Lucio's Rambles

The Theoretical Fundamentals of Fighting Games

Hey all. Shockingly, not dead yet.

Haven't written in a while because I was busy with my final semester of uni (which I am finishing today! wooho!) but a friend asked me today if I could explain to them the bare essentials of fighting games. Y'see, they have barely played any fighting game in their life beyond some old janky flash titles, but they really want to make one of them. I personally am incredibly in favor of outsiders to a genre delving into it because it tends to inject a unique perspective that most won't have, but there's also the danger of rediscovering the mistakes old-timers found out a decade ago.

So, let's go over the basic structure of a fighting game, and see what we actually will need in some form.

Level 1: Punch Good

So, let's start with some assumptions. Because every single one of the thing I'm going to list has some fighting game that violates it, I'm going to list them as immovable truths just so we don't lose ourselves a bit too much.

The fighting games we're going to discuss are:

We'll be acting as if there's only one character controlled by each player, but that's not required, it's just a simplification (All of these extrapolations would equally apply to more characters).

Now that we have our assumptions, what can we extrapolate?

So, our two characters necessarily start at some point on the screen, so we can assume wherever they start should be relatively neutral to both characters; neither has an advantage in time, health, or just being positioned well relative to their tools.

We'd want these two characters to not have an incentive to fully run away from the other player: if they do the game becomes incredibly passive, as engaging is an objectively bad choice to do, despite engagements being required to end a game; draw by timeout becomes the optimal play. They don't necessarily have to be incentivized towards aggression, just not towards total cowardice.

Our characters need to hit the other character with some sort of weapon (whether blade or fist), and missing an attack should be penalized in some way, otherwise spam of this non-penalized attack is an optimal strategy. so we discover our first essential dynamic: Footsies. Footsies is the term for the "mini-game" where players dance in and out of their opponents' striking range to make them miss an attack, and then pushing an advantage based on this miss.

Now, we don't have a lot more assumptions we can make based on these axioms, as any other extrapolations we make will be based on some sort of hidden assumption. You could make a fighting game that's just "punch within a strike range, win if you hit them." (In fact, someone did - divekick). Let's add more axioms in turn, and see what else we learn about them.

Level 2: I Know Block-Fu

Let's say that being constantly vulnerable makes you a little weary. So we'll add a new assumption.

We can extrapolate that this block must come with some other benefits, otherwise it would be better to just play the game normally and not worry about pressing block. However, blocking must not be a better overall strategy than attacking. As in - while blocking an attack may be beneficial over being hit, holding down block cannot be a dominant strategy, otherwise we run into the issue of passivity.

Now, let's assume one character blocked an attack by the other. The blocking player must have some form of exiting this state, otherwise spamming the attack is optimal. What do I mean by this? If you block an attack, you should be able to either counter-attack the next one, be pushed out of striking range, or some other penalty to the attacker, otherwise the opponent has no reason not to just spam the attack button for the rest of the match (assuming they have a health advantage).

Now, how do we make sure that blocking is not a dominant strategy? You could make it so that blocking still deals some form of damage (nicknamed "chip damage"), or make it so that blocking somehow reduces the player's choices. However, another common option in fighting games is adding methods to break a block.

However, this is another non-essential assumption, so we move to our final level.

Level 3: AS GOD AS MY WITNESS, HE IS BROKEN IN HALF

Firstly, we'll see that this mechanic must either be significantly weaker than other attacks in the character's toolkit, (otherwise the optimal strategy is to ignore the other tools and use this one, making the block mechanic pointless,) or have a different "block" mechanic of its own (which now creates two different "avenues" of blocking, where picking the wrong avenue means you are hit by the attack).

I would elaborate here on how these mechanics tend to present themselves in the fighting game "three" structure, but that would go against the idea of my friend being an "outsider" to the genre, so I'll let them explore these ideas to their heart's content.

Beyond these three levels, anything you can add and would add to a fighting game is entirely up to preference. Special moves are not really essential, motion inputs can be ignored, even the idea of having different characters is a convention as opposed to a requirement.

I have no idea how to end this, so I hope this was eye-opening if not at least interesting to read.

#fgc #game design