Godzilla Unleashed Designer Diary #5 - The Fighting System
Simon Strange from Pipeworks Software talks to us about the combat system and controls in the now almost-finished Godzilla Unleashed.
Godzilla Unleashed's release date is now less than a month away and so, unsurprisingly, the game is all but finished. In this our penultimate designer diary from the team at Pipeworks Software, lead character designer Simon Strange talks about the game's all-important combat and control systems.
The Fighting System
By Simon Strange
Lead Character Designer, Pipeworks Software
We're up to the fifth of our ongoing columns on Godzilla Unleashed on the Wii, and we think it's time to go into detail about the final version of the controls that folks will be using to play the game this fall. The controls have been pretty volatile throughout the project, which has been one of the most exciting challenges for us. Since we rebuilt 100 percent of our animations, characters, and environments for this game, the field was wide open for any and all control innovations.
Since we didn't know from the outset exactly what our controls would be--and thus what abilities our characters might have--we had to start out building for all possible scenarios, which meant that we had to throw a significant amount of stuff away as we nailed down exactly how people would play the game. Over time, we got closer and closer to our final configuration and were able to build new characters more and more efficiently. That meant more monsters in the finished product--but more monsters means more controls exceptions, which meant that each monster actually forced us to adjust the controls slightly. That process was a major driving force behind our schedule and final monster list.
What sort of game is this, anyway?
Pipeworks and Atari have collaborated on three of these Godzilla games now, and most people call them fighting games. They play very well as traditional side-view 3D fighters, like Virtua Fighter, Soul Calibur, and Tekken. But they can also be played as four-player games, with an isometric camera view--and in this mode, people tend to play them as madcap action games--more in the vein of Super Smash Brothers, Power Stone, Gauntlet, or King of the Monsters. In Godzilla: Save the Earth, we also started to introduce an over-the-shoulder perspective, which made parts of our game play like a lumbering version of action titles like Grand Theft Auto or Jak and Daxter. Very few games use multiple styles like this, and nobody is crazy enough to use a single control scheme to drive all three. We tried it in Save the Earth, and I think critics and players will agree that there were some problems with our action-perspective gameplay elements.
But we're always ambitious, and with three-plus years of Godzilla experience under our belts, we thought we had a chance to develop a whole new game, and get the action elements right, and totally revise the combat system, and implement a new type of dynamic story, and make up a new control scheme to drive the whole thing.
Wii to the rescue!
Almost all games have more things to do than controllers have buttons to do them with. There are three ways you get more abilities with the fixed number of buttons: 1) You put multiple actions on a single button. 2) You use multi-input controls for some actions (we call these chorded actions). 3) You make actions context-sensitive. We've used all of these solutions to some degree on past Godzilla games, and each has their own advantages and weaknesses. The Wii has fewer buttons than the controllers used to drive previous Godzilla games, so we knew that we'd need to strongly consider each of these options. We quickly decided to avoid the first option because it decreases clarity and makes the game hard to learn. Our first Godzilla game suffered from this with the run/duck button. People would press it, see their monsters duck, and then walk slowly forever. We wanted to avoid that this time around.
Context-sensitive options are also a problem because you can't experiment with them and figure out what controls do what ahead of time. Our primary context-sensitive action is grab. Godzilla and company can grab other monsters, or they can grab buildings off the ground and use them as long-range missiles. As you move around the world, buildings will flash to indicate that if you pressed grab, you would grab the building rather than try to grab a monster. That has been clear to players, so we kept that system in place, with the small change that buildings now flash white--not pink.
We used chorded actions a ton in the first two Godzilla games--most fighting games do. Press A for a basic punch, but tap "Up" on the stick and press A for an uppercut. Tap "down" on the stick and press A to get a hammerfist. That's pretty standard fighting fare. Many series of games are differentiated almost entirely by what sort of chorded actions they use. We used Up-Down-Away-Toward as our primary modifiers to attacks. "Away" and "Toward" are based on the fact that the camera usually has you on the left or right side of the screen, facing your opponent.
But "Away" and "Toward" don't make any sense when the camera is behind you--and we knew that would be happening a lot in our new game. Another problem was that tapping the stick, even for an instant, would turn your monster to face that direction, which often made the attack miss. We could solve this by locking monsters to face one another, but that almost totally eliminated a player's ability to navigate the environment during a fight. That was exactly the case we tried to solve with our old run/duck button, and we didn't want to go down that path again. All of this pointed to the fact that the control stick couldn't be used to chord different attacks together. We seriously considered cutting back to six attacks per monster but ultimately decided that we would lose too much of our fighting game feel if we did that.
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- Release: Dec 5, 2007 »
- ESRB: Everyone 10+
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