Interactive Tutorial Mode Design Proposal

For newcomers to the genre, learning how to play fighting games involves a ton of failure and very little guidance or encouragement. Traditionally, every version of Street Fighter has presupposed a commitment from the player to learn the game at any cost. In all these years, fighting games have yet to make a serious effort to meet new players halfway.

SSF2 Guile normal far standing attacksCompared to a first-person shooter like Counter-Strike, there’s almost nothing intuitive about Street Fighter at first glance. What’s the strongest attack? What’s the fastest move? How do you block throws? How do fireballs work? How is super meter used? What does offensive crouch do?

How do you know when to use which button? There’s no clear-cut answer to that question. Their names don’t mean anything! Guile’s standing roundhouse kick serves a completely different purpose in SSF2 than the same exact button for Bison. Guile’s far s.HK is reactionary anti-air defense, whereas Bison’s far s.HK is an offensive mid-range ground poke.

Sadly, new players aren’t even told that the button layout isn’t meant to be organized by purpose or usefulness. At the very least, they deserve to be shown how to sort attacks into basic functional categories: pokes, anti-airs, knockdowns, overheads, reversals, etc.

What’s the best way to accomplish this? Mini-games! It’s really not that difficult to come up with fun little missions which spotlight individual skills or concepts. Everyone enjoys smashing the car in SF2 and parrying basketballs in SF3 – even people who don’t play fighters.

SSF2 M.Bison normal far standing attacksI don’t think console fighting games need an “Arcade Mode” anymore. It’s basically there out of tradition, but moreso due to laziness. Replace that with a mode that actually teaches how to play any character in the game.

Stage 1: The player must break a steady stream of barrels rolling on the ground at regular speed. All they need to do is find an attack that hits the right space and time it properly. Missed barrels should hit the character without causing knockdown, because nobody would enjoy getting knocked down all the time.

There’s always an “X/10” type of counter on the screen to show the player’s progress. If two minutes go by without any progress, a text box pops up to give the player some tips. The interval gradually increases so as not to become annoying: 2 mins, 5 mins, 12 mins, etc.

Stage 2: Next we make the barrels fall from the sky, so the player has to find reliable anti-air. Breaking 10 falling barrels will help players get used to the timing and spacing of the attack.

Stage 3: Now we randomize the barrel angles, forcing the player to react high or low. With each broken barrel, the rhythm becomes increasingly unpredictable.

Stage 4: Finally we introduce glowing barrels and tell the player that they must be broken with special moves. Of course we’d list the character’s special moves in the same text box, and keep the barrels rolling really slowly so there’s plenty of time for the player to react.

We only need around five of these because we don’t want anyone to get stuck on this part of the game. The only goal is to get the player to recognize special moves as a viable tool.

ComboVid.com - Fighting Game Combos, Tutorials, Matches, Screenshots, and Strategy

Stage 5: Once that’s overwith, we make the player face off against a cyborg/dummy. We only need to design one extra character for this – not too much work. Right off the bat, make the dummy super-defensive.

Basically it moves around but it blocks everything. Now the player has to figure out how to beat blocking, which requires either special moves for block damage or learning to throw.

In Ryu’s case, the dummy usually blocks fireballs but sometimes jumps over them. Against Hurricane Kick, the dummy blocks half the time and ducks the other half of the time, but Ryu usually escapes without harm. If the player tries a Dragon Punch, Ryu almost always gets hit when he lands.

This exercise teaches players the value of throws while also giving them an idea of the risks associated with attempting specials. After all, special moves are typically the slowest attacks in any character’s arsenal.

Stage 6: Once the defensive dummy is dead, we introduce a more offensive dummy – one that’s very, very jumpy. The goal is to use anti-air attacks. The dummy will walk back/forward until it establishes the standard jumping range, then repeatedly attempt air attacks. The player will be forced into some experimentation to find which anti-air attacks have the best priority and the highest success rate. Again the objective is to kill the dummy.

Stage 7: The next step is to teach the player how to block. Instead of infinite vitality/time, the round starts with 10 seconds on the clock, the player has 90% life and the dummy has 10% life – but the dummy is super-reactive, like SFA3 CPU Akuma when he walks towards you.

Any button the player touches, they get punished. Essentially the goal is to survive and all they have to do is block. Maybe we can make this even more symbolic by having the dummy glowing with electricity – so that if you attack it, you get electrocuted outright. That’ll leave the dummy totally free to attack with jump-ins, which will force the player to block high/low. It’s still not too difficult because the player will have to lose 80% life in order to be defeated.

Stage 8: Next up, we teach keep-away. Give the dummy a grappler stance and make it constantly walk forward. It very rarely attacks, but it always throws whenever it gets within SPD range. So the goal is to use long-range pokes to keep it away. Of course if you mistime the attack and whiff, you get thrown – thus it teaches timing as well. Once the dummy is low on health, it kind of almost starts to play footsies. Instead of holding forward, it walks back and forth so it gets a little tricky to land that final hit.
SSF2 Fei Long breaking bonus stage barrels
And so on, and so forth. We might go back to the barrel stages and teach players to do cancels. Basically roll out one regular barrel followed closely by a special barrel, so executing normal move xx special move is the only way to break both. There are limitless creative teaching opportunities to be explored here.

After each level, we might display a congratulatory screen and sneakily play a pre-recorded video of expert-level highlights on that stage. For example with the jumping dummy, we can show Ryu walking forward slightly to anti-air with standing roundhouse; walking under the opponent and throwing; going for air-to-air jumping roundhouse; and landing a deep Shoryuken for heavy damage. Essentially we’re forcing the player to think for themselves so it sticks, and then showing them how it’s really done so it clicks.

Eventually the player works their way through the dummy sessions and the game declares that they’re ready to face their rival. That’s when they play against a real SF character with no limitations. Once they win, they unlock an achievement and maybe some cool artwork. It can even unlock Arcade Mode if someone insists on including it in the package.

I think this would go a long way toward making “hardcore” fighting games accessible to casual gamers, because it’ll highlight the puzzle-solving aspects of Street Fighter. Most people never think to think of Street Fighter as a puzzle game – but that crucial step must be taken long before the stylish aspects or the mindgames ever come into view.

29 thoughts on “Interactive Tutorial Mode Design Proposal

  1. Maj Post author

    To elaborate on the setting a little, i was thinking maybe it would annoy veterans to have to get through a basic tutorial in order to unlock Arcade Mode. Well, Versus Mode and Training Mode should both be available by default. Also, the tutorial mode – let’s call it “Battle Dojo” or something – could start with a match against the player’s rival.

    For example if you pick Ryu, you immediately go up against maximum AI difficulty Ken. If you win, you get a message congratulating you for knowing what’s up, and Arcade Mode (which we can call “Tournament Mode” or “Story Mode” or whatever) is immediately unlocked. If you lose, then you go through the whole tutorial sequence and the final fight is a rematch on medium AI difficulty. Kinda meet the rookie players half-way, y’know?

    That setup would be more versatile – plus losing up front gives people a tangible goal to help them push through the tutorial parts.

    For the record i don’t expect any of this to appear in a Street Fighter game anytime soon, but it sure would be nice.

  2. Twist

    Good timing on this article. I’ve never played a vs game before and it’s really apparent now that I’ve picked up MvC3 just how much effort I’m having to go to just to figure out basics like how do you wavedash etc. Mission mode and SF4’s challenges are more like a challenge to people who know what they’re doing rather than a tutorial for n00bs like me >.>

  3. ryne-ee

    Have you ever played SF4 on the iPhone? It actually contains a similar training mode to what you’re describing called Dojo. For example, with a shortened lifebar, it’ll ask you to:

    – beat a Ryu that constantly chucks fireballs but pauses to anti-air srk you
    – survive 20 seconds against a Chun-Li that does random j.fierce x2, cr.short, and cross-up neckbreakers (and you can’t attack/jump/dash) – something pretty hard to do on an iPhone
    – beat an Abel that constantly rolls/ex-rolls and does tornado throws if you’re vulnerable

    Also, if you fail, it gives you a tip on how to beat them (though they’re not always the most descriptive).

  4. TsiengLiu

    You should take a look at Virtua Fighter 4’s Training Mode. Best tutorial I ever saw for a fighting game.

  5. SofaKingAC

    I’m with TsiengLiu on VF4. Really got me up to speed on VF after years of playing Tekken.

    I actually cracked a smile while reading this. It sounds like the sort of thing that, even though I “know” fighting games, I’d do just for fun. Maybe it would include an optional “speedrun” mode or multiple levels (Level 1 = 10 Barrels, Level 2 = 20 Barrels, etc…) for working on particular aspects.

  6. MrValdez

    For stage 5 (the super defensive AI), increasing chip damage would give the player the idea that special moves deals chip damage. But there has to be a popup text to remind the player that the AI has lower health than the stronger character-selectable fighters.

    The game could even subtly mention that the characters you are using are stronger than normal humans (a tie-in to the game story. Hey, there are some people who like the silly stories of fighters)

  7. Maj Post author

    Ah yeah, i’ve heard of the VF4 training mode being amazing, but i have the least amount of experience with the Virtua Fighter series out of all the major fighting game titles. Did they stop including that feature after VF4? The DBZ Budokai games had pretty good tutorials too – though they were a little boring to be honest.

    And i haven’t gotten a chance to play iPhone SF4 yet. Actually i emailed all these suggestions to s-kill a long time ago, before vanilla SF4 hit consoles. He said that he had already tried to pitch something similar but it was difficult to find the extra budget for additional content/modes. What you guys described sounds pretty awesome though.

    But … As dumb as those barrels sound, the mini-games are a big deal to me. If you use real fighters, i just think there’s a tendency to scare away true newcomers, like Twist said.

    Everyone loves mini-games though. I had a roommate who played only slow-paced PC strategy games, and one day he saw me playing the SF3:2I bonus basketball parrying mode on Dreamcast and asked what it was about. So i explained it to him and he played it every day for like a week, and got really good at it – then went back to some Star Trek game he was playing.

    Mini-games are a lot more non-threatening and inviting than diving right into the full-on fighting game experience with no preparation. There’s a lot of character-specific stuff you can do with those barrels too.

    For example, you can hold Guile stationary and make him use different anti-airs. Just have them dropping from different angles and force players to choose the right button to break them without moving.

    You can also teach post-Sonic Boom anti-airs by placing a barrel at a distance which can only be reached by a Sonic Boom; then as soon as it breaks, it triggers another one falling from the sky.

    And you can do stuff against the dummy as well. For example, start Guile from a specific position and allow him to move after a countdown, maybe 5 frames after the opponent jumps. So the player gets to set up the position they want (to a limited degree), and it’s more like a real-game situation.

    Then you can get into all sorts of advanced corner traps, like “Make opponent block 3 consecutive fireballs with Ryu” or “Prevent Seth from wall-jumping out of the corner with Bison.” Or even “Push Akuma into the corner with Dhalsim while Akuma is holding forward.” All kinds of stuff like that.

  8. kentarch

    I love this idea. Sounds like a great way to help new players get into the game, as well as it may even teach those with some experience in the game something new. Make them experiment a little. Find uses for things that maybe they wouldn’t have thought of before.

  9. kingsagat

    this is the most awesome idea ever. it would have cut down my learning curve by so much. i am having to work very hard to learn fighting games. love every moment though.

  10. zero

    Most people do not play to win. They play for fun.
    If someone want improve his skills, he will find sonichurricane.com and read the footsies articles.
    Most people just want to know how to perform fancy fireballs.
    Easy control mode like one button special move in tatsunoko vs capcom attracts more players. Those who wanna become fighters will find their way.

  11. Snoooootch

    Wow, Maj, this is exactly what I’ve been working on with the contributors of the Fei Long threads on srk. This will help a lot, Maj! Thanks! I’m gonna finish reading it in the morning during work. lol.

  12. phoenix

    Something similar has been done in The King of Fighters 2002 UM. It’s not as extensive, but it definitely helps.

    There’s one dummy that just walks forward and throws you, and you have to break the throw on reaction 5 times to be succesful.

    There’s one character that does a counter CD move on whatever move you throw out, which you have to cancel into a roll and punish.

    Then there’s combo challenges like: do a 70% damage combo, do a MAX bypass etc. Problem with those missions is that, if you don’t read up on anything, there’s no way in hell you’ll figure these combos out. Nevertheless, some of the earliest missions teach you some essential KOF skills that are quite unique to the series.

  13. UrkAngiJordi

    I agree that training mode should train you on how to play the game. It was one of my favorite aspects of VF4Evo with it’s extensive training mode. The idea you put forth is an intriguing one, here’s hoping Capcom or some other company may try it.

  14. onreload

    Definitely some great ideas, and there are people who know fighting games who could help write some of the tips/explanations. Someone already mentioned KOF 2002UM, but I have KOFXI, and it has similar challenges, some really useful stuff…along with some silly things as well; it’s a lot more fun than the SFIV challenge mode, though that has its uses as well.

    I definitely love minigames in fighters…I didn’t feel like Super SFIV brought much new to the table…Barrels were too easy, Car was too slow. [tangent] I’m not sure if anybody has worked on it, but I try to get the fastest times / highest score on the SUV minigame in 3rd Strike. For some reason, most of the times I’ve beaten the Level 5 Basketball game, I’ve had music on. I guess I’m better at visually recognizing that stuff. [/tangent]

    if s-kill already knows about this kind of thing, then they might use it in the future, but I don’t know how much he can suggest as an employee of CAPCOM USA, so…I dunno how receptive the folks over at the Japanese HQ are, but if you know any Japanese players who talk to them, it might be worth discussing.

    It also seems like a good fan project for ST. ST is definitely one of the best games to start fighting games with.

  15. XSPR

    Your blog post has some great ideas, just like the ideas for your training mode post not too long ago. And I can’t say I’m too surprised about Seth getting resistance for the general idea- for example, I imagine it may be a dangerous marketing move to have a tutorial mode at the expense of the familiar single player AI mode (that cheats outright in sf2– talk about confusing the new player!!), simply because I imagine so many people expect that just out of tradition, like a high score, even though that misses the entire point of playing a fighting game of course.

    I had a general idea to make something like this using the input scripter. No barrels, but have specific situation game states of particular P1 vs P2 situations load as each “Stage” in a kind of tutorial. It’s all prepared for the player to play through each one in order. Would be even more non-boring for more people to be enticed to give it a try if there were some kind of a shell program that started up the emulator with the states automatically and kind of narrated the player’s progress from each one to the next. Maybe take screenshots of random matches, display it, and have a quiz, ok what are the best responses for Ryu (or whoever) in this situation? then have the player try it out by playing it. (the screenshot would be the first frame of where the gamestate starts… maybe hard to work out since, from a screenshot, you can’t get a sense for P1 nor P2’s frame, so maybe a brief video, show that and say “ok play it from the point this video ends, ken is jumping in with hard punch like that, at that precise distance. what do you do?” etc. and when the player tries it, the gamestate is beginning exactly where the video ended. like an “auto start” in a racing game (Project Gotham Racing had this for example).

    It takes me a long time to learn a fighting game- and honestly I don’t really understand why hitboxes have to be kept so secret. If it’s because the designers took so much pains to get it “right” by tweaking and tweaking for months on end, even if someone were to steal the data (?) it wouldn’t necessarily translate to a cloned game very well without other subtle game engine specific things like physics/speeds of moves and jumps etc, I imagine. Some players seem to just like the idea of figuring it all out on their own. To me that just seems like cruel punishment, and just one big delay of a learning curve to obtaining competency to play a minimal mind-game. Do people respect me in the game because of my experience and esoteric knowledge of minutia specific to the game? I’d rather be known for knowing their next move. Get me past the learning stage or at least to some minimal understanding. Doesn’t even have to be so fancy as all the Stages you describe (though I totally agree, the more “mini-games” you have, the more enticing it would be to attract players to get into it). For example for SF2, just one for the roundhouse button alone would be of tremendous help to a brand new player.

    Fighting games have evolved so much because so much is kept an obscure secret- I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy that proposed the idea to start displaying “Reversal – 1000 points” message onscreen got a lot of resistance. “That’s ridiculous! Are you trying to get us all fired? Players won’t touch it once they know too much of our secret sauce!” I have no interest in the Vs. games but almost feel obliged to buy that MvC3 Guide simply to make the statement, yes, this is something I value. It’s exactly as you said- they just don’t tell you the rules to a fighting game and fighting games are so complex. How many times do I have to take your game out before she takes her clothes off??

    btw How about another basic thing- between each stage, have a mini-mini game where, you press an attack button and it is played in slow motion, or pauses very very clearly at two stages: when start-up of the move ends/hitting phase beings, and also hitting phase ends/recovery time starts. That fundamental three-stage aspect of attacks certainly was not obvious to me, even for a while of playing fighting games.

    so SO right about the traditional button names. I always try to say lk/mk/hard kick etc instead of the old names, like “forward”. (“walk forward?” “yeah. no! the button.” “…what?”)

    long live SF3’s training mode. As others mentioned I heard VF4’s training mode was awesome too, though I also haven’t seen it.

  16. Maj Post author

    That’s funny, i can actually imagine someone having to fight to get the “Reversal” message included. And yeah, that must have been a big deal back in the day. Before that happened i bet reversals were regarded as some kind of a mythical creature, like the Loch Ness Monster – nobody being 100% sure if they really existed.

    Anyway i totally agree, there’s a ton of fighting game concepts that are hidden or implied but never properly explained. All that stuff could be demonstrated much more intuitively if someone put the effort into it. Strategy guides (like the MvC3 HyperGuide on SRK) do a good job of covering that information, but i feel like it would be much more accessible and much easier to absorb if it was interactive and contained within the game itself.

    Although regarding button labels, “LK/MK/HK” don’t help. They’re still not descriptive names. All they tell you is that they’re supposed to be ordered in terms of power. You get the same general idea from “Jab / Strong / Fierce.” It’s still not enough.

    In fact it’s not even uniformly true. SSF4 Dee Jay’s far s.MK and far s.HK both deal 110 damage. SSF4 Sagat’s close s.MK and s.HK both cause 120 damage, which is more than his close s.HP (110 damage).

    What’s never explained to newcomers is that attacks are arranged with a focus on character variety and balance – not according to any simple formula. The reason SSF2 Bison’s s.HK is so different from SSF2 Guile’s s.HK is partly because Capcom wanted to differentiate Bison from Guile – and partly because they wanted Bison’s best midrange poke to be better than Guile’s best midrage poke.

    I think it’s important for newcomers to know that when a veteran like me plays a new character for the first time, i don’t know what the buttons do either. It’s something you have to decipher for yourself through trial and error and experimentation. There’s no standardized rubric.

    But unfortunately they aren’t given that information, so they just go on believing that they’re missing something that’s obvious to everyone else.

    The other concept that’s never clarified to newcomers is that out of the 18 standard (close/far/crouching) ground normals, no character has 18 good ones – on purpose! At least a few of them are going to be inferior or useless. Because that’s how you give each character a unique style – by differentiating their strengths and weaknesses.

    Of course this is all obvious stuff to you and me, because we’re looking back after playing fighting games for many years. Sadly, it’s far from obvious at the beginning of the road.

  17. onreload

    It’s probably impossible to change the “shorter,” American names for the 6-button layout now; they’re ingrained in a lot of player’s heads, and while I think the L/M/Hx is becoming more common, when you’re speaking in person, saying “me-di-um punch, me-di-um kick” is a lot more cumbersome than “strong, forward”.

    I think it went toward (ha) a decent idea, that Ryu (or Ken) is a good starting point for players, because their normals are generally what the layout describes. The layout is also a starting point when you pick up a new character; you know they’re not going to do something bizarre like have all the big damage/long moves on LP/LK and the quick/weak moves on HP/HK, but you don’t know if the character will even have punches, or if they’ll look like Ryu’s toolset.

    Just to nitpick, my biggest problem is the medium kick nickname. “Forward?” I really want to know who was responsible for that. I really, really do. “you perform Ken’s overhead kick by pressing Back and Forward” — I feel like a moron, sometimes.

    Also, XSPR, I definitely agree on many of your points – I’m already bad at reversals, so playing pre-CPS2 SFII is really irritating in that regard. I’m a big SF3 fan – why do you like its training mode? I personally have a few problems with it – the lack of dummy recording, the restart after each menu choice, lack of detailed attack data, no counterhit message (to be honest, I’m not sure if it matters in SF3, but I think…so…?)

  18. Rufus

    Yeah. Another fun one regarding craziness regarding button strengths is Blanka where MP/MK are the fast attacks, while Jab/Short are slow pokes… One of the things that annoys me a lot about Street Fighter, FWIW is the whole ‘range dependent normal move’ stuff. Especially when the close moves are so different and can whiff. (Cammy’s roundhouse comes to mind.)

    It’s notable that you don’t necessarily see information about which normals are good for what situation in a lot of the FAQs. I was very pleasantly surprised to hear Juicebox talking about that.

  19. XSPR

    Yeah for years, I thought mid kick was not only the trade-off between weak/fast vs. powerful/slow, but also that they stretched further out longer than other moves too (eg Ryu and Guile’s low mk) but even Ryu’s low mk, in hitbox data is the same distance as hard kick I think. Zangief’s low kicks are all the same animation, maybe that could be some basepoint of reference? But Maj reminds me that I probably just stuck with the same character for so many years and never noticed the contradictions too much from character to character.

    Oh hey, as a nerdy verbal exercise, I sometimes consider how to best define the term “special move” so that it applies to each one of every character (say at least the sf2 series games), in just one sentence. And big bonus points for concise/terse wording.

    Rufus, good point about close/far range attacks- ppl keep away from learning ST Dhalsim with controllable limbs for precisely that reason, it’s just all too much to process and learn.

    Onreload, I can easily imagine the original names for the sf2 buttons simply getting lost in translation, ala Monkey Kong -> Donkey Kong. Can’t try to make too much sense of them. SF3’s training mode- I have it for both original Xbox with AE, and on Dreamcast and I think both are the same- it lets you control P2, then you play against as P1. Simply having a dummy jump in (with an attack even!) so you can practice DP’ing is an amazing leap forward in training mode features for something so practical to help you out and do on your own without a second person.

    Gotta love it when you config your buttons in fba, and it’s clearly laid out for sf2 type fighting games, but it says “strong punch button” meaning fierce, not strong. Why not make a button layout, but instead of jab strong fierce, it’d be “Sally, the, and joystick”, while you’re at it.

  20. error1

    I would really like to see a more open ended challenge mode.
    Rather then have it give you a combo it would say something like combo a flash kick after a sonic boom and it would be up to you to figure out how.
    I like the idea of presenting a situation without telling you how to solve it, it’s what I like the most about fighting games, there puzzle aspect

  21. Rufus

    “I would really like to see a more open ended challenge mode.”

    At this point, “make your own trial mode with on line trial sharing” is basically on my list every time that people have a suggestion thread. With something like that – and a reasonably long dummy recording capacity, a lot of these mini-game type things could be made by fans.

  22. Maj Post author

    Haha that’s pretty awesome. I’ve never been a big Mortal Kombat fan because developing their core game engine always seemed to be at the bottom of their priority list, but i have to admit they’ve always had the best minigames. This new Challenge Tower thing looks promising for sure.

  23. onreload

    I was about to post that here, haha…I think that game mode will be the best thing about it…kinda like Konquest mode in Deception. I’m definitely more hyped for the game, now.

  24. Maj Post author

    Good call with the KRS-One intro! I’m shocked that it ended up as well as it did. It certainly could’ve turned out a lot worse. (Haha thanks for keeping my name out of it though.)

    Anyway it sounds like a pretty awesome project. I hope the Super Turbo community appreciates your effort.

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