EVO 2014 - Counting Frames - Frank Lantz
At the risk of becoming a Frank Lantz fanboy blog, I am posting Frank's most recent talk from EVO. The thing about frank's talks is that they're simultaneously deep, accessible, enjoyable, and broad, yet somehow tightly thematic. How could I resist?
While this recent talk veers a smidge early on to promote NYU GameCenter and EVO itself (which is super appropriate for the venue but not so exciting for the context of this blog), it contains many little perfect gems of information to make up for it. So stick with it.
I'm a little shocked that I've never seen a talk weave actual real-life-fighting-sports in with the context of digital esports. From the very first video (which is insanely perfect), Frank weaves these two topics deftly, getting down to the fundamental truths of fighting games, fighting sports, fighting culture... and really just, culture.
For a long time when I first started making videogames I made action games. Some of them were straight action like Bit Pilot, and some of them were action puzzle like Unify. After seeing Area Code/Frank's Drop7, I got this idea that timing was sort of a cheat. That I could design these moderately involved systems, and then instead of perfecting them, I could just put them on a timer, and that would fix whatever was broken. Drop7 seemed so extraordinarily elegant precisely because it didn't do that. Its turn-based nature made it a "more elegant" design.
So I made that kind of game for a while. SpellTower, Guts of Glory, etc. I'm still in that phase with a card game roguelike i'm working on and a billiards game. Both turn-based, both heavy on the systemic elegance.
This talk makes me want to take what I've learned and make an action/systems game again. Maybe that'll be next.
One last thought. One other thing that this talk reminded me of that Frank didn't reference is OODA loops. I was originally introduced to the concept by my friend Amit Pitaru. Just learning about them made me better at both Poker and Starcraft 2, although admittedly, I'm still not great at either.
The thing that OODA loops point out is that it's more important to be able to make faster decisions than your opponent than it is to make better decisions than them. This is because fast "decent" decisions are based off more up-to-date information than your opponents "great" slow decisions. Your fast decisions can actually ruin their slow ones. OODA loops are why Street Fighter players do that little dance of ducks and tiny steps. They're also why APM (actions per minute) actually matter for players of starcraft 2. It's a cool practice that worked great for the US Air Force, and worked okay for me.