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Hello! I'm Joakim Sandberg.
Today I'm learning from Metroid Fusion.
I'm here to talk about games I've personally loved -
- and how I feel I've learned from them.
I've had billions of people mail me and ask how I think while making games -
- so I guess this could work as an outlet for that.
This will be a brief study of the kind of action flow I love in games.
In action games, getting a feeling of plowing through your adversities is real important to me.
Most people when they bring up the game they love for its flow will be a game they played to death.
Very likely in their youth.
That's much more of an achieved fluency from perfecting your knowledge of a game.
I'm also guilty of excusing lots of games in my past that have things I take issue with now -
- because I still remember their structure.
But I try to recognize that if I played them for the first time today -
- I'd probably be... less enthusiastic.
I'd rather like to think about designs to make games go as smoothly as possible as soon as possible.
There shouldn't have to be a slow stream of things to learn and master over time.
Here we can see controls that don't feel like they interrupt your momentum.
Run and shoot, locking aim, shoot freely while climbing or hanging -
- some aim assist, and so on.
The simplest way to fluent controls is letting you do things while moving.
Or perhaps be able to avoid needing to be absolutely precise with the controls.
Not all types of games need that much freedom though.
Being able to move through old areas faster because of your new abilities is great.
Stacking upgrades is fun!
It avoids menu navigation or item cycling to instead expand on your old abilities.
This in turn circumvents learning and getting used to new controls.
You're still likely as good as you were before.
The stacking also opens up the ability of just one button to activate all secondary weapons.
Context sensitivity, like standing or being a morph ball, is a great way to keep it simple.
Other good examples are something like ”Super Mario Bros 3”.
Where your different suits change the function of the ”B”-button.
And how a unique game like Donkey Kong Jungle Beat uses the clap to do a multitude of things.
Context sensitivity lets you be really varied with just a few inputs in a game.
I'm a fan of low amounts of buttons.
Sometimes limitations can really foster innovation, especially in flow of controls.
It's great when an area you've visited before changes when you revisit it -
- telling the player that he or she is not lost.
When a game takes place in a large and free roaming area having your actions regularly change visuals can act as a much more subdued way of telling players where to go.
Instead of giant red indicators flinging words at you.
And as such the player feels more in control and always progressing.
You'll never see every type of game able to employ it -
- but having important story events happen while you're playing is always much more immersive than being locked down talking.
But it would only work if the story was universally understandable and motivating enough to only use imagery.
Metroid Fusion is a poor example of this.
But Super Metroid is a classic very much for this reason -
- as well as the first Half-Life.
It can help make the entire game feel like the story instead of the separated gameplay sections between story-time.
Plenty of players love challenge in their games -
- but most games seem to create challenge by increasing enemy health.
And it can get to a point where progression instead becomes slow.
A lot of modern action games lock you in enemy spawning arenas -
- fighting very resilient enemies.
There are of course reasons for this, not necessarily poor choice.
Like wanting to let players juggle enemies -
- or just that level design has become incredibly complex in recent years.
I vastly prefer an increase in weak enemies before I see an increase in enemy health.
Or perhaps the behavior of the enemies change, not their hit points.
Like plenty of arcade games -
- Metroid Fusion doesn't shy away from letting you kill enemies in single hits -
- or at least very few of them.
Using things like the charge beam and especially missiles.
If an enemy takes more than one hit you can generally shoot enough projectiles between you and the enemy to avoid breaking momentum.
Something introduced in Super Metroid was the charge shot jump.
It kills anything that would die from a charge shot -
- and it even makes you invincible to some enemy fire.
If you hit an enemy the charge gets spent -
- but you recharge quickly.
Moves like this lets you run through easier rooms with great fluency.
Easy kills can also bring the player a greater feeling of being powerful and highly skilled at what they're doing.
There are of course times when figuring out how to beat enemies or following a cool pattern to weaken them -
- is satisfying in a whole other way.
The jumping in Metroid games is one of a kind with its usually single horizontal speed.
What makes jumping feel the best interestingly seems to vary the most between games.
Examples of games I like which have different jumping include Super Mario, where your momentum has to be counter-acted to stop -
- but lets you do satisfying things like keep going by bouncing on enemies by just holding jump.
Yoshi's Island, where the gravity really acts quickly when you're jumping but you have the hovering move to really let you avoid falling into traps.
And Metroid, where jumping is just one speed and it locks your momentum until you stop flipping -
- which interestingly makes the controls very precise and predictable.
There are other games with special jumping like Super Ghouls and Ghosts -
- or maybe Castlevania -
- but do it as a bigger challenge.
While I'm not a fan of that approach it's still interesting to look at.
The Metroid games often have the Space Jump ability, and a Metroid Fusion addition I love -
- is pressing jump in mid-air from a straight jump that causes you to start flipping-
- making shooting while jumping and going back into Space Jumping without landing, really fun.
The wall jumping in the game is also a fun feature that helps moving around faster.
But it's not the simplest of moves -
- although far more lenient than it was in Super Metroid.
If there's anything that breaks flow for me it's dying and replaying what I just went through.
To me the best parts is when I made it through something and only just survived.
As a game designer that's impossible to predict for every kind of player -
- but the point is the idea of death is there to make the player want to avoid it -
- not part of the gameplay itself.
Fusion aids this idea by having several health expansion tanks placed where they know a player might have just lost a lot of health.
There have been and alway will be games that work perfectly fine with deaths.
But the good games in those genres perfect the controls so that dying always feels like an error on the player's end -
- not the developer's.
And they tend to start you off near, or exactly where you died.
I've been talking randomly about action gameplay flow. Now, it's impossible for a game to be perfect.
You aren't likely to find a game that always manages to avoid stopping, or a game that flawlessly has every player pull off a jump.
I certainly won't be making flawless games because I can't predict how people will play what I make -
- and I can't take every precaution.
But I do what I can based on what has felt great to me in the past.
I hope you enjoyed this nitpicking-session of small details.
It's something at least I'm really interested in analyzing -
- and I hope you found something interesting in it too.
Thanks for watching.
Well, I have to go now!