March 07, 2003 - Combat. It's one of the major staples of any RPG-style game, and there are many ways to approach it. Some games use the turn-based approach, where you select each member of your party and choose their attack. Often this descends into a situation where you 'Summon the Seventh Demon of Kunarg', spend 3 minutes watching a jaw-dropping spell effect where the earth is ripped in two, a 500 foot monster climbs out of the crack and pisses lava over your enemies. At the end of this, the world magically heals itself and the number '23' rises helpfully from your enemy, the only indicator of the damage that's been done, or indeed what just happened.
Other games use a real-time, randomised system, where the roll of an invisible pair of dice dictates whether each attack equated to a wet fart or a lump hammer. Usually this turns into a situation where both opponents run furiously at each other, screaming their battle cries, before skidding to a halt a meter apart, pausing and then: Whack, Thunk, Whack, Thunk, Whack, Thunk. Uuuurgh. And someone gets eight inches of pointy stick up them.
Not being fans of either of these approaches, we opted for real-time, visceral, hands on, meaty combat where you could work up a sweat bashing away at combos, or contemplating your timing with the skill and audacity of Sun Tzu on coke. It seemed so simple.
It wasn't.
So many things can go wrong. So many things did go wrong that we compiled our list of all the things we learned to get our combat feeling anything more interesting than an old ladies' handbag fight. Here are some examples:
1) It's not in the animation...
Of course we don't mean it. However, in order for a strike to go from start to end pose, we're probably talking about a quarter of a second, maximum. Any more than that, and the time between one button-mash and the next becomes rather frustrating. Players start complaining about combat being 'too slow'. Frankly, anyone who can swish a broadsword 180 degrees in a tenth of a second is probably a steroid inflated freak, but apparently that's what feels 'realistic'.
2) ...it's in the posing
With that in mind you begin to realise that the players actually see more of the end-poses than any other aspect of animation. If your hero lands a blow and finishes up looking like he's had a poo in his pants then nobody is going to be impressed, regardless how much damage it did, and regardless of how swanky the rest of the move was. That last frame of animation is the one that's on screen most of the time, so the character had better look like he knows everyone is watching.
3) Assailants and positioning
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So, how about the assailants? Should they all run at you in a line? Should they try to be tactical and sneak around the back? Should they try and maintain a specific position relative to you? You have to be very careful with all this, or else you risk bandits milling about effectively saying:
"Look, Mr Hero, I'm primary assailant -- I get to stand here, right in front of you so you can thwack me firs... oh, hello. The bugger's moved again. I wish you'd stand sti...aaaaarghsplat."
We opted for a complicated wheel-based affair that's far less interesting than this picture of a cute puppy.
4) Playing (un)fair
If there's more than one assailant in the battle at once, then you have to make sure they play fair, or more accurately, unfair. For example, we had to make our bandits think along these lines:"Don't hit him when someone else is hitting him. It might be a really good tactic lads, but he'll whinge 'There's only one of me.'"
"Don't hide where he can't see you. Yes, I know he's allowed to, but he is the hero and it's his privilege."
"Take plenty of time to attack. Stop, yawn, point to him, hold up a bloody sign saying, 'I'm going to attack you now,' if you have to, but make sure he doesn't start moaning about how unfair everything is; even if he did run into a group of seventy of your bandit mates without looking."
"Oh, and make sure that you're blind. If you can see the player from over 30 meters away, just pretend you didn't, or he'll complain that he wasn't given time to react. Spoilt little bastard. It's OUR lives on the line. Does he care? Well??"
There were many more things we discovered, including the importance of how a creature enters into the fray, how they respond to being hit, etc. However, the most important thing we learned, we learned from the best; or more accurately, from studying and copying every fine beat'em'up and action RPG we could get our hands on.
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Basically:
Every single attack must be covered up with so many big bastard sparkly, spangly effects that the player is too busy having an epileptic fit to see anything else, leaving you free to ignore all the other rules.
Sigh...
