boghog

Boghog

@boghog

Gamedev

Hi, I'm a game dev interested in all sorts of action games but primarily shmups and beat 'em ups right now.

Working on Armed Decobot, beat 'em up/shmup hybrid atm. Was the game designer on Gunvein & Mechanical Star Astra (on hold).

This is my blog, a low-stakes space where I can sort out messy thoughts without worrying too much about verifying anything. You shouldn't trust me about statistical claims or even specific examples, in fact don't trust me about anything, take it in and think for yourself 😎

Most posts are general but if I'm posting about something, it probably relates to my own gamedev in one way or another.

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boghog
@boghog

Bmups - Proximity-based orbit size

There's a big problem with beat 'em ups, particularly 3D ones, which have big arenas. Especially if they have fast player movement. The way enemies circle the player is extremely uneven - they spread out effectively at close range, but can be kited & clumped up just by moving away. This rewards backwards movement - you wanna get them together into one nice big group and then move forward and crush them all to minimize danger. Or lure them to you.

IMO, ideally, you want there to be a bit more symmetry between long range & short range movement to preserve the dynamics of enemy behavior. So I think what games can do is simply increase/shrink the orbit enemies circle based on the distance between the player & enemy. So instead of clumping up at distance, they will spread out and really cover the arena, potentially making things even more dangerous than if the player was closer. Then as they get closer, things tighten up. It has them spread out more even in their aggressive mode and I think it's a fairly simple solution. The only problem is preventing them from getting stuck on walls cause the orbit's too huge.

This is an idea I had while thinking about bmup movement. I won't be able to use it for a looong ass time cause Decobot doesn't really benefit from this, so I'm throwing it out there. Maybe someone will find this useful.

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in reply to @boghog's post:

Celialicious
@Celialicious

I think something clever that DMC4 SE did was make it so that your character speeds up faster when they're out of combat. Elden Ring ignores the stamina bar when you're out of combat.

I think this is a clever way of adjusting for whether the player is in close quarters with a single enemy or not.

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boghog
@boghog

Right, and stuff like Fight N Rage handles it from the other side as well where a bunch of enemies, when aggro'd, will seemingly scale their movement speed based on distance to you so they'll close into mid range really fast and then move normally from there. A nice way to make combat more uniform across distances, tho it's a lot harder to implement in 3D cause you'd need less abstract walking/running animations (or I guess just explicit running states)

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buddysnatcher
@buddysnatcher

the large orbit messing up with walls around i can see being a big problem, also take into account elevation and various geometry + the uneven jagged shape of most levels

since the fatty headbutt usually messes me up when trying to herd enemies ig giving enemies situational gap closers and leaping attacks could work, something like the hunters' leap from bio1 or ff poison ivy flips but from range, attacks that arent hard to dodge but end up putting the enemy behind the player.. the tag team jump attack the basic goons in god hand do is also kinda like this ig.. tho all this adapted to longer range might mess up even more badly than the large orbits

a few posts ago i joked about the elegant ng2 solution of exploding the player, but i get how implementing stuff like blood cultist dynamite needs to be compensated with stronger player movement, which in turn errodes the beat em up dynamics and even sort of duplicates the long range herding problem in close quarters - like leaping from side to side of the screen in avp and guardians.. not to mention enemies gleefully shooting projectiles through their buddies you're fighting in close range. tbh i myself quite like haha funny explosive spam as blood and ng2 are two of my favorite games but generally this specific aspect of both games is quite controversial to say the least.

the simplest solution to me is meta elements, scoring ofc but also diegetic timer mechanics like vampiric life drain in shinobi and others, tho at that point you're just avoiding the problem entirely

i would like to see a 3d beat em up which keeps the snowballing aspect without introducing tons of its own problems but i dunno, its not like anybody really cares, capcom probably isnt gonna give okamoto the gng resurrection treat meant to make the best game ever anytime soon

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boghog
@boghog

Yeah I think what you'd need to do in games with complex level geometry (& honestly even simple geometry) is split up it into 3 phases - phase 1 the enemy gets the x/y/z coordinates, phase 2 it adjusts the x/y/z coordinates to move them away from walls and what not (maybe even using arena center as a point to move closer to?), and phase 3 would be regular movement code/pathfinding. In practice this is probably a fucking nightmare

For gap closers idk, part of why I like bmup enemy movement is cause of how continuous it tends to be where enemies will often react to your adjustments on the fly and reposition whereas gap closers are static high commitment states. At that point I think just speeding them the fuck up when they're far away might do the trick but then good luck actually animating it and making it make sense (& the need for less abstract animations I think holds 3D bmups back a lot)

I def like the NG2 shuriken spam, esp since it avoids the usual hitscan problem, but really we all know the real solution to the problem :
perfect CAG

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