the school of thought that meter should be a thing you should get to spend for fun to just DO, not to be these weird unsafe things that you tack on the end of already-complex-enough combos.

So on the thread of “who’s the beatdown” and the relationship with meter
The relationship of resources and how to define ‘comebacks’ is complicated.
There seems to be 2 major ways to quantify it: winning from a great life disadvantage, and winning from a great resource disadvantage. Often people somehow mean something in between. after all, life itself is a resource.

MvC3 xfactor was brought up, but there’s just a lot of things that outsiders to the game refer to as xfactor comebacks that many people who play the game just wouldn’t even think of as a comeback. When XF3 Vergil with 5 bars beats a full health nova/doom/spencer who has no meters and no xfactor, I wouldn’t call it a comeback. It’s just sort of natural given the resources / matchups.
And this isn’t unique to mvc3. In mvc2 when a cable with 5 meters beats 3 characters, it is no surprise. When ST Bison just ‘randomly’ dizzies someone who had a large life advantage and just kills them, it’s rarely considered a comeback. When Abel punishes a blanka ball on hit with an ultra, it’s basically guaranteed damage that was going to happen no matter what, not a comeback. And there’s even situations with significant life leads where I’d say the player with the more life must be one to make the comeback. Back to the cable example, if we have a cable with 0 meters but a 100% health and a living, let’s say, commando assist, against a cable with 5 meters and 20% health, the person making a “comeback” is very much the 100% health 0 meter cable. I don’t mean to overly focus on capcom examples, but I just know them the best. I guess a game that I’m significantly worse at and less knowledgeable about: I’d say when I play bedman versus elphelt in Xrd, if I have no meter, we are fullscreen, and elphelt has 100% meter, I’d feel like I’m going to lose even with 80% health vs 20%. This may be a personal thing because of how bad I am at guilty gear though.

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I still need to get the game in my hands before I have more solid thoughts on it but I’m still having difficulty really coming to terms with SFVs Vbar. I mostly wish it was more GRD bar than an Ultra bar. My biggest misgiving is how you can only actively build it by using V-Skills to either eat fireballs or just use it (I’m assuming here since I haven’t heard otherwise yet and some V-Skills don’t eat fireballs like ken’s run or chun’s jump). It sounds like if you want to build V-bar without taking damage it leads you into becoming predictable or setplayish. That might be by design where if you want the benefits of V-Bar options you have to play a certain way instead of solid play. I’m not sure I can gel with those kind of mental gymnastics in a match. I’d probably be more comfortable if it were more like KOFXIII’s HD Bar that built through the same actions as the super bar but at different rates and some actions building more than others to make it different enough from the super bar. But the game could come out and be perfectly tweaked in a way that it works with that kind of specific play for specific meter build.

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The Team Itself as a resource is one of the things I always thought was cool about Marvel 2 and 3. Heck, Marvel 3 tries to emphasize it more with the “comeback power” of increasingly strong X-Factor, and characters like Phoenix who are designed to change the flow of the match suddenly and drastically. (Though the meta has likely replaced her with characters who unintentionally do it better and/or provide more value to the entire team, such as a fully-loaded Vergil.)

There’s something really satisfying about assists/strikers/etc. in almost all of these games. Just being able to put something else on the screen that briefly “breaks the rules” – letting you attack while moving, connect odd hits, build other resources, etc. The cooldowns or other costs associated with them make them feel more important and effective, but the costs are also generally “low” enough that you can use them frequently, rather than saving your Super for the ideal confirm or what have you. They’re kind of The Best, huh?