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designs. I'll use the popular example of Street Fighter II (I'm most fa-
miliar with the original SNES version of the game) to illustrate what I
mean.
Let's imagine for a moment that we have a fictional version of Street
Fighter that has only a single character, Ryu (a basic Karate Man type
of character who has a super uppercut, a fireball, and a flying spin-kick
move). The game consists entirely of Ryus fighting other Ryus, or mirror
matches as they're known. First of all, realize that this absolutely would
be a complete game—there would be nothing wrong with a Ryu-only
Street Fighter game. If you think it would get boring, then there's a prob-
lem with Street Fighter 's overall design, because every matchup should be
interesting, including mirror matches. Interestingly, many fans of asym-
metrical games generally seem to think that it's OK if an asymmetrical
game has uninteresting mirror matches.
So let's say the game, with its one character, has a rating of ten com-
plexity points, a completely made-up unit of measure that loosely signi-
fies how complicated the game-system is. We should assume that even
under these circumstances, the game is interesting, and that therefore it
will be quite difficult to design and balance (making interesting games is
always hard, after all!). Let's assume that Ryu takes up eight or so of the
ten complexity points, or about 80%. What does the remaining 20% go
to? Well, there are health bars, a best-two-out-of-three match system,
and a big rectangular stage with walls on either side. Of course, not all
games put so much of their complexity into characters, but for Street
Fighter I think that's the case.
What if we add in another character? How many complexity points
would we be looking at now? That depends largely on how different the
other character is from Ryu: if the character is just a recolor, the game is
no more complex and the total number of complexity points would still
be ten. If he's a character like Ken (who has all the same moves as Ryu, but
slightly different stats), then we might have to take that character com-
plexity (which was nine points) and add to it. If the character is different
enough, though, we might be adding around four complexity points to
our game. Adding two more characters, for a total of four, would make
the game roughly twice as complicated as it was when we started! If your
characters are significantly different from each other (which they should
be—otherwise the reasons for introducing asymmetry are diminished,
and the game simply becomes fuzzier and less clear), you can see that
the amount of complexity in your game will skyrocket with 20 or more
characters, like most fighting games have.
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