Category Archives: Technical

Community Combo Development

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When i got on stage at Evo, jchensor asked how i have time to write weekly strategy articles, manage Strategy Corner features on SRK, and still find enough material for combo videos. My answer was, “It’s not just me.” I’d like to explain that briefly.

I always tell people that i would rather explore any decent game with massive community support, over a game i absolutely love which nobody plays. There’s a simple reason for that: Everything i can find on my own in two years, a dedicated community like Shoryuken.com could find within three months.

The later stages of a fighting game’s evolution are what fascinate me, personally. I’ve never been a big fan of the surface-level week-one stuff. Obviously someone has to do it, but it’s not a particularly sophisticated phase when all is said and done.

In fact, i waited fifteen months after SF4 was released to begin working on combos for that game. By then all the basics were well-established, giving me the opportunity to dive right into the deep end of the pool. It would’ve taken three years to reach that point on my own.

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Where Do Combo Videos Fit In?

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Last month, i said that combo videos and combos in general comprise a relatively small piece of the complete fighting game puzzle. How exactly do they factor into the overall picture?

Tactically speaking, executing a combo is a lot like finishing a traditional three-point play in basketball. As a reward for driving past a perimiter defender and baiting an interior defensive mistake, the player is granted an additional free throw after the made basket. The two primary components of free throw shooting are technical ability and maintaining composure.

Can free throws decide games? Absolutely. Does anyone consider free throws a core strategic aspect of the game? No. They serve a clear purpose, but there’s much more to the game on a fundamental level: spacing, timing, footwork, adaptation, defense, etc.

In fighting games, landing a combo involves recognizing an opportunity, evaluating damage options, having the technical ability to perform the combo, and maintaining enough composure to pull it off under pressure. Anyone who drops a combo during tournament play should absolutely be penalized for failing to complete a simple task that they can ice ninety-nine times out of a hundred in practice. That’s a perfectly valid part of the game.

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Combo Design Pathways

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The initial spark is always accidental. You fire up Training Mode, you pick a character, you mess around, you try something on a whim, and it happens to work. Now your real creative task is surrounding that discovery with the right pieces to refine it into something special. Choosing the right direction is the single most important step to creating a good combo. Here’s a basic roadmap of the most prominent routes.

    Build Around an Element
The direct approach is starting with one substantial breakthrough, then expanding the combo in both directions. Let’s say you notice SF4 Akuma’s c.MK xx HK Tatsumaki Zankukyaku landing in a strange manner that allows him to follow up. What’s the most impressive combo you can construct atop that foundation? Since Akuma requires lots of meter for extended juggles, how about arranging a five-bar combo and saving most of it for the end?

    Connect Multiple Elements
A slightly more complicated method is taking two or more such pieces and tying them together. The more you add, the more challenging it becomes – and thereby more rigid. Sometimes you’re left with only one viable path from one point to the next. Of course, it depends on the game engine. For instance the Versus series is considerably more accommodating than the oldschool SF2 series in this regard.

    Follow Through on a Unique Setup
Once in a while, an innovative setup can be intriguing enough on its own to warrant a combo demonstration. It’s usually impossible to add anything extra prior to such elaborate provisions, so you can only build forward in these cases. The distinct benefits provided by each individual setup tend to dictate their resultant combos. Try to utilize every advantage gained.

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The Role of Damage Scaling

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Every time i release a new combo video, especially for SF4 or SSF4, someone comes along to declare that “damage scaling makes it worthless.” I have a number of objections to that claim. First, damage scaling makes sense. Second, damage scaling only matters in combo videos when the author says it matters. Third, combo videos and combos in general are a relatively small piece of the complete fighting game puzzle.

Balancing a dynamic combo system is extremely difficult, partly because players demand substantial character variety. I’d be surprised if even 1% of the damage scaling complainers have ever tried drawing up their own hypothetical combo framework as a thought experiment.

We can all agree that practical touch-of-death combos are generally detrimental to game balance. There need to be fair limits on how badly a single minor mistake can punished. The price of whiffing c.MK should not equal the penalty for whiffing an ultra. Furthermore, characters possessing the best mobility and the most offensive mixups probably shouldn’t have the highest damage potential.

How are such considerations governed without confining players to pre-programmed combos? SF4’s solution is a sharp reduction scale which magnifies the first four or five hits, then blurs out the remainder. This affords designers and testers the luxury of managing a reasonable subset of possible sequences while holding the rest to a combined average of less damage than one hard attack. Thus it becomes much easier to identify which characters can get ahead of the curve, then adjust their damage values and frame data accordingly.

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SF4 Combo System Exploration, Part 3

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It’s been a while since the last one, so here are some more random notes i’ve gathered while working on combo videos and the like.

Akuma’s air Hurricane Kick seems to be a one-time juggle setup, even if it only hits once. You can test this with a lvl3 Focus Attack against Dhalsim’s j.LP, followed by a rising HK air Hurricane Kick. The first hit connects, but the second hit whiffs. If you trade Akuma’s lvl3 Focus Attack against Dhalsim j.LP, you’ll have enough time to connect a descending HK air Hurricane Kick, so that it only hits once. Following up with an HP Dragon Punch only juggles twice.

It’s a good bet that Akuma’s LK Hurricane Kick works the same way, but it’s difficult to test because it has so much recovery time. It’s hard to tell if follow-up attempts are passing through the opponent or simply aren’t connecting fast enough. The problem is LK Hurricane Kick seems to launch opponents much higher when it connects on the ground as opposed to when it connects during a juggle.

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