First playtest

Since last time, I have thought quite a lot about the combos, and how I want them managed. The points that seemed crucial to me are:

• They should be handled in a different way from the usual fighting (in this case, there is a phase dedicated to the combos, outside of the normal fight). This will give them their special flavor, and highlight how they are different from the normal fighting process.
  
• Introduce a "progressive difficulty". The longer (and more powerful) the combo is to be, the more difficult it must be to pull off. The hard step here is to make sure that this difficulty is not too much luck-based, which could be very frustrating.
  

With this in mind, and the janken relationship of moves found in Yomi, I have built a first set of basic rules for the game, as well as a first prototype.

And today was the first playtest with a real partner. Talking about an opponent at this step would be presumptuous, as this first playthrough was mostly about figuring out which parts of the rules made sense, which concepts were worth keeping, and so on.

The first problem there is with the game today is the symmetry. Indeed, the game regularly (beginning of the game and after each combo phase, mainly) goes into a state were the situation is completely symmetrical. All moves have equal probabilities of success and equal profits, so the choice becomes totally random.

The second issue was the lack of strategical choices. The choice of the next move is indeed influenced only by the previous move, and by what I want to do as a next move. But it stops there. There is no global orientation of the moves (at least in the normal fighting phase - the combo phase is a bit more interesting to this respect).

So the next step will be to make some adjustments. I think I will get rid of the starter moves, and rather offer the player the possibility to pay some extra resources to start a combo following an attack or a throw. This way, she will be more likely to gather the resources needed to fire the combo, and will have an objective.
And in a similar way, the opponent should be able to take resources from you, to incite players to start combos soon after they have the ability too.


So quite a few things to change before the next playtest.

Stop making sense

I have shamefully taken the title of a couple of articles found on the Internet that tackles the question of sense and realism in videos games, and that have helped me on my particular issue.

From the beginning, I was trying to wright my fighting system as a reflection of real-life boxing or martial arts. And this has been very helpful for me to uncover ways in which I wanted to go, for instance on how to chain combos (in the real world, you give a punch, and your body is pushing forward. It is thus easier to chain with another punch (the one-two) than with a backkick for instance).

However, it has implicitely set boundaries to my imagination. Since then, I had been trying to fit every move in this "moving forward", "unbalanced", etc. framework, while it should have been only a means to help me figure out what I wanted to do.

A friend of mine helped me find fighting board or card games, to look at how they are built. Two of them caught my eye:

• The Universal Fighting System, and
  
• the Yomi card game
  

I have learnt a lot, and had quite a few ideas, simply by reading the rules and reviews of these games. The important point here is that they do not sacrifice gameplay for realism. I have now taking my basic concepts ("forward moving", "balanced", "unbalanced", etc.) and abstracted them (I am using resources like "fire", "wind", etc.). This allows me to simply create fun moves, or moves that would go well with each other, without trying to stick to a realistic representation of a fight (which no one really cares about). Reading these games have given me quite a few ideas though, and I am in the process of changing some parts of how the fight should be run. I have a few basic ideas for the general moves, but I want now to focus on a big part of every fighting system: the combos.
And hopefully, this will also affect how standard moves are dealt with, so I will likely need to review my whole system soon.