Explaining OFF-SCREEN Enemy Attacks
Vložit
- čas přidán 25. 06. 2024
- This time, we explain how enemy positioning and attack direction work in action games!
(NOTE: Part 7 is pending a long delay, possibly not til 2025 given my work schedule and wanting to work on a different video in the interim.)
This is part 6 of 7 in a long-form analysis of Enemy Combat Design, created for gamers and game developers to learn more about how gameplay is designed in action games.
[As always, to pay fealty to the nascent machine gods that control our meager mortal efforts to connect to others, we supplicate for any signal boosts (likes, shares, subscriptions, etc) on your digital ecosystem of choice.]
Text Essays: signalsandlight.substack.com/
Cohost: cohost.org/SignalsAndLight
Bluesky: signalsandlight.bsky.social
Threads: threads.net/@signalsandlight
Twitter: / signalsandlight
Instagram: / signalsandlight
TikTok: / signalsandlight
MUSIC:
"Solkatt" By William Benckert
"Shrine Battle" from Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom OST
"Back to Business" by William Benckert
"Heikea, Intimidation Crab" from Another Crab's Treasure OST
"Moragia Battle" from Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom OST
"A True Warrior" from Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown OST
"Tiger Tracks" by Lexica
"Grovekeeper Topoda" from Another Crab's Treasure OST
"Fort Slacktide?" from Another Crab's Treasure OST
"Bozz" by William Benckert
VIDEO CLIPS: @RabidRetrospectGames @kadaj187 @GameZard @Typhlosion4President @botw9993 @SourceSpy91 @Shirrako @AFGuidesHD @Videogmz @Gdconf @GitGudScrub @EncryptedDuck @ZanarGaming @Katanalein @AKSTYLEGAMER @glp @Baziklet @SHNHorror @jelome1989 @PLAYGAMES. @walkthroughholic @parmedal2218 @NaveedGamingOG @swdnova1954
(Fair use for non-monetized educational content.)
FULL CITATIONS LIST: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...
[oxihbfa kzbg jvvzvvbs]
00:00:00 - Opening
00:00:34 - Introduction
00:02:03 - P6-A - Enemy Positioning
00:04:03 - P6-B - Action Game Camera Types
00:04:58 - P6-C - Camera-Sensitive Combat
00:06:27 - P6-D - Camera-Partially-Sensitive Combat
00:08:02 - P6-E - Camera-Insensitive Combat
00:11:08 - P6-F - Direction and Level Design
00:12:47 - P6-G - Discussion: Should the Player See What’s Hitting Them?
00:18:35 - Next Time
TOPICS: #GameDev #gamedesign #CombatDesign #VideoEssay #Analysis #Tutorial
GAMES: #EldenRing #GodofWarRagnarök #HyperLightDrifter #AnotherCrabsTreasure #PrinceofPersia #TheLostCrown #GranblueFantasyRelink #SpiderMan2 #SuperMarioWorld #TheLegendofZelda #BreathoftheWild #TearsoftheKingdom #DarkSouls3 #AssassinsCreedOrigins #TheDivision2 #Batman #ArkhamAsylum #Dishonored2 #ALinktothePast #Ori #OriAndTheWillOfTheWisps #Bastion #Bayonetta #DevilMayCry3 #DevilMayCry5 #GodofWar #Doom #DoomEternal #WolfensteintheNewOrder #HorizonForbiddenWest #Returnal #Sekiro #TurboOverkill #DeadSpace #ResidentEvil2 #SpiderMan #ImmortalsFenyxRising #RatchetAndClank #RiftApart #TheLastofUs2 #LiesofP #Nioh #DeathsDoor #Godfall #Deathloop #Uncharted2 #Halo #JediFallenOrder #GhostofTsushima #MonsterHunterWorld #DarkAlliance
As always, in trying to get the channel off the ground, any social media boost is appreciated!
Twitter: twitter.com/SignalsAndLight
Instagram: instagram.com/signalsandlight/
TikTok: tiktok.com/@signalsandlight
Bluesky: signalsandlight.bsky.social
Dude.. this video is way better than a 800subscrier channel.
Your thumbnails, tittles, Description, The actual video content! The editing.. Its all too good.
I struggule so much with all of those things.. Mostly due to a lack of time.. But did you follow any tutorial or reached out to someone to help you out with making your channel so professional?
I need help so much..
Here are some likes and subs..
@SarpSerter , thank you! No specific tutorials or anything I can point you to, unfortunately. I went to undergrad for film and got into shooting and editing a fair amount then, did graphic design a lot between high school and now, decided to go into game dev instead, but gengerally just learned a lot about using creative software tools over the last... 15 years, now? If I ever have a question about how to do something specific, I just look it up, there are definitely tons of tutorials out there for After Effects and Premiere. It just comes down to spending a lot of time doing it, learning from your past work (trust me, I made some stuff when I was 20 I wasn't happy with at all), and persisting. Otherwise I'd say it ended up about 40 hours of editing per video (I'd say it probably averages to like 3-4 hours per minute between cutting footage, adding clips, making graphics, and adding music).
I would say the small thing I learned the most about that I was happy with in these vids was how to make motion graphics templates (MOGRTs) in After Effects for Premiere. All the title cards and whatnot here are MOGRTs that expose a bunch of parameters like text or which specific backgrounds to show and things like that so you don't have to remake a graphic multiple times just to change a few things. I also learned about the scripting language in After Effects for things like controlling the text of game titles sliding in and using math to get the position to work no matter how long the title is. But that sort of stuff just transfered what I learned in game dev, to be honest.
There was a brief time I thought of doing a post mortem video on how I do some stuff, but already not getting enough views at the moment to think about that. 😅
@@signalsandlight I have some experince in after effects and creative cloud tools as an animator but I think I lack more the direction of the script you have for the video and the general idea you create for audience to click your thumbnail.
I am honestly so lost to why your youtube didnt blow up i just watched every video you made.
I appreciate the credit for my clip! Great video keep up the good work!
Bro this series was unbelievably good. There’s almost nothing else out there right now that matches up to the quality of information here. I really appreciate the work that went into this and will be hungrily devouring everything you put out!
A couple tangential thoughts:
1) Air combat games (e.g. Ace Combat) fit into this in an interesting way, in that offscreen attacks are often the norm, but you have radar/missile warning systems as diegetic attack indicators, and you are expected to rely heavily on them.
2) I really like Devil May Cry 3 for giving pretty much every enemy attack a distinctive audio cue. Even though enemies in that game aren't strictly supposed to attack from off-camera, sometimes you pan the camera away just as they start their attack or the enemy might be hard to see amidst everything else that's going on. I actually rely on sound more than visuals to score parries. In general, I think audio cues are underrated for action game attacks. It's been shown that humans respond faster to auditory stimuli than visual.
Good points! I'm super unfamiliar with air combat games, but I think some aspects of off-screen indication are fundamentally inspired by them in a lot of other games that borrow similar concepts. For audio, the games I got hung up on recently are particularly overwhelming with their audio and music design, so they really fall back on other things like UI (or characters just literally shouting at you). I think weirdly a lot of great examples I can recall that have great sound design for clear combat feedback also don't have that many off-screen attacks, but audio can also help manage concurrency, so that's a really good point that I missed! I mentioned audio a bit in the timing video, but there are so many layers to these things.
Top notch content!! Keep going!!
Great video! Thanks for the tag buddy.
Great video, I think the God of War reboot games are a great example here as well. When I was playing GoW 2018 I really wished the franchise had stuck to a top down camera view. I really appreciate how the developers added these little quality of life features to allow the player to remain aware of enemies off screen, my favorite being how your companions would tell you when there were enemies behind you.
Regardless, the camera perspective just felt to me as if it was a poor choice for that kind of game, especially as there were many occasions where you couldn't really position yourself to be able to see all enemies in a fight. While I get that there can be an advantage to not showing all enemies at all times, like making positioning more important, needing to rely on UI- elements so often to dodge off-screen attacks was just pretty annoying and somewhat unreliable to me.
I suppose whether or not you're fine with the new camera in these games mostly comes down to the ration of how much you appreciate having to keep all your enemies in check versus how annoyed you get by attacks frequently coming from off-screen.
I think a really underrated point made in this video is considering how punishing it is to get hit by an attack off screen. It really comes down to the nature of the game, its overall difficulty and consequences for dying.
If I die to an attack coming from off screen in a Souls game where I lose my progress, or a competitive game where I lose my rank, it's going to be much more frustrating than dying in a game with unlimited lives and frequent checkpoints. I think that should really be one of the most important factors when designing how the game deals with off screen attacks.
In a game that is already very difficult or that punishes players for dying, I think it might be better to just take the bayonetta approach and design enemies so they can't attack from off screen. Personally, I would much rather play a game that feels a bit too easy than a game that feels frustrating and unfair.
very well made, keep it up!
If the player's attack direction is tied to camera (like in FPS/TPS games, or nu-GOW, or even your typical hack&slash game that's very reliant on lock-on while tying the camera to it) or camera movement is slow, there's an extra layer of skill to the game that comes with information management. The player has to build their attack plan around it, commit less to offense and know when to tactically reposition to keep different enemies in the view. Although, in more timing/combo-heavy games (like DMC) this might detract from the experience as the positioning element isn't that present in your decision making, your tactics won't change, repositioning due to camera would simply interrupt your flow. In games like Monster Hunter or Soulslikes where positioning IS the flow, managing the view fits right in. It's all about balance, know where your game sits
The video already mentions that having a decently-sized HP bar helps with stray hits, especially when those hits only do damage and not knock you down or whatever. But really, what you want is for enemies to be more predictable. If an enemy has a consistent pattern of attacks and movement with little to no randomness (either RNG or just from chaos of the game with positioning and stuff), then the player can learn to deal with it even without seeing or hearing any attack telegraphs (if you can beat it with the monitor turned off, it's good enough to be placed offscreen). Adding an extra touch of predictable randomness (for the case of pure RNG, make it trigger every couple seconds. For emergent randomness you can get creative) would keep the enemy from getting entirely internalized by a skilled player so they'd still have to stop and reposition to see them.
There's also other tactics that could work consistently, like kiting for melee enemies (they can't attack you if they have to catch up to you), circlestrafing for ranged enemies (if they can't aim where you're going to be, only where you are) or body blocking (enemies hit each other while aiming at you). A smart player can treat the collision from level design and visible enemies (which is what limits these tactics) as a makeshift attack telegraph for offscreen enemies with a creative way of dodging
Great additional thoughts! I think I got a bit caught up more with some of those concepts when I was working on Melee versus Ranged, and I got so focused on specifically camera management on the AI side here that I wasn't necessarily thinking in the frame of mind of how a player can find ways to manage it in spite of a given camera design. I think I took a lot of your points here for granted to a degree, as my frustration in some games is that they make all of those things very hard to accomplish due to the verrrry high complexity of their off-screen enemies.
But a bunch of very good points there, I'll keep some of that in mind when I get to writing Part 7 where I want to synthesize the ideas more than I did across these first six. Learned a lot just in the structure of how to write this sort of thing after working on this series, I think in the future I'd treat more of what I wrote here as pieces to tie to more concrete examples rather than just describing the concept and letting the video clips do all the work for me without providing context on more of them.
good work, im making a game and want to learn more about game design, since i can only code and make sprites
I call it bad game design and compromising