It's time to talk about staying natty - designing beat 'em ups (and other action games) without resorting to balance via stats, meters, cooldowns. Instead relying as much as possible on the "natural" mechanics of the genre (x/y/z movement, frame data, hitbox interactions, enemy states).
If you're designing a bmupemup, you'll probably always be thinking about how to encourage players to use a variety of moves without hard coding any sorta weakness systems or using meters/resources/stats. This is already pretty damn hard. But what makes it harder is the difficulty of decoupling what moves are supposed to be (and appear to be from an observer's perspective) from what they actually are. The genre is full of silent killers - seemingly basic mechanics that we inherited, that complicate the design process massively. The jab and the autocombo are two such silent killers.
The idea is that they are weak, basic moves, something you throw in without thinking much before you build the rest of the moveset. But this far from the truth! Strip away the graphics, and strip away the artificial statistical layer of damage numbers - what are jabs & autocombos? They are moves that let you, on command, put the enemies into a hitstun state, and convert that into a full knockdown. The jabs have very few startup frames, basically no recovery frames & they tend to have decent range. Autocombos tend to require a bit more commitment, but they are still very fast and they are a natural extension of jabs, so they're very safe.
Now think about what beat 'em ups are fundamentally, removing damage from the equation. They're games where you try to safely approach enemies, stun enemies, knock them down, throw and group them. There are some extra states/move properties on top of this, but they will usually be minor variations of what's already there. Jabs make approaches quite safe + they make hitstun/knockdowns easily accessible, and they're great tools for attacking grouped enemies. If you think of it in terms of natural mechanics, they're far from weak - they're some of the most powerful mechanics you have. A jab alone lets you get near-immediate, easy access to basically half of the game's important interactions/properties.
So when balancing a game, jabs have to be treated as extremely powerful. Otherwise you run into problems. Allow players to cancel the autocombo and keep re-jabbing enemies? Now you have infinites. Give jabs long range? Now you can stand in a corner and spam jabs. Make them fast enough? Now you can counter running attacks all sorts of other things. Then you go further and allow players to throw out of an auto-combo, which minimizes the time cost of the autocombo by giving you safety near the end. And you have the absolute abomination that is the ability to throw enemies forward out of your autocombo - now not only are autocombos much safer, but they give you all the properties of a throw and override the only benefit from finishing your autocombo normally which is a forward knockdown.
Well designed games try to fight back against this. Sometimes they do it in good, natural ways like making enemies mobile and evasive, making it harder to land that first jab to begin with. Often they cheat and give enemy attacks iframes/super armor so they stand a better change at hitting you despite your jab's overwhelming strength. Sometimes they make jabs really slow and shitty, as a result encouraging you to use other moves (Streets of Rage 2).
A good little hack for testing this sorta stuff would be to equalize damage between hits and see how their other properties work - are you still using your jump attacks, or do they actually kinda suck ass if you lower the DPS because they have no unique niche and don't feed back into neutral?
I'm hoping to make this a bit of a series of articles because of what I talked about here. Gotta figure out some nice & quick solutions that I myself can use, and hopefully other devs can too without needing to reinvent the wheel.
