Dependencies - Designing Games - page 335

Falls down only makes sense if there is an attack to be doing when you
get hit—in this case, spin-kick . The sweep dodge is an ability meant to com-
pensate for the falls down weakness, so there's no point in doing it before
falls down . Finally, wall jump is an extension of basic speed , and handspring
kick is a special attacking version of the wall jump .
As always, given different design details, this stack could be different.
Speed and wall jump , for example, could easily exchange places. This stack
reflects my imagined paper design.
Every part of the design has some uncertainty tag:
• Spin-kick This has just a little uncertainty, because it is derivative of
attacks we've seen in other games. The main uncertainty is in the
tuning of its radius and timing. If it turns out that the spin-kick works
better when it lasts a half second instead of the three seconds the de-
signers anticipated, changes might ripple upward into other abilities.
• Falls down This is very uncertain. Designer's intuition says that being
stunned might just be too frustrating, meaning we would have to re-
place this entirely.
• Speed There are technology-driven uncertainties here. Nonstandard,
physics-driven locomotion is always difficult to implement well. AI
might have trouble anticipating it or navigating with it, and players
might have trouble controlling it. It might need redesign or removal.
• Wall jump This has similar risks as speed , with added problems for AI
navigating along pathways that are usually inaccessible. The control
system for wall jumping will also likely need a few redesigns.
• Handspring kick This is not so uncertain in itself, but handspring
kick is vulnerable to a lot of cascading uncertainty from lower-level
systems.
• Sweep dodge This is straightforward on its own, but it's vulnerable to
cascading uncertainty from below.
We shouldn't just plow ahead with that entire design as though it's
guaranteed to work. It probably won't. As with Fantasy Castle , we should
find the core and liquefy everything else into the design backlog.
Capp's core gameplay is probably spin-kick , speed . Together, these two
allow him to fulfill his unique speed demon role, which is useful and
distinct from other characters. It looks like this: