Through the Lens: Video Games - Game Design Theory - page 98

problem, which is that their designs are driven by the theme and not the
mechanics.
The first serious problem with brawlers is the issue of Z-order. Any-
one who has played a brawler knows that in almost any of these games
your enemies can never attack you as long as you stay out of their Z-
orders. That's a dominant strategy in just about any brawler I've ever
played. Unfortunately, it's also a source of confusion, because it's not al-
ways clear if you're precisely on the Z-order of opponents or not. This is-
sue of Z-order plays into another issue that comes up with third-person
games as well.
Also, most brawlers are not randomized; they're totally linear. This
means that after a few plays, players will begin to memorize large chunks
of the early game. If players have already memorized optimal moves, the
game is dead .
The games are also, frankly, gigantic messes that are held togeth-
er only by their themes (and even those have holes in them). You have
health bars, which already is questionable (I'll get to this in the section
on fighting games), but then you also have lives, each of which, when
consumed, fills your health bar. On top of that, though, you also usually
have continues , which fill your lives counter when consumed. You can
see that these three mechanisms are essentially all expressing the same
element, but obscuring it at the same time by putting it into three differ-
ent denominations.
And I hope that I don't need to explain how it's insane, illogical, and
possibly even immoral to allow a player to essentially buy more in-game
strength by putting more quarters into a machine, but the recent rise of
social games and in-app purchases makes me wonder. If you have 100
dollars to spend on any coin-op brawler, it doesn't stand a chance. This is
in stark contrast to the older model of using credits, which allowed more
plays of a game, but still started you from the beginning when you died.
By the end of the arcade era, credit meant “continue,� or “you now get a
free health bar multiplied by a set of lives.�
Some suggestions for building better brawlers follow.
Ignore the Theme for Now
Punching bad guys is thematic—mechanically, though, what is your game
about? Is it about controlling space on the screen? Is it about synergies
between tactical moves? Is it about managing resources? Maybe your
game is about predicting randomized patterns of enemy movement. The
point is, start out asking the right questions.