Lately a lot of people have been asking me how i know certain things or how i can explain the way certain things work when everybody else seems to be guessing. Honestly it’s pretty simple. It comes down to a matter of confidence.
Not too long ago, i was hanging out at a restaurant with two friends, when one of them brought up a mystery concerning Seth in SF4. He couldn’t figure out why he was randomly getting reversal EX Shoryuken while attempting Yoga Teleport using a single button configured as LP+MP+HP. I told him i’d been running into the same problem and that based on what i’d seen, i believed that certain 3P/3K specials couldn’t be executed using negative edge. We tested it when we got home and it turned out i was right; and he was astonished.
Why, though? I know i’m not any smarter than him. Asking yourself the right question is already half the battle won, so why didn’t he finish the job?
Here it is: The only reason i was able to solve it is because i had more relevant facts than he did. In other words, even though my focus had been on different goals, i tested each obstacle in my path more thoroughly than he had – which led me to more bits and pieces of info to draw from when that same question was presented to me.
Confidence plays a role here. It’s exceedingly rare for anyone to crack a good puzzle without considerable effort. More often than not, your first hunch will fail and so will your second. Don’t let that discourage you. Sooner or later, you’ll come up with an idea which will pan out far enough ahead to give you a promising clue.
It took me a long time to develop this certainty to a general degree. When i first started making videos, the only games i felt confident about were CvS and CvS2. No matter what happened in those worlds, i felt like i could get to the bottom of it and figure it out. There was a tremendous difference between knowing that i could speak the language of CvS2 and being unsure whether i’d ever fully understand advanced ST nuances. It wasn’t until years later that i finally started feeling comfortable with other game engines and combo systems.
Everyone thinks confidence must be earned through time, effort, and understanding. Conventional wisdom says that confidence will come after you become good at something. Now of course you can take that route, but the funny thing is, it’s much easier the other way through. If you simply refuse to take no for an answer, you’ll cut straight to the heart of any matter much quicker than taking the cautious path around.
The question is, how does disappointment affect you? How quickly does it faze you? How much of it can you handle? Trust me, you can learn to handle more. It’s all in your head. If you take one more step before giving up, you’ll learn one more thing – maybe something cool. That’s all there is to it.
Having access to tool-assistance helps too. It’s weird, but i’ve solved quite a few problems without resorting to programmable controllers simply because i knew they were there as a last resort. That level of certainty kept me focused, perhaps longer than i would have otherwise.
Maybe the first idea i came up with was too elaborate. Maybe if i didn’t have programmable controllers, i would stop there, decide that it’s beyond my ability, and leave it for someone else to decipher. But having those methods kept me going, so i kept thinking about it and eventually arrived at a much simpler experiment.
All of this is mental. All of this happened without me ever pressing a button. Having that confidence was the difference between giving up due to a pointless convoluted mess, and continuing until i thought of an elegant solution.
It’s not about being smarter. Sometimes it’s not even about trying harder. It’s about pushing one day longer, because you believe you’re capable of getting wherever you want to go.
So are you saying that becoming an encyclopedia of game engine knowledge is only possible through perseverance? I’d agree with that absolutely, involving yourself with the game over and over again will make you a lot more likely to understand all kinds of quirks and game properties, but I’m just confused as to whether or not confidence is really the right word for that sort of thing.
This is more about what it takes to answer one particular question or overcome some specific hurdle. My point is that it’s a misconception that you need to be an encyclopedia of game engine knowledge to accomplish anything. You’ll reach any reachable goal if you don’t give up. And even reaching for unreachable ones usually yields interesting tangential results.
You just can’t let your confidence be shaken by your first few ideas not working out. That’s when people start doubting themselves and their overall ability/knowledge.
Great piece. I always like articles like these that’s somewhat specific to ST but is actually pretty applicable for everything in life in general.
You just gotta have confidence, but then it’s important to just go and TRY. Works in science (testing a hypothesis), sports (new plays), art (sharing an idea), girls (haha). Can’t let mental block stop you!
Oh, I was gathering the strenght to ask you a question about a very similar case. It happened to me a lot, that in training mode I was getting super instead of ultra with Abel. The problem was, I had the inputs on and so I was sure that I only pressed the three punches once. But I totally forgot ng… Thanks :D
Yeah it’s really weird how that happens. SF4 has a complicated command priority flowchart and sometimes it leads to strange results. Everyone’s saying they should make special moves less lenient because they think it would help precision. But i don’t know if that would help considering how many different overlapping commands there are in the game – especially for the teleport characters.
I’ve talked to a lot of speed runners and taser and there is agreement that the number 1 quality to make a good run is patience. Being really good at a game doesn’t mean anything if you break your tv when you die on the last boss during a speed run. I was talking to andrewg ( a Mario speed runner ) as he was doing his werewolf tas and I swear he started that tas over around 10 time because he found new glitches that he could use on earlier levels. That’s the approach I try take with everything and it has a good success rate.
It’s weird. Source code of the games will explain everything in a short time. But it is out of access. Mame debugger can analyse CPS123 and other emu games.
I do wish fighting games could be open-sourced.
Hm, i don’t think that’s true exactly. Having the code would be a nice resource but most of the things we’re interested in at this stage involve unexpected occurances or even glitches.
Even with the code available, someone would have to ask the right questions, do the research, and follow through. Fighting games are pretty complicated. Most of the time i think it would be easier to test things in-game rather than figuring out how the code would resolve.
Anyway half the fun of this is figuring out ways to figure out how our toy works without breaking it open.
I was reading this story the whole time thinking to myself: “Perseverance? I just went into training mode and did the tele– oh, he’s talking about in general!”
Perseverance may very well be the case and it certainly can be tested when you find yourself disliking what you uncover. I think our desire to break open BlazBlue literally ended up snapping our interest in two regarding the game. Once an option select was discovered that basically let you use your barrier defense and automatically break any throws for a 13-22 frame window as you jumped away… seriously destroyed any wake up game we could muster for all but 3 characters.
What intuitive aptitude stops grasping can make it so difficult to continue paying attention/trying to grasp new things. That’s where I find myself failing at times. Sometimes just basic execution failures drive me insane, especially when I land a combo 10 times in a row, and then stop being able to do it for 30 minutes.
@zero
“Source code of the games will explain everything in a short time.”
Not really, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_halting_problem. When you start getting into glitches and subtleties, all bets are off.
“It’s not about being smarter. Sometimes it’s not even about trying harder. It’s about pushing one day longer, because you believe you’re capable of getting wherever you want to go.”
Haha! Yeah…
I’m pretty much a self-taught programmer. Holding down a job for over 3 years now based solely on that. And it can only be attributed to plain stubbornness, as opposed to natural talent or honed discipline.
Looking back on it, this article (and the one before it) was essentially me failing to explain where ideas come from. It’s an intriguing question, and i’ve heard interesting partial answers to it, but never a complete one. I don’t think it exists. Or if it does, it’s not for us to grasp.
Still fun to try though, in spite of all the failing.