I know it’s a lot to ask, but i really think game developers should keep combo video makers in mind when designing Training Mode options. Fighting games receive tons of exposure through combo videos. From a marketing perspective, it pays to make our lives a little easier. Here are a few Training Mode suggestions that i would like to see in future fighting games.
Stage Select
This is a no-brainer, but some games (such as SSF4) still don’t have it. Unless you want pages upon pages of Training Mode screenshots in u2b search results, let us choose a different background. Otherwise you’re forcing us to represent your game by its blandest stage.
Dummy Status Options
In addition to standardized dummy actions (stand/crouch/jump/record/playback/human/CPU), we also need basic status settings such as counterhit, dizzy control, and defensive options. Then if it’s possible to set the dummy to perform a specific move at every reversal opportunity, many players would find that helpful. For example, sometimes we want the opponent to perform a Dragon Punch or throw as they come out of hit stun or block stun.
Dummy Record / Playback
Obviously the capability to record and play back a sequence of commands with the dummy character is extremely convenient. Most games allow ten seconds of recording time, and that’s fine. Changing characters in SF4 doesn’t erase the recording, which is actually very useful for testing a combo against multiple opponents. You simply record the combo with the dummy, and swap characters until you find the ideal punching bag.
Meter Behavior
Most fighting games have four settings for controlling super meter: normal, max start, refill, and infinite. Every single one of these options is important, for different reasons. However, it’s a little annoying having to reset the meter for combo recording purposes when we don’t want it to refill automatically during the combo. We basically have to pause the game, set it to infinite, unpause, repause, set it to normal, and unpause – every single time we attempt the combo. Surely this can be assigned to one button?
Lifebar Behavior
Constantly refilling lifebars make it difficult to test lifebar-based damage scaling and other such factors. It would be nice to decide whether or not lifebars will refill, and also whether draining the opponent’s lifebar will cause KO.
Color-Coded Status Warnings
If the game system has combo escape mechanisms such as air recovery and combo breakers, there needs to be some kind of clear visual indicator for when a combo becomes escapable. There’s nothing more aggravating than uncertainty over whether or not a combo is guaranteed. As soon as the combo becomes escapable, please change the combo counter to a different color! Likewise with counterhits, please display the counterhit message in a different color when the Training Mode counterhit setting is enabled, so we can distinguish natural counterhits from artificially generated ones.
Basic Data / Full Data / Input Display
Most fighting games have an option to enable input display and combo/damage data. These are very helpful for discussing strategy and making tutorial videos. Unfortunately with many HD games, it’s difficult to make out those tiny numbers when a video gets posted on flash video sites such as u2b. I recommend two data display settings: basic combo/damage/stun info with large fonts and full data info with literally everything you can think of.
Hitbox Display
Revealing hitboxes is a tricky issue because obviously it goes into how much of the underlying game engine the developer is willing to disclose. I’ll just say that if you include a hitbox viewer in Training Mode, players will be grateful. Although if you’re making a brand new game, it might be wise to save hitbox display for the upgrade/sequel.
Save State / Load State
If you’ve ever used an emulator before, you don’t need me to tell you that saving and loading states is one of the coolest features any player could possibly ask for. You wouldn’t even need 100% perfect save state support. Just keep track of basic essentials: meter levels, lifebar levels, stage position, status effects such as power-ups and Taunt bonuses, obtaining/losing weapons, and so on. Let us establish all that stuff manually and save the state via the pause menu. Then reload everything whenever we press Select. Just having that ability at our fingertips would take care of 99% of what we need to test combos and whatever else. It’s impossible to overstate how much time this feature would save us!
Well, that’s about everything i can think of at the moment. Implementing these suggestions in any game’s Training Mode will earn continued support from combovid makers. And it goes without saying that we need a way to silence background music without muting sound effects, for basic video editing purposes.
frame advance
record/playback inputs to/from a file
dizzy options (no dizzy/constant dizzy/next hit dizzy)
Honestly:
Dummy recording playback on button push instead of looping.
Record everything by default is just a good idea.
In addition to record and playback, also allow sharing of inputs (this is the age of the internets).
It’s not really a combo vid thing per se, but make your own trial and make your own input tutorial tools would be nice if the products are shareable. (Think Chun combo challenge.)
I think ‘max start’ meter should be changed to ‘refill on pause’.
i just use the training mode in ssf4 to get better at the game, and i have run into these problems myself. in particular the damage scaling should be optional, waiting for their health to refill before you can pull off another combo is tedious. just add an option to make them stay at full health. the hit boxes would also be nice. you can look at them online anyway, why not just show them? while training mode is already a great tool, adding even more depth to it wouldnt be that hard and it would just make it oh so much better.
oh. and two player training mode online would be nice…
Remember giving too much capability couldlead to people manipulating the privelages in to larger combos than they are capable of performing. (For example performing a stun combo & save-stating during the stun, then completing the second half) That said that’s only minor.
One thing that gripes me with Refill in SSFIV is that it refills mid combo, i personally think it should only refill after a combo has ended. (Which surely wouldn’t be to hard to implement)
As a developer, I’ll try to remember this. Some of these are easy, others very hard (save states are hard to save and load instantly).
@Dragonglove
I’d think that save states (instant or otherwise) are really dependent on some design decisions, and can be relatively simple for some designs.
The one thing I would really want (besides maybe ~30 seconds of record time, or 43 seconds, which is around Balrog’s Final TAP charge time…Just on principle, when the recording time is shorter than the time needed to complete a move, I’m like :|) is an easier way to switch from record/playback etc. CvS2 has it under Dummy Options, then a few rows down, whereas I feel that if you’re already recording, the “reset recording” or “switch to playback” type options should be in the front page of options.
Dragonglove: Even if it’s not instant, like if it takes a second to load, that’s still better than repeatedly establishing everything manually – especially when we need a specific meter amount or lifebar level or character position/spacing. Like i said, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but players will appreciate anything you can give us.
onreload: Balrog’s Final TAP is too much of a special case. I wouldn’t go through that much trouble just for one move, especially when that solution still isn’t convenient. No matter what you do, waiting a minute per attempt sucks. If it’s actually difficult to implement recording for longer than 10 seconds, i wouldn’t worry about changing it just for one move.
Anyway we can come up with more elegant solutions than that. One possibility is including it in the save state somehow, where you hold the buttons for 45 seconds, then press pause to save the state. Then whenever you hold the buttons and press Select, it loads with that much charge stored up. Same would apply to Juri’s stored fireballs, etc.
Another solution is character-specific options like in Guilty Gear and BlazBlue. Mike Z mentioned this to me and i think it would work great. You could have a menu option where you set the level of Balrog’s TAP, so that he always does the same count every time.
But it really depends on how much of this kind of stuff you have in your game. If it’s just one or two moves, it’s probably not worth it – especially if other features end up getting cut in the process.
being able to save multiple recorded inputs to play back would be cool. like, select playback 1, playback 2, playback 3, or be able to name them yourself to avoid confusion. use different ones to work on different things, have one for working on anti airing, one for juggling or whatever. i guess having multiple save states to load would accomplish the same thing tho?
@demonoidpancake
Savestates and recordings are different. It would be good to have lots of both available.
But I think a bigger issue here is the developers have no incentive to make it easier to do complicated combos. If training mode is a combo maker’s dream lab, those elaborate combos will be found sooner, and some of them will be usable in matches, and then they have to deal with rebalancing the game or negative hype or whatever.
By making life difficult for combo makers, they try to delay all that until after the game’s effective market life has ended. Combo makers are too small a part of the market for them to care about, especially now when games that don’t ship a bazillion units on opening week are considered a failure. So, don’t expect mainstream developers to listen.
They have plenty of incentive. How many millions of combined views have SF4 and SSF4 combo videos gotten? You can’t tell me that doesn’t affect sales, or get people hyped up to play the game (and buy costumes and accessories and whatnot).
I can understand if they’re shy about having their system flaws exposed, but crappy Training Mode isn’t going to stop us. If anything, it’s only going to make us resent the game and think negatively – trying to make the game look dumb instead of cool.
Anyway it’s not like i’m asking for a thousand revolutionary features. Everything i listed (except save states) has been done at least once by major developers. And even save states – Warcraft and Diablo had those!
All i’m saying is that it pays to think of Training Mode from a marketing perspective and give players the tools they’ll need to make good-looking viral advertisements for the game. Everyone who makes combo videos is concerned about aesthetics, but our time and resources are limited. Meeting us half-way would be a good idea for any image-conscious developer.
i’m actually working on a fighting game and i’m going to try to include the majority of these features.
I like how Virtua Fighter 5R has replays with +/- frames on hit and block. Adding that to the hud in training mode would be great for figuring out combos and safe blockstrings.
The sad thing is, nearly everything is already present in training modes, just not all for the same game. If you could combine (excuse my 3d bias)
– VF5’s frame data and command display
– Soul Calibur BD’s move recording (where it actually waits until you press something so your moves come out on frame 0, including for playback after an action = awesome)
– VF4’s position save, option select save etc.
– Tekken’s hit analysis
– Tekken Tag’s Unknown (= all character’s available randomly in practice mode without having to go back to character select, just press R3 to cycle through them)
– Position reset
– Blazblue’s character specific tweaks
you would have pretty much perfection.
Add to that a record and upload function, and you’d be in best-ever territory.
The truth however is (and Harada is on record for saying this) that there is very little interest from higher up in putting any effort into training mode. The Tekken 6 training mode debacle is testament to this.
BlazBlue had a few options, yeah Maj, I remember thinking about that for Final TAP – at first I didn’t want to suggest it since it can lead to training-mode-only combos, but hey – there’s always room for those anyhow. The other thing is that we can’t forget about the IDIOTIC input for El Fuerte’s EX Quesadilla Bomb – in Vanilla it’s 8 seconds of charge time. I mean, countering/comboing against Final (or higher-level) TAPs isn’t that common, but what if EX Quesadilla Bomb was more of a viable move? (I guess it wouldn’t have 8 seconds of charge time…)
…but that is for the yet-to-be-written article by yours truly, entitled “Stupid Inputs.” I swear, if there was ever an onReload stove, it would consist of only four backburners. Nothing actually cooking :D
After reading this, I think I should mention that 3SO does have a Save State / Load State feature in the Standard Training mode, so maybe someone at Iron Galaxy read this post during development. Although parry training (and therefore, dummy recording) is still separate from normal training like all other (?) console ports of 3S.
While I’m at it, all this talk of combo vids makes me want to make one. I was thinking about making one for 3rd Strike, but I haven’t the slightest idea of where to start and I’m not one for execution. Just thinking out loud, really LOL.
Basically, you have to buy a capture card or some other method of getting footage onto your computer. Then you gotta record combos. Then you gotta edit the clips into something presentable, and you’re done.
None of it is all that hard to do, but it’s all very time-consuming. Good luck!
Thanks for heading, Maj. It seems simpler than I thought it was. I’m gonna go ping pong some ideas.