FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Fighting Games
Fighting games have little in common with other action games because they involve neither exploration, shooting, nor puzzle-solving. They still qualify as action games because they place great demands on a player's physical skills: reaction time and timing. These games simulate hand-to-hand combat, usually using highly exaggerated moves vaguely modeled on Asian martial arts techniques. (Serious boxing games belong more to the sports genre than to the action genre, as they try to model the techniques of boxing realistically.) Fighting games may be further subdivided into those in which characters fight in one-on-one bouts, and melee games in which one or two characters fight against large numbers of opponents. (The latter are sometimes called beat-'em-ups.) Fighting games also use hand-to-hand weapons such as swords and staves, and a limited number of ranged weapons. Figure 13.4 shows screen shots from two fighting games, Street Fighter and Dead or Alive 3.
The player's actions typically consist of hand-to-hand attacking and defending moves of various sorts. Typically, certain defenses block some attacks but not others, and players have to learn when and how the moves are effective through trial and error. Each successful attack takes energy away from the character hit, and the game continues until one fighter's energy drops to zero. The strategy of the game rather resembles rock-paper-scissors as players try to guess which move their opponent will use next.
A common feature of fighting games is the combo move, often simply shortened to combo. Because early console and arcade machines offered only a small number of buttons and a simple 8-way joystick or D-pad, there was no way to assign a separate
button to each of the moves that the designers wanted to include. To compensate for this and to create an extra challenge, they designed games so that the player would execute an especially effective or spectacular attack if she could rapidly issue a particular sequence of buttons and joystick maneuvers. The effectiveness of the move is often related to its difficulty of execution; more complex combos carry higher risk because the avatar is open to attack while the player carries out the sequence.
When the software detects that a player has started a combo move, it sometimes displays a combo meter somewhere on the screen—a visual indicator of the player's progress through pressing the buttons. If the player stops or gets the sequence wrong, the meter resets to zero and she has to start over.
Bout-structured fighting games tend to show all the fighters on-screen at once from a side view. Even in a game that uses 3D technology to display the world and the fighters, the play is largely 2D in the plane of the video screen. The fighters move left and right and may jump up and down, but they seldom move toward the player or away from him. Again, realistic boxing games are an exception because they try to model the ring and boxers' movements accurately—another reason why they're not usually classed with fighting games.
Most innovation in fighting games consists of developments in characters' actions and reactions. This includes their interactions with each other and their environment and their reactions to injury, as well as the methods used to control the fighters—especially when considering how to handle special moves and combos.
