Post by Tyler Legrand on May 6, 2015 4:00:31 GMT
Recently, I read an article about Bloodborne by Tim Rogers (he's famous for writing long, long, articles):
www.gamasutra.com/view/news/240839/Bloodborne_You_are_the_experience_points.php
In this article, he talks a lot about "action warm-ups", a term I assume he invented or got somewhere, to describe what Bloodborne does very well. The thing is, a term already exists for that and I know all about it because it's very well studied in the animation industry. In our world it's called anticipation:
The earliest example I remember of a game that has something like this would be Prince of Persia. It was difficult to control because you had to anticipate those running jumps before you made them, just like in real life.
Anyway, a while back I watched an Extra Credits which talked about the animation in Punch-Out!:
It praised the game for having the enemy characters display a lot of anticipation before their actions, while, unlike in the Souls series, the player character had pretty much no wind-up before his actions at all. The enemy animation looked both fun and informative while the player character had minimal animation (which is fine; the player is not paying attention to him) and snappy controls.
This reminds me of an interview about Metroid: Other M, wherein the designers described how they handled the transition from 2D sprites to 3D models. Initially, they animated Samus pulling her gun out in a logical way before shooting. However, this meant that players had to wait for Samus to get her gun out before shooting, which was contrary to the older games, when pressing the button got Samus to shoot instantly. Therefore they scrapped the anticipation animation entirely, in favour of snappy controls.
Because of the design decisions I read about, I assumed that player characters should very rarely have anticipation before actions, lest they annoy players with 'sluggish' controls. I certainly loved being able to get out of sticky situations on a whim in Mario games with their super-responsive controls. But now, considering the success of the Souls series, I wonder if more people than I thought loved delayed actions as part of gameplay.
So what do you guys think
www.gamasutra.com/view/news/240839/Bloodborne_You_are_the_experience_points.php
In this article, he talks a lot about "action warm-ups", a term I assume he invented or got somewhere, to describe what Bloodborne does very well. The thing is, a term already exists for that and I know all about it because it's very well studied in the animation industry. In our world it's called anticipation:
The earliest example I remember of a game that has something like this would be Prince of Persia. It was difficult to control because you had to anticipate those running jumps before you made them, just like in real life.
Anyway, a while back I watched an Extra Credits which talked about the animation in Punch-Out!:
It praised the game for having the enemy characters display a lot of anticipation before their actions, while, unlike in the Souls series, the player character had pretty much no wind-up before his actions at all. The enemy animation looked both fun and informative while the player character had minimal animation (which is fine; the player is not paying attention to him) and snappy controls.
This reminds me of an interview about Metroid: Other M, wherein the designers described how they handled the transition from 2D sprites to 3D models. Initially, they animated Samus pulling her gun out in a logical way before shooting. However, this meant that players had to wait for Samus to get her gun out before shooting, which was contrary to the older games, when pressing the button got Samus to shoot instantly. Therefore they scrapped the anticipation animation entirely, in favour of snappy controls.
Because of the design decisions I read about, I assumed that player characters should very rarely have anticipation before actions, lest they annoy players with 'sluggish' controls. I certainly loved being able to get out of sticky situations on a whim in Mario games with their super-responsive controls. But now, considering the success of the Souls series, I wonder if more people than I thought loved delayed actions as part of gameplay.
So what do you guys think