Time has been short for me, and a real update (besides bugfixes) is still a ways out, but I guess this is as good a time as any for me to make a game design post.
Some key points I have learned:
* Slopes impede mobility a little too much, simply due to SRB2's core acceleration curve. There are solutions to this that I would like to try in the next major update.
* Tails and Metal's abilities still aren't especially well-designed for Arena and Survival, due mainly to the fact they make it too easy to avoid engagement with no clear vulnerability period on landing. Further experimentation is warranted.
* Amy would benefit from the kind of button "standardization" that Fang has received, i.e. weapon always activates on spin, midair jump does a mobility action. This would allow me to expand on her native toolkit and improve her depth of play.
* All characters would benefit from having the ability to redirect horizontal momentum somehow, namely because it allows them to make more aggressive plays. This is evident in the evolution of Tails, Fang, and Metal Sonic's ability sets. I intend to apply something similar to Amy in the future.
* Shields should still provide some additional utility even if characters have no-spin "weapon" movesets. I'm going to experiment with potential bonuses for Fang and Amy.
These are the main changes I would see myself making in the next major update.
Fang went through a lot of growing pains, but his final design can basically be summed up through the following:
* Corks can be fired in the air, and Fang can jump while firing on the ground -- This gives Fang the ability to stay more mobile while attacking (a necessity in Arena's environment), and to chain up corks in more interesting ways.
* Corks are a little bit slower than their vanilla counterpart, making them easier to dodge.
* Corks have weak hitstun during a "clash" and inflicted players can try to wiggle out of it early to avoid followups.
* Bomb was replaced with Dodge Roll, giving Fang much-needed evasion and recovery abilities. It also has side utility as a "bump" move, which can tactically knock enemies around, despite not dealing damage. The tail thrust maneuver is largely just a bonus option for getting around faster.
All changes made were done with the intent on allowing Fang to keep up in hand-to-hand combat with more mobile opponents. The cork changes and removal of bombs, in exchange for greater popgun and dodgeroll mobility, simultaneously make Fang a fairer opponent to fight while also deepening his metagame for dealing with more skilled opponents.
While this is a noticeable contrast from bomb-Fang's emphasis on defensive play, which did give him team utility in CTF, the new design allows Fang to be more generally well-rounded and less polarizing in design, making him more fun to play as and against. I learned a lot from redesigning him, and my Tails rework incorporated similar design tactics to make him more engaging. Amy's theoretical redesign is still mostly tentative, but it would likely also follow a similar motion.
As for pipedreams way down the line...
I have been studying the game designs of Doom Eternal and Rivals of Aether. These are two very different games, and it could be said that SRB2 is also quite different from both of them; but considering that BattleMod is an attempt to sort of "smashify" Sonic gameplay in a 3D Doombased environment, it seems that BattleMod could benefit from design philosophies incorporated by both extremes here.
In Doom Eternal's case, the developers have stressed the importance of the "fun zone", and coercing the player to stay in the zone for as long as possible. What this means is that players are discouraged through both enemy design and core gameplay mechanics from simply playing "safe" and camping the corners of the map, instead incentivizing them to get into the heart of the action and deal as much damage as quickly as possible. While this was necessary in Doom Eternal's case in order to properly transition a multiplayer deathmatch style arena gameplay into a compelling single player experience, SRB2 has the opposite challenge in which it must gracefully transition its single player gameplay into a multiplayer format.
I've shuffled through a lot of different strategies for making SRB2 Battle feel "sonic-like", and I feel overall I've gradually made steps approaching the "fun zone", with early examples being the CP system, which encourages players both to explore and collect resources as well as to take risks engaging other players in combat.
That being said, I have consistently found myself running up against a couple issues:
1) It is difficult to consistently promote engagement between to players unless a centralizing objective is at play -- and even a centralizing objective may not necessarily enough to lead to compelling gameplay if the objective encourages one player to simply continue running away. Diamond and CTF walk a tightrope in which players must be rewarded for successful evasive maneuvering in a 3D environment, but it also can't be impossible to apprehend someone who is running away.
2) Attempts at centralizing the gameplay via Arena and CP sometimes end up feeling claustrophobic and disjointed. This is because small arena maps and CP objectives currently don't have a lot of ways to account for varying player counts. In CP, this could surely be resolved by allowing multiple CPs to be active at once according to player count. But Arena and Survival, which lack such centralizing objectives, must find other means of regulating the density of player conflict.
This is where Rivals of Aether offers solutions. The aforementioned video above suggests three basic design principles to Rivals' character design:
The emphasis on spacial resources is where I think BattleMod's gameplay is most lacking, and is also its one core flaw in comparison to the gametype of Ringslinger. Whereas Ringslinger has means of denying area or otherwise making a certain spacial environment more advantageous to a certain player, BattleMod has less mechanics in place for promoting such stage dynamics, with the notable exception of the elemental shield's fire trail. By controlling or influencing area in some way, it becomes much easier to funnel players into various advantageous/disadvantageous/risky conflicts.
This of course could mean many things.
For example, Sonic could have a move similar to his Sonic Battle kit where Sonic tosses a ring on the field, then catapoults toward that ring later. What if someone could collect Sonic's ring? That person could then be "tagged", causing Sonic to be able to snipe them in mid-air, or to follow up decisely with a thok-to-homing combo. This creates an interesting dynamic for Sonic, where he has some influence over the stage, and it also creates opportunities for aggressive follow-ups or even movement techniques for clearing obstacles.
For Fang, this could mean that successful hits on enemies would drop a cork -- if Fang collects this cork, his next attack becomes powered-up, giving him a trump-card to use in situations where standard corks may not be enough to get the job done. In this case, it is Fang who is incentivized to move around the stage rather than the opponent who is disincentivized from doing so -- but this also works well for Fang, who already has a ranged attack as part of his core toolkit and is well-suited for this type of weave-in-and-out playstyle.
Metal Sonic actually already has stage control in some respects -- his ability to run circles around certain terrain is partly what makes him challenging to deal with in certain arena maps. Improving Metal Sonic's spacial control aspect may just be a matter of making small tweaks to his existing kit.
Unfortunately, reworks like these would be a long ways off. But it's a direction I would see myself going in the long term after everything else is all said and done. This in addition to improving on the CP and Diamond systems would help make the gameplay feel more dynamic and flexibly suited for a variety of gametypes and player counts.
Some key points I have learned:
* Slopes impede mobility a little too much, simply due to SRB2's core acceleration curve. There are solutions to this that I would like to try in the next major update.
* Tails and Metal's abilities still aren't especially well-designed for Arena and Survival, due mainly to the fact they make it too easy to avoid engagement with no clear vulnerability period on landing. Further experimentation is warranted.
* Amy would benefit from the kind of button "standardization" that Fang has received, i.e. weapon always activates on spin, midair jump does a mobility action. This would allow me to expand on her native toolkit and improve her depth of play.
* All characters would benefit from having the ability to redirect horizontal momentum somehow, namely because it allows them to make more aggressive plays. This is evident in the evolution of Tails, Fang, and Metal Sonic's ability sets. I intend to apply something similar to Amy in the future.
* Shields should still provide some additional utility even if characters have no-spin "weapon" movesets. I'm going to experiment with potential bonuses for Fang and Amy.
These are the main changes I would see myself making in the next major update.
Fang went through a lot of growing pains, but his final design can basically be summed up through the following:
* Corks can be fired in the air, and Fang can jump while firing on the ground -- This gives Fang the ability to stay more mobile while attacking (a necessity in Arena's environment), and to chain up corks in more interesting ways.
* Corks are a little bit slower than their vanilla counterpart, making them easier to dodge.
* Corks have weak hitstun during a "clash" and inflicted players can try to wiggle out of it early to avoid followups.
* Bomb was replaced with Dodge Roll, giving Fang much-needed evasion and recovery abilities. It also has side utility as a "bump" move, which can tactically knock enemies around, despite not dealing damage. The tail thrust maneuver is largely just a bonus option for getting around faster.
All changes made were done with the intent on allowing Fang to keep up in hand-to-hand combat with more mobile opponents. The cork changes and removal of bombs, in exchange for greater popgun and dodgeroll mobility, simultaneously make Fang a fairer opponent to fight while also deepening his metagame for dealing with more skilled opponents.
While this is a noticeable contrast from bomb-Fang's emphasis on defensive play, which did give him team utility in CTF, the new design allows Fang to be more generally well-rounded and less polarizing in design, making him more fun to play as and against. I learned a lot from redesigning him, and my Tails rework incorporated similar design tactics to make him more engaging. Amy's theoretical redesign is still mostly tentative, but it would likely also follow a similar motion.
As for pipedreams way down the line...
I have been studying the game designs of Doom Eternal and Rivals of Aether. These are two very different games, and it could be said that SRB2 is also quite different from both of them; but considering that BattleMod is an attempt to sort of "smashify" Sonic gameplay in a 3D Doombased environment, it seems that BattleMod could benefit from design philosophies incorporated by both extremes here.
In Doom Eternal's case, the developers have stressed the importance of the "fun zone", and coercing the player to stay in the zone for as long as possible. What this means is that players are discouraged through both enemy design and core gameplay mechanics from simply playing "safe" and camping the corners of the map, instead incentivizing them to get into the heart of the action and deal as much damage as quickly as possible. While this was necessary in Doom Eternal's case in order to properly transition a multiplayer deathmatch style arena gameplay into a compelling single player experience, SRB2 has the opposite challenge in which it must gracefully transition its single player gameplay into a multiplayer format.
I've shuffled through a lot of different strategies for making SRB2 Battle feel "sonic-like", and I feel overall I've gradually made steps approaching the "fun zone", with early examples being the CP system, which encourages players both to explore and collect resources as well as to take risks engaging other players in combat.
That being said, I have consistently found myself running up against a couple issues:
1) It is difficult to consistently promote engagement between to players unless a centralizing objective is at play -- and even a centralizing objective may not necessarily enough to lead to compelling gameplay if the objective encourages one player to simply continue running away. Diamond and CTF walk a tightrope in which players must be rewarded for successful evasive maneuvering in a 3D environment, but it also can't be impossible to apprehend someone who is running away.
2) Attempts at centralizing the gameplay via Arena and CP sometimes end up feeling claustrophobic and disjointed. This is because small arena maps and CP objectives currently don't have a lot of ways to account for varying player counts. In CP, this could surely be resolved by allowing multiple CPs to be active at once according to player count. But Arena and Survival, which lack such centralizing objectives, must find other means of regulating the density of player conflict.
This is where Rivals of Aether offers solutions. The aforementioned video above suggests three basic design principles to Rivals' character design:
- Movement -- How a character is able to travel from A to B at a given moment
- Spacial resources -- How a character influences the stage around them
- Mechanical synergy -- How a character's toolkit is able to chain into itself
The emphasis on spacial resources is where I think BattleMod's gameplay is most lacking, and is also its one core flaw in comparison to the gametype of Ringslinger. Whereas Ringslinger has means of denying area or otherwise making a certain spacial environment more advantageous to a certain player, BattleMod has less mechanics in place for promoting such stage dynamics, with the notable exception of the elemental shield's fire trail. By controlling or influencing area in some way, it becomes much easier to funnel players into various advantageous/disadvantageous/risky conflicts.
This of course could mean many things.
For example, Sonic could have a move similar to his Sonic Battle kit where Sonic tosses a ring on the field, then catapoults toward that ring later. What if someone could collect Sonic's ring? That person could then be "tagged", causing Sonic to be able to snipe them in mid-air, or to follow up decisely with a thok-to-homing combo. This creates an interesting dynamic for Sonic, where he has some influence over the stage, and it also creates opportunities for aggressive follow-ups or even movement techniques for clearing obstacles.
For Fang, this could mean that successful hits on enemies would drop a cork -- if Fang collects this cork, his next attack becomes powered-up, giving him a trump-card to use in situations where standard corks may not be enough to get the job done. In this case, it is Fang who is incentivized to move around the stage rather than the opponent who is disincentivized from doing so -- but this also works well for Fang, who already has a ranged attack as part of his core toolkit and is well-suited for this type of weave-in-and-out playstyle.
Metal Sonic actually already has stage control in some respects -- his ability to run circles around certain terrain is partly what makes him challenging to deal with in certain arena maps. Improving Metal Sonic's spacial control aspect may just be a matter of making small tweaks to his existing kit.
Unfortunately, reworks like these would be a long ways off. But it's a direction I would see myself going in the long term after everything else is all said and done. This in addition to improving on the CP and Diamond systems would help make the gameplay feel more dynamic and flexibly suited for a variety of gametypes and player counts.