This post explores the choreography when designing crowd melee combat - close combat fights that pits the player against multiple opponents at once, be it an old school beat'em up like Streets of Rage, 3D action games like God Of War, or even open world games like Batman : Arkham Series.
In short - The art to making player feel like the badest ass of all time!
In short - The art to making player feel like the badest ass of all time!
- PUNCH! KICK! It's all in the mind! -
What do we aim to achieve?
Provide player a sense of achievement from overcoming the danger of number and variety.
How can we achieve this?
Provide player a sense of believable danger which the player can than overcome and come off victorious.
What are the challenges?
We've all played enough game to know that you're not gonna design complex AI to these dumb minions. They exist to be beaten up and for the player to feel good. But how dumb does one really need to be, to be our best, dumb minion?
If they're too dumb, it lacks challenge, leading to the lack of achievement and grindy gameplay. If they're too smart, player can't beat them and we do not achieve our goal.
The challenge is to find the right balance, not necessarily the right level of dumb, but the right kind of dumb.
How can we solve this?
As an artist/designer, my designs are often very visual as I tends to look at a certain movie and ask myself, how can I translate that into a video game experience? To do that, I need to deconstruct the movie, understanding the basic filmmaking techniques/ideology behind, before translating and reconstructing that experience into video games.
In the case of crowd fighting, I naturally turn to the master of choreography himself - Master Jackie Chan!
Let's find out how he does it, and what we can learn from him!
Provide player a sense of achievement from overcoming the danger of number and variety.
How can we achieve this?
Provide player a sense of believable danger which the player can than overcome and come off victorious.
What are the challenges?
We've all played enough game to know that you're not gonna design complex AI to these dumb minions. They exist to be beaten up and for the player to feel good. But how dumb does one really need to be, to be our best, dumb minion?
If they're too dumb, it lacks challenge, leading to the lack of achievement and grindy gameplay. If they're too smart, player can't beat them and we do not achieve our goal.
The challenge is to find the right balance, not necessarily the right level of dumb, but the right kind of dumb.
How can we solve this?
As an artist/designer, my designs are often very visual as I tends to look at a certain movie and ask myself, how can I translate that into a video game experience? To do that, I need to deconstruct the movie, understanding the basic filmmaking techniques/ideology behind, before translating and reconstructing that experience into video games.
In the case of crowd fighting, I naturally turn to the master of choreography himself - Master Jackie Chan!
Let's find out how he does it, and what we can learn from him!
Basic Choreography
In the video above (2:55 mark), Jackie Chan explains how early HK movie choreographs crowd fight scenes to look/feel more dangerous than they actually are.
Jackie's Choreography
In the same video (3:30 mark), Jackie Chan explains how he takes the choreography even further, allowing 4 stunt man to engage him at the same time.
What have we learn?
That's cool and all... But how does that apply to my game!?
Patience young grasshopper!
First off, I hope the theories has been digestible so far. But if you are a young designer working on combat for the first time, it might be hard for you to wrap your head around how you can make use of all these information to eventually integrating them into your game. Isn't combat about fancy moves and hit boxes and frames counting!? And it's understandable that you think so :)
In my next post, let us refer to what we learn from early HK movie choreography and we can translate them into video games - STAY TUNED!
In the video above (2:55 mark), Jackie Chan explains how early HK movie choreographs crowd fight scenes to look/feel more dangerous than they actually are.
- When 4 people fight me, there is only 1 person to fight with...
- The 3 people behind, just prance around, changing kungfu stance...
- When I knocks one out, the other one runs in to take his place!
Jackie's Choreography
In the same video (3:30 mark), Jackie Chan explains how he takes the choreography even further, allowing 4 stunt man to engage him at the same time.
- They fight at the same time.
- Everybody have the yelling.
- A different yelling, so I know when they're coming.
- If everybody yell the same, I don't understand.
- So if you come from front, yell "Er", when you come from back, yell "Ah", now I know.
- I also yell "Come!" or "Go!", so they know when to come at me.
What have we learn?
- With good choreography, I can make a crowd fight look/feel more dangerous then they actually are.
- Enemy NPC shouldn't all engage the player at the same time. They just have to look engaged.
- When Enemy NPC aren't engaged, make empty threats to build a sense of danger.
- Player need to know where and when the enemies NPCs are coming.
- Enemy NPC can be cued by player's action to build up the danger. This should be subtle, and not made aware to the player.
That's cool and all... But how does that apply to my game!?
Patience young grasshopper!
First off, I hope the theories has been digestible so far. But if you are a young designer working on combat for the first time, it might be hard for you to wrap your head around how you can make use of all these information to eventually integrating them into your game. Isn't combat about fancy moves and hit boxes and frames counting!? And it's understandable that you think so :)
In my next post, let us refer to what we learn from early HK movie choreography and we can translate them into video games - STAY TUNED!