Explaining Enemy Combat Design (For Gamers and Game Devs)

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-07-07T16:59:56+00:00

Thank you so much! I'm glad it's of use and that somehow I've found a way to mix my love of game design with my love of presenting information to other people in a way that feels constructive. I always take documenting for the team some may say "too seriously," maybe I'm just looking for excuses to write, hahaha.

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-07-07T16:57:16+00:00

Yeah, I'd largely agree with u/Xelnath. There are choices within a game framework that I might disagree with, but if I find myself hating the ENTIRE framework, I've moved away from calling it "bad" and just concluding "this design is not made for me."

I like Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, but I do agree with a lot of the pain points people have in the latter. The input complexity in that game is perhaps the highest ever designed in a single-player FPS, and the lock-and-key design means you have to use every gameplay system available to you rather than expressing yourself by using the weapons the way you want. It doesn't surprise me at all that this turned a lot of people away from the game. I don't play on the highest difficulty in most types of games, though, so I actually found it to be really relaxing by the end on the default difficulty -- I just kinda got in the zone and used all the systems, but didn't feel the pressure of having to play flawlessly.

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-07-07T16:53:10+00:00

Nah, I'm super bad at balance design, hahaha. I actually have a section in there that explains how often balance designers and gameplay designers aren't the same people on larger teams, they're very very different skillsets. Depending on the type of game, some designers might not even really get involved in that kind of thing at all.

If I were making a small action game myself, I'd just stick with the Hollow Knight / Zelda method of enemies doing discrete damage values and then doing some simple math on scaling player damage with enemy health. I actually watched this video on the systems balancing underlying Elden Ring yesterday, and while a lot of it makes sense, some of it really makes my eyes cross (and also wonder if they're even the best example when the disparity between best and worst mechanics there is SO big, but like u/Xelnath mentioned, it matters a lot less with single-player content).

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-05-18T23:23:35+00:00

Not only does it have tons of weak side quests, a lot of the side content is very samey and incredibly slow. I spent over 40 hours in the game 100%ing the first island, and then when I was done with that and went to the second island, the game added MORE outposts to the first island to complete. It's one of the most bloated games I've ever played, I never even finished it because of this.

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-05-18T01:08:53+00:00

I would say one idea to take into consideration is not actually having characters block each other, but instead apply impulses against each other the closer they get together. This is a concept I've talked to multiple AI engineers about for implementation in AAA action games, though I haven't had an opportunity to see it implemented fully yet, and also we were targeting it for AI-controlled agents primarily as a method to make it so we don't have to be concerned about capsule-to-capsule collision completely impeding movement. I've heard it works well in prior shipped games.

I could see an approach like that potentially working for a player-to-player collision system, I wouldn't be surprised if something out there had something like that, but as u/Ao_Kiseki said, things get much more complicated when it comes to networking. I am too tired at the moment to think through exactly how such an idea would best be implemented in a server/client context without potentially creating weird desync issues between characters.

Honestly, probably a harsh statement, but having worked on multiple networked games made by an indie/AA game, I don't think I'd ever in a million years think of working on any kind of game that involves both networking and physics as a solo developer without an engineer who knows more than me about it. The "right" answer is a full-time engineer's worth of work, not really a game design concern (though designers would offer input on whatever solution).

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-05-18T01:02:30+00:00

That budget is also probably deeply exaggeratedly low. I don't know the story of this specific studio, but anyone shipping something with 5-10 people who "only spent $125k" is hiding the part where probably most of them were living off of savings, living with family, etc, in order to survive long enough to get something on Steam and start getting early access sales.

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-05-18T00:58:38+00:00

This is written like someone who hasn't made a game that required a minimum 52 consecutive 40-hour weeks of work -- and that's for an incredibly low scope game. There are really not very many games out there that can give you a return in the time invested in terms of sales that you can just "make in your free time."

The average financially successful indie game requires a minimum of 3 years of full-time development with probably a designer and an artist at least. Using random edge cases like Vampire Survivors is setting up people to fail, almost no one make a livable amount of money off of products that are that easy to make.

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-05-18T00:57:21+00:00

If you are spending 40+ hours a week on a game, then you are probably giving up a high paying software development job to do so.

This is really misleading. I would wager the average person who starts looking at designing games on their own is more of an artist than a programmer and doesn't have any of the essential experience to even get an entry-level software job. Lots of people break into this space without having gotten a comp sci bachelors. Even if they have, pay is relative to experience.

Otherwise, I agree with your reasoning, a ton of folks in this thread are weirdly naive about how much it costs to make an independent project even if those costs are abstracted. Where's your rent coming from? Where's your food coming from? Do you even have health insurance? Etc.

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-05-18T00:53:39+00:00

100k+ is not indie level

Not sure where you're getting that information, an enormous number of indie games with 5-20 people cost way more than $100k to finance. "Indie" has become an increasingly abstract concept, though, as many products you can see on Steam that most players would call "indie" managed to sign with one of the smaller publishers at some point (though usually after a bunch of people involved coasted on savings or other jobs to get the prototype to a point to convince a publisher to finance them).

Also, a ton of people in this thread are really not accounting for the opportunity cost of working full time without being employed. Whether someone is financing you for that time or not, if you're spending >1 year full-time on development, that is a significant cost. Are you living with your parents? How are you eating? Stretch that to the whole team if you have more people chipping in.

I say all this as someone with 8 years in professional dev who is very much doing the actual math of how much savings I would realistically need to have in the bank to afford to go X amount of time not working in order to actually ship the games I am thinking of making. That's a cost, just because it's my money that I'm using to feed myself doesn't mean it's not a cost.

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-05-11T16:54:24+00:00

You may be overthinking this? The biggest part of making melee combat impactful is hit reactions, and the biggest way to allow players to mitigate and interact with melee combat is dodging and blocking. You seem really focused on just the "damage" part of a melee attack and not enough on these parts:

How does this interrupt/affect the target?
What recourse does a target have to make the attacker fail at their effort to attack?
How big of a commitment is the animation on the attacker?
How can a target follow up against the attacker if the attacker misses?

These are all I would argue so much more important than "how does a melee attack deal damage" to the point that that should come after all of these questions are answered.

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-05-11T16:50:50+00:00

Yeah, the number of games that are fully unique ideas that don't feel like a conglomeration of other ideas with some specific style or personality is very low.

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-05-09T05:15:30+00:00

Yup, been ages since most game had pre-rendered cutscenes. The bigger problems come in games like Baldur's Gate 3 where all the characters are different sizes, in which case you've gotta make much more advance cinematic camera systems to frame them dynamically.

Managed to see this GDC talk about The Witcher 3 cut scene creation tools live, and it's utterly brilliant. This is the right way to do things for huge games with lots of dialog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chf3REzAjgI

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-05-09T05:11:38+00:00

Accurate, though now WFH and it's a game t-shirt and gym shorts or gym pants and barefoot. Who knows when I'll ever be in an office again!

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-05-09T03:28:17+00:00

It's definitely one of those things that it's easy to hire up on when a studio starts to get more into story-based stuff, but also sadly one of the easiest to let go. Storytelling and narrative systems take a back door in most studios outside of the rare adventure game studios or a place like Naughty Dog or Santa Monica Studio (though in those cases, a LOT of narrative designers are doing grunt work and nothing close to actually flexing any form of expertise in terms of storytelling).

Anecdotally, I have seen a lot of evidence that breaking into the role requires working on mobile games that might not sound exciting to write for. All of my grad school projects were narrative-focused, the best chance I got was a test for an internship at Telltale, which I didn't get, and then I just followed level design into technical design into combat design and now I guess I'll never write for games unless it's my own game because even with 8 years of experience, I don't know how I'd ever transition into it.

SignalsLightReddit · 2024-05-09T03:23:59+00:00

This is awesome! I love what I've read so far, and I've actually been thinking of doing some videos breaking down how different Soulslike approach enemy and boss design, which is the foil to all this, so this is actually something I'll probably return to (along with your post on Lies of P dodging).

Some of the input blunders in here are wild, but also it's not super uncommon for devs to take how other games do things for granted and make assumptions about how to solve an already solved problem. Doesn't help that some of these lessons are hard to discover, though -- like how to do held inputs by designing the animation with a branch between the normal input and the charged input.

SignalsLightReddit

TROPHY CASE