Differing Control Schemes for Different Characters

I was thinking about fighting games and came up with a cool concept for a character. One of his abilities would be to propel himself in a direction determined by player input. Traditionally in fighting games, you're limited to a eight directions for stuff like that (left, right, up, down, and diagonals). The way I envisioned the character, however, was with fine control over direction which the player could achieve by using a mouse or analog stick.

So that made me wonder if it would be a bad idea to have some characters of a fighting game have a different control scheme than others. My initial thoughts are that it allows for more variety in character mechanics which may be nice. But trying out a new character might come with an increased learning curve if the control scheme is new to the player.

I was wondering if y'all had any insights into what else I may need to consider if I were to do something like this. When would doing something like this would be appropriate, if ever?

 

This all sounds like pretty standard stuff. What you're describing sounds a lot of a game like Gauntlet (or one of its many versions), where you can pick from various characters that each have a different play style, a different set of moves/abilities, etc. Generally it's considered part of the "fun" to try out different characters.

One way I could see this being badly implemented is if you're forced to play as all the different characters over the course of the game. Players aren't always in the mood to have their progress essentially reset, and to have to learn a new character. But if you give them to option to do that at any time, I think it works well.

 

I meant more than just a set of new abilities. That is pretty standard for sure. I'm not all to familiar with Gauntlet other than the general concept. Do any of the different characters mess with control schemes?

 

Well, i wouldn't think that it would be that difficult to do, but probably needs to be implemented well in terms of the character balance. I'm just gona quote Guilty Gear since i'm most familiar with that. Most characters have the standard walk run, airdash etc, but certain characters move differently. Potemkin for example, cannot run, air dash or side step. Slayer cannot run, but his dash is a teleport. Eddie's movements control his pets as well so you need to pay a lot of attention to movement in order to take care of pet positioning. I-No's forward "dash" is in fact a 30 degrees upwards flight/air dash.

What you described, correct me if i'm wrong, sound like a flying or floating character which you can control their movement/position analog stick (we tend to use arcade sticks for fighting games though ). Your main concern if this is true, would be game balance. This is one of the main reasons people don't have true flying characters in a roster where no one else can fly, It would be too easy to cheese, and probably immune to a whole segment of attacks such as sweeps and so on. Guilty gear has air dash variants and float, MVC has "Fly" but limited to 2s, but I don't remember any popular fighting game with true flying.

If you are thinking of one of those "unlockable bosses", EX Characters, story or non-standard roster/tournament characters, then go wild, the sky's the limit. I do remember a fighting game with a playable boss character who could actually fly but I don't remember which (it was a bonus character/unlockable, and not usable in tournament/multiplayer play, only in single player play)

 

Check out unholy war for the PS one.

It’s a strategy fighting game where all the fighters are drastically different.

 

I think anything can be fun if you commit to it.

You just got to make a prototype and play it. One by one find the parts that annoy and refashion them. Eventually it will work, even if it has changed a lot from the original plan.

It's not exactly clear if you are talking about characters having different movesets or that like, the punch button and kick button are swapped from character to character. I think that would just make the game hard to play for most people and add nothing. But maybe that's not what you meant.

 

Ah yah it seems I wasn't the most clear about what I was trying to say. It is not uncommon for games to have different characters have different moves. I am not referring to that. I also think it would be a very bad idea to swap attack buttons just for the hell of it (unless the goal is to confuse the player) lol

To clarify, I wanted to have most characters controlled using the keyboard alone (assuming the player is not using a controller or other interface). But for one specific character, I wanted the player to have analog control over his flight ability to determine what direction he is flying in. Naturally you don't have analog control on a keyboard to do this so my thought was to just have that player use a keyboard and mouse to get analog control via moving the mouse.

This led me to wondering about switching up control schemes to cater to different characters in general. Perhaps there's a character who can attack in a direction that he is not facing unlike the other characters so the player may need to use another set of keys to specify an attack direction. In this case, the key bindings might look something like WASD to move and IJKL to attack with each of those buttons representing a different attack direction.

I hope that clarified things

Will do when I get the chance!

The original game idea was just a single player story game where most of the enemies have some form of ranged attack so flying could be quite deadly at times. I have, however, begun thinking about a more standard fighting game mode that would be multiplayer where flying would for sure lend itself to some cheese .-. Definitely a good point if I decide to go through with adding that multiplayer mode.

 

maybe it could work but I think you'd have to be careful about it so that people dont have to like fire an entirely different side of the brain to play another character. i dunno what the major hook is with the fighting game genre but to me that just sounds like too much work to have to swap my muscle memory from one character to another.

It's not something I'd try to do unless I already had a straightforward fighting game made that was working in it's simplest form, and then I had spare time to dink around just for the fun of it with this idea. It could become something cool you never know but the first thing is it sounds like more work and there isn't any obvious reward for it.

you never know unless you try it though.

 

Yah this is my biggest concern.

True that. I'll be thinking about it.

 

It's common in fighting games for most character to have very similar inputs, or at least have the core inputs be the same per character. Plenty of fighting games will have a small number of inputs specific to each or certain characters, often for special/super moves.

I like the idea of having the core inputs being the same. Players can pick up any character and get right into it. Then they only have to master a few extra character specific components.

You can also have most of the characters using the same inputs, with just a few 'gimmick' characters completely changing it up. Or a lesser example, in Smash Bros Ultimate, nearly all the characters have the same inputs. However the guest characters from traditional fighting game origins, (Ken, Ryu, Kazuya), also have their proper motion inputs on top of the existing inputs. Anyone can play these characters, but only good players can use them to their full potential.

I'm not super in with the fighting game community these days, but best I can remember, they always value interesting takes on the genre. Complexity is appreciated, and they will put in the miles to figure out what's optimal.

All that said, breaking into the fighting game genre is very hard as there's a number of games forever sitting on the throne.

 

Oh interesting. I did not know about the characters with motion inputs in Smash. All useful info and stuff I'll think about as I decide where I want this game to go. I guess that's what prototyping is for.