Designing Defensively: Guilty Gear

The more variety there is an asymmetric game, the harder it is to balance. When each character (or faction / race / deck / etc.) is extremely different from the rest, there's more potential for some characters to do things that other characters just can't handle. But having radically different characters is really interesting, so is there some way we can keep things balanced anyway? The fighting game series Guilty Gear shows us how.

How They Did It

They handled offense and defense differently.

Universal Defense: all characters have equal access to an unusually large number of safeguards and defensive abilities. This includes failsafes that solve problems the designers didn't have to specifically know about ahead of time.

Unique Offense: each character has unique mechanics that stray further from the standard template than they would in most other fighting games.

Because the designers can count on all characters having so many ways to get out of trouble, they can give each character radically different offensive tools. I think of features shared by all characters as the "design skeleton," and the different options each character has as the "meat on the bones." Even though all characters share many defensive options (and a few offensive options), they feel extremely different. That's because your offense options define your gameplan—what you're actually trying to do when you play.

How different are we talking? The characters in Guilty Gear are more different from each other than the characters of just about any other asymmetric game that I know of, yet the series is still reasonably well balanced and definitely suitable for tournament play. The characters have such different mechanics that sometimes they feel like they're from different games. Here's a quick sample: 

  • Zato-1 lets the player control a second character at the same time as the main character.
  • Venom can place pool balls on the screen and change their arrangement and trajectories in complex ways.
  • Faust can throw random items onto the screen and he has to take advantage of whatever he happens to get.
  • Jam has to summon "cards" in order to power up her moves
  • Johnny has a limited number of coins per round, and hitting the opponent with coins charges up his "mist finer" attacks. He can also throw a mist onto opponents that makes them unable to block "mist finer" attacks.
  • Robo-Ky has his own unique super meter as well as a heat gauge that fills as he does moves, and a way to let off steam so he doesn't overheat.
  • Bridget can throw a yo-yo around the screen and then return it, turn it into a floating razor-bear, and many other tricks.

The Design Skeleton

The reason Guilty Gear is able to have such diverse characters (that are still well-balanced) comes from the common set of things all characters share. Let's look at some of those things, staring with the most basic.

The Basics

With only a few exceptions, all characters have access to this suite of movement abilities and basic attacks:

  • Double Jump
  • Ground and Air Dash
  • Sweep Attack
  • Overhead Attack that Launches
  • Ground Throw and Air Throw
  • Air Recovery (aka "tech recovery")
  • The ability to block high and low

There aren't any characters who can't block low, for example. There also aren't any characters who can't jump, or who can't walk forward. Characters lacking such basic things would inevitably cause major balance problems, so Guilty Gear wisely avoids doing that, but then so does just about every other fighting game.

Getting Out of Trouble

Some character is attacking you and doing whatever crazy and unique thing that character has. What do you do? No matter which character you are, you always at least have these options.

"f+p" invulnerability. Every character has a move performed by holding forward on the joystick and pressing the punch button. For every character (except Testament), this move grants some invulnerability to the upper body. This means that if an enemy jumps in at you, a f+p move is very good "anti-air." That is, it works well against attacks coming from above (unless the enemy expected it, and double jumped).

Green Blocking (aka "faultless defense"). While you are blocking, if you hold two buttons down, your character becomes surrounded by green rings. During this time, your super meter depletes, but you will take no "block damage" as you normally would from projectiles and other special attacks. Also, when you green block an attack, you will be pushed farther away than you normally would. This allows you to loosen up your opponent's traps by pushing them too far away. You can also use green blocking while you are in the air to block attacks from an opponent on the ground (you can't block those types of attacks without green blocking). Green blocking allows you to get out many situations that might be potentially brokenly oppressive, but it does cost you in-game resource (super meter) to do.

White blocking (aka instant blocking). If you block an attack at the very last moment before it hits you, your character flashes white. This reduces your character's blockstun, meaning that you recover from blocking slightly faster than you otherwise would. It's difficult to time a white block correctly, but it can help you get out of a sticky situation. If there's some sequence of repeated moves that you have to block, white blocking might let you recover just fast enough that you can interrupt the next incoming move.

Alpha Counter (aka "dead angle" attacks). While you are blocking an attack, you can perform this maneuver to cancel your blockstun with a pre-set attack of your own. It costs a lot of super meter to do, so you can't do it that often. If you're being overwhelmed by attacks though, blocking and then alpha countering gets the opponent off you. It knocks them down and gives you a chance to start up your own momentum.

Infinite Combo Safeguards

These next several features contribute to preventing "infinite combos." An infinite combo is a situation where once the opponent lands the first hit of the combo, they can continue the combo forever until they win. The more complicated a fighting game is, the more likely it is to have unwanted infinite combos. The designers of Guilty Gear put several systems in place to reduce the likelihood that such combos could exist.

Burst. This is the most blatant failsafe to stop infinite combos: a move that lets you break out of a combo. The game Killer Instinct pioneered this concept, but implemented it badly. Guilty Gear perfected it. While you're getting hit by a combo, you can "burst" out of it to knock the opponent away and avoid being hit further. It's your "get out of jail free card," and every character has it.

You can only burst about once per round. The designers surely knew that this mechanic was so powerful that it had to be closely regulated. If it cost super meter to use, there would be some character who's good at generating super meter and would be able to burst too much. Instead, burst has its own meter. It starts full at the beginning of the fight, and using your burst empties the meter entirely. The meter fills up automatically over time, but the only thing that can affect the speed it fills up is how much you're getting hit. If you get hit a lot, you get it back a bit faster. There's no trick to get it back instantly.

Your burst meter does not automatically refill each round, which was a clever decision. If you're at the end of a round and getting hit by a combo, you might very well choose NOT to burst so that you'll still have that ability at the start of next round. You should only burst if you think it will actually help you win the current round. The overall effect is that you don't see bursts every round because often players save it for the next round. The failsafe is there, but it doesn't get used excessively.

Also, a clever opponent will expect the moment you'll burst and they'll voluntarily stop attacking right before that. That makes your burst whiff, so they can punish the recovery of it with an even bigger combo. Even the failsafe itself has a counter.

Guard Meter. Right under your health meter is a little red meter called the guard meter. It starts at 50% full, and naturally tends to wander back to 50% if it gets higher or lower. The more attacks you block, the higher that meter gets. The more attacks you get hit by, the lower that meter gets. The higher the meter is (the more attacks you recently blocked) the less you benefit from the game's normal system of damage scaling. Usually, when you get hit by a combo, each successive hit is "scaled" down in damage more and more. But when your guard meter is high, even an ordinary combo can do massive damage to you because you are not being protected by the usual damage scaling. This is meant to punish overly defensive players.

On the flipside, the lower your guard meter is (meaning you got hit by a lot of attacks in a short period of time), the more damage scaling you benefit from. A very, very long combo will eventually do only one pixel of damage per hit because of this feature. So even if an infinite combo did exist, it would take an incredibly large number of hits to actually kill you and you could probably burst out of it before then.

Furthermore, you receive another even more important protection when your guard meter is low: reduced hitstun. Every time you get hit by a move, you are briefly stuck in a reeling animation where you can't do anything (except burst). This is the basic concept that allows combos to exist at all, since the opponent can often hit you again before your hitstun ends. But in Guilty Gear, the more you get hit, the shorter your guard meter becomes, which then makes your hitstun shorter. So if there exists a combo that is a "loop" of repeated moves, it may be possible to do 3 or 4 repetitions of the loop, but eventually the opponent's hitstun becomes so short that the combo simply stops working. (They'll be able to block at some point.)

Progressive Gravity. The longer your character is being juggled by a combo in the air, the greater the force of gravity on your character becomes. Many infinite combos in fighting games involve "juggling" a character in the air with attacks. Much like with actual juggling, it is a fight against gravity to keep it all going. While it might be possible to do 3 or 4 repetitions of a juggle loop, eventually the victim's body falls so fast to the ground that the juggle is no longer possible.

Summary of Mechanics Shared by All Characters

Every character has upper body invulnerability with their f+p move (except Testament). That alone is a great help in stopping attackers. White blocking can get you out of some situations without spending any super meter, but it requires precise timing and has only a small effect. If you're willing to spend super meter as a defender, you can green block or alpha counter. Green blocking will protect you from all damage while you block (except throws) and it will push the attacker away from you. Alpha countering is another method to get the attacker off of you, and it can be performed while you are in blockstun. 

That's a lot right there, but there's plenty more. If you actually get hit by an attacker, you have all sorts of things going for you. Your guard meter will eventually reduce the damage you take by the combo and shorten your hitstun allowing you to escape. Increased gravity will also eventually thwart their combo. You can nip it all in the bud, though, by simply bursting right at the very start of their combo, avoiding almost all damage. And don't forget that a great way to nullify attacks is simply not to be in the way of them. Every character can double jump, and every character but one can air dash.

The Freedom to Design Crazy Attacks

Every Guilty Gear character has a lot of options and system features that help them escape or avoid degenerate situations. The beauty of it is that the designers didn't need to know what those situations even were. They don't need to know which combo could juggle forever, because no matter which one it was, progressive gravity probably stopped it. They didn't need to know which non-juggle combo went on forever either: the guard meter's reduced hitstun solves that.

This gave the them the confidence and the ability to arm each character with pretty extreme and wildly different mechanics while maintaining reasonable balance. So that's the recipe: a robust, shared system of defense and failsafes with diverse and unique attacks for each character.

Designing Kongai

Kongai is an online card game I designed for Kongregate. You can play it here. I'll explain how the game came to be, then I'll go over my design choices. The focus was on making a game that's easy to get into, that still has lots of strategy, and that met Kongregate's requirements of a site-wide "metagame."

The First Inklings of Kongai

While Jim Greer was the technical director at the casual game site pogo.com, one of the things he oversaw was the pogo badges system. This allows players to earn icons in various games on that site, and show off their achievements to other players. Microsoft used this same idea with their aptly named Xbox Achievements. Jim then stole his own idea back when he created his casual game site, Kongregate.com.

Jim wanted to the achievements to be even more meaningful than on pogo or Xbox. When you complete the challenges for various casual games on Kongregate.com, you don't just win an icon; you win a card that's part of a metagame that ties the whole site together. Jim asked me to design that game. I told him there are many pitfalls in this idea and I could think of at least one hundred ways to do it wrong. Jim asked how I'd do it right.

Fair Competition

The first thing I wanted to avoid was any kind of artificial rarity for a few very powerful cards, or booster packs with random cards. That's great for collecting and all, but it flies in the face of fair competition. A fair competitive game has an even playfield where everyone has access to the same power level and everyone who's willing to pay for the game can get immediate access to any gameplay-relevant element. Anything less than that is trampling on what competition is all about. If our game had a forced-grind (such as in League of Legends) or a collectible barrier (as in Magic: the Gathering or Hearthstone), it would be below the minimum standard of what a legitimate competitive game should be. Collectible barriers and forced-grinds are simply incompatible with the point of competing.

Thankfully, we were able to create a legitimate competitive game without forced-grinds and without artificially rare cards. You can directly buy any Kongai card you want for a reasonable price. Directly buying cards was more of a secondary thing though. The main method Kongregate expected people to get cards from was the optional "grind." This came from players completing challenges in various other games on Kongregate.com in order to win Kongai cards. The challenges were meant to be interesting, rather than difficult. So again, we were being as inclusive as possible and we ultimately want you to have the cards. We could make some cards extremely hard to get, but only if they have no gameplay differences from the easier-to-get version. For example, a very difficult challenge might get you a different border on the card, or different art, or a different icon for the edition of the card.

No Bad Cards

I wanted all the cards to be approximately the same power level. I'm aware of Mark Rosewater's stance over at Magic: The Gathering that there should be a lot of bad cards on purpose to give players the fun of not choosing them. I like Mark's work, but on this point I strenuously object. Bad cards are chaff that clutters up a game, get in the way, and are blunders in game balance. I liked the Guild Wars philosophy that as you gain more cards (or abilities in that game), you are gaining the ability to create a wider and wider variety of decks, but not more and more powerful decks. I modeled Kongai after that concept.

Another thing I wanted to avoid was a game that required a lot of cards to play. Constructed decks in Magic: The Gathering have 60 cards, but winning 60 challenges on Kongregate.com just so you can try a new deck would be way too hardcore. Even if we gave you 60 to start, winning 60 more to make a totally different deck is way too many. I wanted a game that could be played with relatively few cards.

With these ideas in mind—not too hard to get cards, no intentionally bad cards, and small deck size—I needed to actually create a game. I had several candidates, not to mention three other card games I was already working on for my own amusement, but one idea rose to the top: Pokemon Netbattle.

Pokemon For Adults

Years ago on sirlin.net, I created a thread asking people to name a game that satisfied my long list of requirements for a good competitive game. I could not really think of any game that met them all, so I asked my readers. An unusually high number suggested Pokemon Netbattle. It took them a while to get through to me that they didn't mean the Pokemon trading card game, which is a totally different game. What they meant is the turn-based battle system that's inside all the Pokemon role playing games on GBA and Nintendo DS. The fans of the game extracted the combat portion only, including all equations and stats, and created a PC online version that removes all the RPG stuff. Even though I do not have much experience playing this game, when Jim asked me for a metagame for Kongregate.com, I remembered all the good properties of Pokemon Netbattle, and it seemed like a good fit. It has good strategy, requires only one action from the player per turn (simple), and has small decks of 6 cards.

That said, I thought there were a lot of ways Pokemon Netbattle could be improved. For starters, we could make a game much more accessible and reach a new audience with it. Beyond that, we could explore new design space with some new mechanics, and add even more to the strategy.

Here are the major areas I changed from the Pokemon game:

  • Character switching mechanic changed
  • Attack type system vastly simplified
  • All math equations vastly simplified, replaced with simple arithmetic
  • Mechanic for multiple hits added
  • New mechanic for fighting at close range / far range
  • Meter management system added/revamped

Most of you probably have no idea how these game work in the first place, so here's a quick explanation of the Pokemon game first. In that game, each player has a deck of 6 characters. Each turn, each player makes only one decision, but it's done in a double-blind simultaneous fashion. Your only choices are a) do one of your character's four possible attacks or b) switch to one of your remaining characters. So you might decide to do your attack A and your opponent might do their attack C. Then these choices are revealed simultaneously. The faster attack hits first, then the slower attack hits second. If one player chose to switch out, then their incoming Pokemon will get hit by the enemy's attack. When you lose all your characters, you lose the game.

Pokemon Is Really Complicated For No Good Reason

These mechanics are very simple, but learning Pokemon is not simple at all. To understand this, let's look at how a Pokemon player should go about deciding what to do during their turn. Why choose Attack A over B? Why switch characters instead of attacking? A lot of the strategy of the game comes from a concept called resistance. There are 17 attack types in Pokemon (such as fire, grass, psychic, dragon, etc.). There is a 17 x 17 chart telling you how good each attack type is against each other attack type. In some cases, you'll do double damage, others you'll do normal damage, others you'll do half damage, and in others, no damage at all. If you understand and internalize this chart, you can use attacks that are very effective against your enemy's resistance, and force them to attack with attacks that are weak or have no effect because of your resistances.

On top of all that, each move is classified as either a normal or special attack. Your character might have good resistance to normal attacks but weak to special attacks. That's in addition to the layer of resistances provided by the 17 x 17 chart. When both players understand this, it leads to interesting mind games. If your current active character has a very favorable matchup against my currently active character, we both know I'd like to switch out. But will I? Because of the metagame (players know which Pokemon are popular and tend to be in decks), you can probably guess which exact Pokemon I'd like to switch to in order to counter yours. If you're really clever, you'll do an attack that's strong against the Pokemon I might switch in (that you haven't even seen yet!) instead of doing the obvious move of a strong attack against my current active character.

The problem is that none of this is interesting at all until both players have internalized an unreasonable amount of data. Ironically, little kids have a better chance at this, because they have been exposed to so much Pokemon media (games, tv show, movies, card games) that they already instinctively know whether grass-type beats bug-type or not (no) and whether dark-type beats ghost-type or not (yes). We need a simpler system that doesn't require a 17x17 chart.

I decided to go with only three attack types: physical, light magic, and dark magic. Each character has three resistance numbers, one for each attack type. I also got rid of all complicated math that goes on behind the scenes. If you attack with for 15 physical damage and your opponent has 4 physical resistance, then you will do 15 - 4 = 11 damage. Very straightforward. Note that it doesn't matter how much or little resistance the enemy has to light or dark magic when you do a physical attack.

This makes the game much easier to understand, but it removes too much strategy. There isn't enough "play" in dancing between three attack types as there is in dancing between 17. I needed to create more nuances. The first was the concept of multiple-hitting attacks. The rule is that resistances are subtracted from each hit of a multi-hitting attack. For example, if an attack does 10x4 damage (that's 10 damage four times in succession), then a resistance of 3 would make it do (10-3)x4 = 28 damage. But if that same attack had been a single hit for 40, then a resistance of 3 would only take it down to 37 damage. So all things being equal, you'd rather do a single hit for 40 than a multiple hit that adds up to 40, because the single hit is less susceptible to the enemy's resistances.

There are a couple other factors to consider though. Each character has a health meter and an energy meter. The energy meter is similar to a Rogue's energy meter in World of Warcraft. It holds 100 points of energy, starts full, and refills quickly (20 points per turn). But moves cost energy to perform, so now you have to consider not just how much damage a move does, but also how much energy it costs. As part of the basic game design, it costs less energy to do a multi-hitting move for X damage than it does to do a single hit move for X damage. So the best possible case for you is if you fight an enemy with, say, no resistance at all to your multi-hitting move. You will then get to do all damage from every hit, and you didn't even have to pay the higher energy cost of a single hit. If the enemy *does* have resistance to whatever type your multi-hit move is though, it will probably be very ineffective. You'd be better off paying a bit more for a single hit move that isn't effected much by resistance.

A second thing to consider is that any bonuses you have (such as +1 damage) apply to each hit of your moves. So a multi-hit move can be powered up much more than a single-hit move. The point is, this system creates several nuances, but all of them are governed by straight arithmetic and no elaborate chart is needed.

Character Switching

One of the major changes I made was the character switching mechanic. As always, when you switch character, you gave up your chance to attack that turn. But Kongregate's game needed more ways for you to maneuver around attacks. Without the vast design space of the 17 x 17 chart, you needed some extra ways to avoid stuff when you know it's coming. This is why in Kongregate's game, switching characters lets you COMPLETELY AVOID all damage from your enemy's attack. If you know they will attack, you can make them waste the energy they paid to attack, and make them deal zero damage. Of course, they'll need a counter to this if they know you will switch, which is why I added the new mechanic called intercept.

Intercept does nothing at all if the enemy attacks—you just get hit. But if the enemy switches characters, your intercept will prevent the switch AND deal 35 damage, a huge amount. That means your opponent skipped their attack (because they chose to switch characters instead), they don't get to switch, and they take a huge amount of damage. This intentionally creates a game of rock, paper, scissors with highly weighted outcomes. If you have an opponent down to very little life, everyone knows they want to switch out (they'll heal one hit point per turn while switched out, by the way). Or, if your opponent's character has little or no energy left to pay for moves, everyone knows they want to switch out. So the "textbook" thing to do is to intercept them in this case. This creates a good mind game where you have to read how crazy your opponent is. Are they crazy enough to actually attack when his character has 2 hit points left? Are they crazy enough to attack two turns in a row? Three turns in a row?!

Fighting at Close or Far Range

So far, we have energy meter management, we have paper/rock/scissors system of attack/intercept/switch, and we have single/multi-hit attacks and three types of resistances. This almost gives the players enough wiggle room to use good strategy, but I wanted players to have one more tricky way to influence the fight: attack ranges.

Each turn, the fight will take place at either close range or far range. Each attack in the game is designated as either a close range attack, a far range attack, or both (can be done at either range). Some characters must be far to be most effective, others must be close to be most effective, and others are able to fight at both ranges. This mechanic lets you try to change the range in order to get an advantage, but it's intentionally expensive to change ranges: it costs 50 energy points (half your energy meter) to attempt to change it.

This brings the total number of decisions per turn from 1 to 2. Now, you must first decide whether you want to try to get close (50 energy), try to get far (50 energy) or just go with the flow (0 energy). If you decide to go with the flow (which you usually will because spending 50 energy is a lot), then you're allowing the enemy to pick the range for the turn. If one player chooses close and the other chooses far, then the choices cancel each other and the range is set to whatever it was last turn.

The double-blind nature of the choice can make it a hard decision sometimes. Imagine that you are playing a character who is great at close range, but poor at far range. The range is currently close (yay!) but now you must choose which range you want for this turn. You'd like to pass (go with the flow), so'll get to keep your 50 energy and fight at your optimal range. But your opponent might move to far and then you'll be very unhappy. To guard against this, you decide to choose close range (50 energy) even though you're already at close range. This guarantees you'll fight at close range, because if the enemy chooses far, that will just cancel out your choice and the range will remain the same. So you choose close (50 energy). Remember this choice is double-blind, so after you committed your choice, it's revealed that your enemy chose to pass (0 energy). You psyched yourself out into spending 50 energy for nothing. The fight would have been at close range even if you passed.

One good thing about the range mechanic is that it's visual. Your characters on-screen are either standing far apart or close together, and it's obvious which range you're at. It's also a lot easier to deal with three resistances in your head than it is to deal with 17. It's easier to deal with simple arithmetic that you can easily compute yourself before you attack, than relying on a hidden algorithm to determine stats and damage. And finally, it's easier to actually participate in the paper, rock, scissors part of the game with attack/switch/dodge than it is to participate in the 17 x 17 version of the paper, rock, scissors in Pokemon.

Focus on Strategy and Reading the Opponent

And yet for all this simplification, you still have a lot of opportunity to be smart and sneaky. I've only told you the basic skeleton of the game, but there's also a lot of twists and turns added because every character has their own special ability (that automatically takes place—you don't have to click anything to make it happen). Also, every attack has a chance at producing an extra effect of some sort. And finally, as in Pokemon, you can equip one item card to each character which gives them even one more automatic ability. None of these require any extra clicks from you, but they create more opportunity for strategy.

With attack/switch/intercept, resistances, changing ranges, and automatic special abilities, you can really size-up what kind of person you think your opponent is and start to outplay them by reading what you think they will do. There's enough going on that players tend to develop patterns you can use against them. And most importantly of all, it's relatively easy for players to go from beginners with no clue about anything to intermediates who grasp enough of the game to develop decision tendencies.