noahcopeland-blog

[noahcopeland-blog]

Solving for Shields in Hitbox/Hurtbox Interactions

I am trying to understand melee combat. I am trying to understand hitboxes, hurtboxes, and shieldboxes interactions, for the sake of 2D side-scrolling combat in a single-player melee-action game.

Scenario 1:

I will use Sonic The Hedgehog attacking this shielded enemy as an example. Here, Sonic (the player) throws a punch into the enemy's shield.

Green = enemy hurtbox. Blue = enemy shieldbox. It looks like Sonic's punch should be block by the shield, yes?

Red = Sonic's hitbox. Well, Sonic's hitbox for his punch is colliding with both the enemy's shieldbox AND hurtbox. Obviously, the enemy shouldn't take damage in this situation, so we need to favor the shieldbox collision. Easy enough, I'll just write the hitbox code to check for shield collisions before hurtbox collisions, and then exit early. That should work.

Scenario 2:

Now Sonic is attacking from behind. This kick should definitely damage the enemy and not get blocked by the shield.

Green = enemy hurtbox. Blue = enemy shieldbox. Lookin' good so far...

Oh no! Even though it looked fine visually, Sonic's hitbox is just barely colliding with the shieldbox. Since I had set the shield collision check to occur first in code previously, this means Sonic's kick would get blocked in this scenario, when it shouldn't!

I could adjust the hit box to be smaller, but I don't forsee this being the most scalable solution across a wide variety of attacks and characters. Shrinking the hitbox could also make the attacks feel nurfed in more general scenarios, thus compromising the entire attack just to account for this one specific scenario.

I know! I'll imagine a center line drawn across the enemy.

This will tell which side (left or right) the shield is on.

If the enemy's shield and the player's hitbox are originating from the same side of the enemy, it will block the attack. Otherwise, allow the attack. This would let players to attack from behind, since they would be on the opposite side of the shield.

Great, this could work! Though it will get a little more complicated once sloped terrain is involved, but the centerline concept should prevail Moving on! Scenario 3:

Ah crap. I forgot about aerial attacks.

This attack should definitely hit the enemy on the head...

Darn. Sonic's Hitbox is just barely touching the shieldbox!

And both he and his hitbox are originating from the left (shield) side of the enemy's center line. So this attack would get blocked too, even though it shouldn't!

At this point, as I am hand-tailoring all these edge cases, I am starting to wonder if I'm approaching this whole problem incorrectly. There are so many games with hitboxes, hurtboxes, and shield boxes; there's gotta be an elegant solution I'm not thinking of...

[noahcopeland-blog]

"Put in the options!" - The dangers of The Option-Toggle Curse™

As an indie game developer, you've undoubtedly encountered those pivotal moments during the game development process when a tough decision arises. Should your character have a high jump with strong gravity, or a low jump with weak gravity? These dilemmas often lead to a debate.

The Alluring Siren Call of Option-Toggles

Invariably, during these discussions, someone will interject with what seems like a convenient solution: "Just put a toggle in the options and let the player decide." It's a tempting proposition, isn't it? The ability to please everyone by providing choices is alluring, but I implore you to resist the temptation! The Option-Toggle Curse™ is real, and it's essential to understand when and when not to use it.

The Overuse Problem

Let's be clear; option toggles have their place in game design. When it comes to something as subjective as camera controls (y-axis inverted or not), offering player customization is a wise move. However, the issue arises when this suggestion jumps the gun, becoming a knee-jerk reaction to every design conundrum. More often than not, hastily adding an option toggle is the wrong decision.

The Illusion of Convenience

The moment you opt for an option toggle, you unwittingly avoid making a crucial design decision. It's like admitting defeat before the battle even begins. What's worse, you've effectively doubled your workload, as you now need to account for both options during development. Game design is a nuanced art, comprised of a series of micro-decisions that collectively shape the player's experience. Embracing option toggles too readily robs you of the chance to hone your decision-making skills.

The Way Forward

Instead of jumping to option toggles as a quick fix, remember that they should be a last resort—a tool to address genuine player preferences, not a way to dodge making tough design choices. Game development requires courage, creativity, and a willingness to make those difficult decisions that define your vision. You're not a coward; you're a skilled and innovative game developer. Have the guts to make decisions that resonate with your game's identity.

Conclusion

In the ever-evolving world of indie game design, option toggles should be wielded judiciously. Don't let them be your default solution to every challenge. By embracing your role as a decision-maker and staying true to your creative vision, you'll create games that stand out for their unique design choices and captivate players in ways option toggles never could.

Remember, in the realm of indie game development, the courage to choose is your most potent weapon. So, go forth and craft experiences that reflect your vision, free from the clutches of the Option-Toggle Curse™.

[noahcopeland-blog]

Predicting Sonic Frontiers Reviews

Sonic Frontiers comes out next week at the time of this writing. I have not played the game. However, after years of reading Sonic reviews, I feel like I can predict what negative reviews of the game will say before they’ve even come out. I’m writing this now to see what I get right. The rest of post will now be a hypothetical negative Frontiers review, not my opinion. Here we go.  ---

Sonic The Hedgehog has had a rocky transition to 3D. While starting off strong as a mascot to rival Mario in the 1990′s, the beloved blue bur has since fallen from his high heights. Remember when Sega gave Sonic a sword, turned him into a werewolf and made him kiss a princess? 

This time around, Team Sonic has opted to take Sonic into the already-crowded open world genre (though they insist it’s called “open-zone,” and no one’s sure why). How does Sonic’s first adventure into open space fare? Read more to find out.  

The story of Sonic Frontiers starts off with Sonic separated from his friends with no memory of how he got there, so that the “what is this place?” cliché can pay out. Gone are the fun Saturday-morning cartoon cutscenes of games like Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations (the few GOOD 3D Sonic games! [insert link to a review where the site actually gave both games a 5/10]) and instead is the unwelcome return of that patented early-2000′s hedgehog-melodrama that only the most diehard of Sonic truly care about. Sonic’s annoying and furry animal buddies with no pants must be rescued so they can give you heartfelt sob stories about how they got there. The “mystery” of the main villain, Sage, shows promise at the start as a mysterious force, but ultimately falls flat as the plot twist because increasingly obviously from the 5-minute mark onwards.  Like many Sonic games of the past, the game struggles in the technical department. Asset pop-in is a frequent plague. It's often thinly veiled with a lazy digital effect that is reminiscent of the same hand-wave energy of Kryptonite fog. Certain busy sections will cause the game to lag and stutter, and for a $60-70 game, it’s especially bad on Switch. (editor’s note: Remember, that if a game doesn't run at 120 fps you should consider it a personal attack from the game devs letting you know that they hate you and your family.) 20 years after Sonic 06, and only a few after Sonic Boom and SEGA still hasn't learned their lesson about technically-rushed rebranding attempts. 

One highlight of the game, however, is the moment-to-moment gameplay. Sonic has a large area to explore and many of obstacles are actually quite enjoyable. However, while it is fun for a while, the main thing that bogs Sonic Frontiers down is the repetition. On paper, Kronos island gives you a lot to do but when it all starts to feel the same after a while, the quantity no longer matters. Get the macguffin to power up the other macguffin to open the door macguffin. Lather, rinse, and repeat. Any potential this new playstyle has is squandered by mindless grinding that all starts to blur together after a while.

To flesh out the design, the game offers up puzzles but I struggle to feel comfortable using the word "puzzle" as most of these can be solved with the most minimal of brain power. New to the series, however, is an emphasis on combat. The enemies look like more something from Shadow of the Colossus than the family-friendly world of checkerboarded grass we all remember Sonic for. 

In between the open areas, Sonic Frontiers take you to Cyberspace levels. These are fast-paced linear levels that feel more like the old school traditional Sonic we love. I found the level design in these areas to be strikingly new and fresh, with layouts unlike anything I've ever seen in Sonic games past. Yet they somehow felt familiar. It all perfectly encapsulates the exaggerated swagger of a fast hedgehog.

As stated earlier, Frontiers presents a gameplay style Sega is bent on calling "open-zone," insisting they've created a new genre of gameplay. However, after 100+ hours in the game, it's not clear how this really differs from the broader open-world genre. “Open-zone,” if anything, feels like a lesser and smaller version of what open-worlders where like in the PS2 era, which is hardly the innovation Team Sonic seems to think it is. While Sonic's first foray into this genre is mostly successful in terms of moment-to-moment gameplay, it's too little too late. Frontiers adds nothing new to the open-world genre while simultaneously missing out on 20 years worth of lessons learned from other, better open-world games. If you are looking for an open-world experience in 2022, they are simply much better options. 

6/10 - too much fast, too much repetition

---

annnnnndddd.....scene! 

[noahcopeland-blog]

I have feelings for a game no one cares about: Legend of Kay Anniversary

I just finished playing The Legend of Kay: Anniversary. 

So basically, this was a game from 2005 that I would have played that crap out of as a kid, expect it was PS2 only (I was a Gamecube kid).

So about a year ago, they remastered it and released it on Wii U. Saw it at GameStop, got serious Ty the Tasmanian Tiger vibes from the box art, and bought it instantly. I had literally no knowledge of this game before then. Never even heard of it, and I don’t think most people have either. But I’m happy to say that I have enjoyed it!

So here comes the part where I needlessly analyze this game that only 6 people have played. 

TONE/WRITING:

The game is about a cat named Kay whose land gets invaded by these nasty rats and gorillas who plan to enslave everyone. Kay, of course, takes it upon himself to stop it. The whole game takes place in a very Asian inspired world of martial arts and Buddhist temples.

But one thing that is striking is that this game is completely tone-deaf with it’s narrative direction. I get the vibe that they are three different departments with three different interpretations of what the story should feel like.

Voice Director/Casting Director: “This is for little kids, so that’s get an 8-year-old to voice our lead hero, and make all the other voices really goofy and cartoony!”

Script Writer: “Let’s go super edgey with this and make our characters swear and make brutal threats of murder and decapitation! Also, add in alcohol.” 

Game Director/Story Director: “Let’s go for a good, balanced tone. One that’s kid friendly, but not goofy and soft. Think 4Kids Ninja Turtles maybe.”

Really though, it seems like no one was one the same page here. You get the feeling that the game wanted to be right-in-the-center tonally, but the voice acting got pulled in the extreme kiddy direction and the dialogue got pulled in the opposite direction.

Seriously, the titular hero, Kay, is voiced but what sounds like a very young child and it’s kinda embarrassing. Then, out of a nowhere, Kay starts swearing (in a very cringey edge-lord way, too) and it’s couldn’t feel more juxtaposed. 

Who thought this was a good idea? Were these guys just riding off the Jak II hype wave? “Jak II was a platformer with swearing and it was successful!”

Maybe Jak II’s darker, humanoid world found a way to get away with it, but the world of Legend Of Kay, with its fuzzy fur-ball characters, just can’t pull it off.

GAMEPLAY

This game really feels straight out of 2005. Definitely from a bygone era. And you know what? It’s an era that I miss. Legend of Kay has what I would expect, and want. It’s a third-person mascot platformer with action and adventure elements. Platforming, powerups, puzzles, combat, combos, exploration, hidden goodies, and a bunch of other things that were standard tropes of the genre in the 2000′s before 3D platformers faded into unjust obscurity (only to be replaced by a tiring barrage of first-person shooters).

The final boss feels exactly the way a final boss should. It’s big, epic, and you feel the that whole game is leading up to it. It’s great sense of excitement when you’re fighting the last boss, and great sense of accomplishment when you beat it. Not saying that modern games don’t do this ever, but it seemed so much more like an unspoken rule back then. It was expected and you were disappointed if it wasn’t there. Over time, I feel like developers tried doing different things for their final boss, perhaps solely for the sake of “avoiding cliches.” 

Let’s talk about combat. I think you can judge a game’s combat system on a “pre-Arkham” and “post-Arkham” scale. This game, of course, is pre-Arkham, and the combat system is pretty unique. 

Basically, if you get some combos going, you enter a new state of combat, where you zip around freely from one foe to the next, simply to how Arkham would do it four years later (and get ridiculous amounts of praise for it). It’s hard to put into words, but there’s definitely an “aha!” moment when you get a feel for the combat. There’s certain flow to it that is almost zen. 

While the combat does get repetitive and is unfair at times, it’s still a neat system that I’d like to see another game try to perfect.

You start with a sword, but you get two other weapons throughout the game: a big fat hammer and a set of Wolverine-esque claws. You be able to upgrade these weapons too, making them stronger which is a nice sense of progression. However, the claws are pretty useless, despite looking really cool. Immediately after you get them, you’ll use them to cut some bamboo and then will likely never see them again. They suck in battle and are less powerful than your standard sword. Why?

Moving on, there are definitely some weird gameplay moments of clunkyness that would have been unacceptable even at the time. For example: If you pull yourself up from a ledge grab on a moving platform, the platform will just move on without you and you’ll “pull” yourself up onto nothing and just fall through thin air. 

There’s also these weird colored diamonds that you can collect to increase your score. But to my knowledge, your score does absolutely nothing. You get no bonus for having a high score. It is literally just a number. Why?

As mentioned earlier, the voice acting is just terrible, and it really hurts how long winded some of the characters can be. At times, they talk just to talk. They don’t say anything of real value. Almost every time you run into enemies, the game stops to give you a “cutscene.” And by “cutscene,” I mean you sit and watch the enemies stand still in a defensive stance while they say five or six lines about how they want to hurt/beat/kill you. 

But in an odd way, part of me likes that. It gets too long and repetitive because it happens nearly every fight, but I like the attempt to make your enemies feel like characters with personalities. 

Speaking of making enemies feel more real, Legend of Kay has an interesting obsession with perma-death. Seriously, if you kill an enemy, his corpse will lay there infinitely. You can leave an area, turn off the game, load back up the save, go back to the area, and his body will still be lying right where you killed it. It’s feels more grim that way. In other platformers of the time, you’d kill an enemy and their body would fade out or disappear in smoke. But in Legend of Kay, the perma-death makes you start to feel the weight of your actions. You can’t just kill something and sweep the body away to instantly forget about. Nope, that body will always be there. Dang, that is some heavy stuff for a 2005 platformer.

One last thing. Legend of Kay does something that I hate in video games.  After you beat the game, loading your save file puts you right before the final boss forever. I hate that. I’ve always appreciated it when game will load you back to the hub-world and let you see the world in peace. At the very least, give me a level select list and let me replay levels I didn’t 100%. That brings me to my next point of discussion.

REMASTER:

I get the vibe that this 2015 remaster version had almost zero budget. Seriously, look at the back cover of the box. It looks like it was made in Photoshop in 10 mins. I’m not exaggerating. 

It’s doesn’t look terrible, it just looks like it cost almost nothing to make. This is not the work of a graphic designer. This is one of the programmers making it the day before the game ships.

Look at the text! It’s a plain as it gets.

Compare it to the original 2005 box art.

I didn’t play the original, but I get the vibe that almost no changes were made to the gameplay. Certainly not any big ones. Aside from some up-res’d textures, this the original 2005 Legend of Kay, warts and all. There were a lot of little things here and there that would go a long way into improving the game. Simple things that I’d imagine would be easy fixes. But this ain’t Majora’s Mask on 3DS. This is a graphical fix only.

OVERALL

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with Legend of Kay: Anniversary. It’s not going to happen, but I would love to see a new Ledgend of Kay game in 2017 or sometime in the future. This is a relatively forgotten franchise that I think could use new life. In fact, you could use it’s obscurity to your advantage. The world and characters are already built, but there are hardly any preconceived notions to worry about. 

As much as I hate this word, this experience was “nostalgic” for me in a special way. It’s a game I didn’t play as a kid, but feels 100% like a game I would have played as kid. It was great to take a trip back to 2000′s era gaming without re-playing through a game that I’ve already seen a hundred times. It’s a new experience from an old era. And boy, I do miss that era.

You’re alright, Legend of Kay. You’re alright. 

(Now bring on Yooka-Laylee)

[noahcopeland-blog]

This is me.

I am thing.