donkey kong

I play a lot of games, and I do pretty well in bracket and on the leaderboards; I'm at the top of the leaderboard for a number of games on Fightcade in a lot of genres, but particularly puzzle games. However, I often chafe at being called a strong player or having commentary or spectators expect me to do well by virtue of showing up.

Usually those conversations begin and end with the amount that I play or the breadth of titles I've played, which frustrates me because I actually don't have that much time invested in a lot of them, and many of them I've picked up in the past yearish. I'm also missing a lot of legacy skills that players with much more invested tend to have, like piece finesse (Specifically DASing to a wall and setting up rotations that way)

So I thought I'd share the specific thoughts and techniques I use to improve:

1. Replay review: It's a must that you record footage of yourself and others playing and review it. Fightcade does this for you automagically but for other games you should be recording replays as needed. It's important that you be able to slow down or sometimes pause footage so you can identify the specific choices players are making. If you play fighting games already, chances are you know to do this.

   You should also identify situations: what are sequences that players return to on offense and defense? What board states are players trying to construct that accomodate different piece queues? What could an opponent do to interrupt or interact with those strong positions while exposing themselves to as little risk as possible?

2. Using your imagination: Now that you've exposed yourself to the game without playing it, without a time crunch, without your opponent pressuring you, it's important to review the situations you identified in play as either problematic or advantageous, and then experimenting with different piece queues. How will you use this situation, how will you get into it, or out of it, etc etc. I used to just...think about it, when I'm doing dishes or whatever, or by playing around in Photoshop, but nowadays I use Fumen to explore boards. It's designed specifically for Tetris and has features along those lines but I've used it for studying color matching games and basically everything else: https://harddrop.com/fumen/

   Here's an example of a 6 chain using columns rules as illustrated in Fumen:

   Instead of simply looking at chain forms other people have made in a tutorial, instead, look at footage and see how other people do it, and then construct chains for yourself in this environment where you're free to break rules or get exactly the pieces you want. Extending this idea further, review footage and record the piece queue. From that piece queue, construct chains in Fumen, on a notepad, whatever, without the pressures of play. This can really help

3. Building Familiarity: One of the first things new players tend to notice about their peers is that they play pretty quick, and then announce that they could never play at that speed. Playing fast is not usually a matter of control or dexterity but reflects the speed at which players make Decisions. When you build familiarity, it's to make sure you can manipulate the pieces quickly (and accurately), so when you are ready to make decisions, it's as simple as holding down.

   I recommend playing against the CPU or the solo arcade modes for games so that way you can develop a sense of comfort and understanding of the controls and the kinds of situations your own play can put you in. This doesn't take as long as you might think, and generally as you get more experienced, this phase of development will get shorter and shorter. Every time you acquire a new finesse idea, or a particular build order, you should practice it in a controlled environment so you don't have to spend energy on the build or trick; you want to spend energy on decisions not on performing. Now that you can play a little bit faster you'll need to start:

4. Slowing down: This is at times controversial but I stand by it: You should only play as fast as your opponent forces you to play. The consequences of mistakes in the genres I play are often worse than what your opponent can do to you. Moreover, by slowing down your play: it gives you an opportunity to look at your opponent's board and interact with them; it also lets you spend some time to compare your board against the ones you remember from your vod review; you can consider the pieces in your piece queue and how you want to use them. In other words, by slowing down you can spend less time choosing to react and spending time to make decisions to interact. Playing quickly Because You Can or Because That's What You Do or Because You're Scared is not going to improve your results.

5. It's Okay To Struggle When You're Learning: In fact, if you're never outside of your comfort zone, you probably won't grow. So you should seek out stronger opponents, and get yourself into situations you don't always know the answer to. By feeding these games back into the top of the list, you'll have a pretty straightforward method for learning. That said:

6. Know When To Take A Break: If it sucks, hit da bricks.

   If you can't find any fun in what you're doing, or you're getting too irritated, or sparring isn't going how you planned, then do something else. If what you're doing sucks and you hate it, why are you even doing it? Even if you can answer that question, if what you're doing sucks and you hate it, how are you going to motivate yourself to work on it tomorrow? Personally, I've found that my progress and retention starts falling off fast, and falls off a cliff if I'm even slightly cranky. Also hard work is for suckers; this method is for fun-havers ONLY.

And that is it baybeeeeee. Completing the first few steps takes only a few sittings, and step 4 is really a "review" step that takes only a few matches to work out. Sometimes this process may be longer or shorter because some aspect of the game is very new to you, or maybe there's a specific weakness in your control that a given game really makes obvious. You should take stock of how much time you want to invest, and then shape what you practice and study to best accomodate what you want to do.

I'm gonna follow up on this with examples from games in the future, because these games are often pretty poorly documented...Once upon a time I used to post about this shit on Twitter in lengthy threads but let's be real: that sucks to read!!! And Write!! I ain't doin' it anymore!!!!!!!!!!

I'd put more pictures in here to illustrate some of these concepts but the finer points of embedding images on here without it looking doofy is still new to me and I'd rather save some of those ideas for if/when I write about some games in detail. Peace