Whose job is to pull separate systems together? For example, when the FPS player fires, an animation plays, an enemy is damaged and killed which gives experience triggering a level up, an ally barks plays, and the player automatically reloads, playing a different animation. Who brings all those different events together?

It's usually the most senior engineers who bring all of this stuff together. They have a good understanding of how the various game systems work and how to build those systems to work within the way the program itself works. Every game system has three major elements in common - whether to do the thing, when to do the thing, and what "do the thing" entails.

Whether to do the thing is the set of conditions under which the thing happens. Each system usually has a set of necessary conditions under which they start - leveling up requires crossing certain XP thresholds, which necessitates checking for things like how much XP the character has and what level he already is.

When to do the thing is how the game handles task performance timing. For example, we probably don't want a fireball spell to generate a fireball specifically when the player presses the cast button - we want the character to perform a casting animation that ends with a specific pointing animation, and then we want the fireball to appear from the character's hand when the character points. The animator needs to mark the animation frame at which the fireball appears, and the bone (pointing finger) as the position to make the fireball appear.

What "do the thing" is pretty much handling the event when it happens. Most games usually have some kind of core event system where the game will fire a specific kind of event on a given frame with relevant context (who did it, who the target is, where, any other necessary context, etc.) and event handlers are set up to listen for specific event types, see the event, and do what they are set up to do when that event happens. This can mean "do damage", "play vfx", "save the game", or whatever. Event handlers can also fire off their own sub-events with their own conditions and timings (e.g. "cast a spell" can fire off "play this animation", which can fire off a "spawn VFX (fireball)" event).

Essentially, the senior engineers that are familiar with how game systems work and interact with each other are the ones who ensure that all of the work plays nicely with how the software is built. It's kind of like visualizing a flow chart and making sure that each sub-section works the way it should on its own and within the greater context of the overall game flow.

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Got a burning question you want answered?

why elves. aren't they just girls but like. long in the wrong way

what's wrong with girls who are long in the wrong way

Is it possible for a character who is 18cm shorter and not as muscled as their opponent to pin said opponent to the ground in a few calculated moves? Both characters are fit and exercise regularly, but the shorter character has trained in various martial arts (with and without weapons) and the taller one is more proficient in sword duelling. My intent is to write a sparring scene where the shorter character humbles the (overconfident) taller one. Any specific martial arts I should look at?

So... being shorter doesn't matter. In fact, in this situation, it is an advantage.

I'm going to point out here that if you're not careful, your character that you want to have a badass moment is going to look like an complete asshole because they are humiliating another character who they actually are better than. If they haven't been trading off humiliations to build tension (safely so no one gets hurt) then you're going to have a lopsided “sparring” session. Or, you will, if you haven't been building up your narrative to support the humbling. (And there is a lot that goes into these scenes to make them work, which, if you're not familiar with how martial arts training works then you'll approach it from the wrong mindset and hit Starke's pet peeve.)

Let's hit the ground running with the high points:

Sparring is not dueling.

Sparring is not play fighting.

Sparring is not so you can humiliate your opponent.

Sparring is not about fighting anyone or anything.

Sparring is a training exercise so that both of you can work on improving specific techniques.

Do people in real life get carried away sparring? Yes, they do. Are they complete competitive idiots about it? Yes, they are. Do they get punished for it? Absolutely, they do. This is especially true where they'll be expected to put their lives on the line. Treating violence like a game is detrimental, and leaves the trainee ill-prepared for dealing with real danger when in the field. Make no mistake, that is exactly the mindset you are describing in this question. Your characters (at least your minor ones, the trainers in this situation if your leads are too young or too dumb to comprehend their reality) should care about stomping this attitude out. And you as the author should to. Why? Because if you don't take the violence in your narrative seriously neither will your audience.

There are rules, as a writer it's imperative you establish the rules (and there no rules means you haven't established them for violence in your setting and therefore won't be able to establish the baseline that can be built upon later) and one of the rules is that you're not going to spar someone with a weapon (wood or otherwise) unless you both have weapons. There's not a lot of value in having one character spar with a weapon and one spar without one unless it's a knife, and the point is learning the dangers of knife fighting. And knives make sense because they are in the same distance range as fists. Swords are in a completely separate distance category. They are mid-range weapons.

You don't practice disarms by sparring, you practice disarms by practicing disarms in a controlled setting where you're repeating the motion over and over. Can you humiliate a person by being good at practice disarms? Yes. You do it by being a complete dick. It also requires the character in question to be better at the moves in question than the other character performing them because they need to be able to confidently, or at least believe they can, counter the other person's growing anger while taking the move a step further or two than they're supposed to. It also means they can get away with it without arousing the suspicions of their instructor (or act with their instructors approval) and no one gets hurt. (We hope.) For a character to do this is a sign of overconfidence, FYI. As is trying to humiliate someone in a sparring session. The characters that are good enough? They don't do it.

In fiction, good sparring scenes serve one real purpose. They establish a baseline of skill in safe setting so the audience becomes comfortable only for that to be disrupted and thrown into chaos when the characters encounter real violence. There's two paths for this. Either the character is a big winner only to be brutally beaten later, or they get dumped on their ass to find that they're actually much better prepared than they thought later when it matters. That's why so many stories with these scenes dump their MC on their ass, especially in any Wuxia or Shounen manga. This is because the authors of these stories understand that sparring has no reflection on how well a person will do when they're allowed out of the training safe space. If your baseline is: my character is awesome. Then it's all downhill from that point on.

Say it with me, Losses Create Tension. If your character is winning all the time, you have no tension and your fight scenes will be boring. The goal when it comes to creating a character who is good at fighting is to make other characters look better. Or, from an antagonistic/mentor point they exist to establish the height our MCs must eventually reach/how much further they have to go in their journey. Kakashi's fight with Zabuza or the first fight between Itachi and Sasuke in Naruto are both great examples of how to do this well.

I'm not saying you can't write a sparring scene like the one you intend. I can't tell you to do anything, what I want to you to start doing is considering the implications of the scene, what it may say about your world and characters that you didn't intend, and it's overall impact on the whole of your narrative. Narrative gratification here is work you'll need to do to build back your tension later. Is it a win your MC can afford?

Now, you can look at any martial art that has a ground fighting component for what you want to do unless you're planning on having the duelist spar with their sword. If you want that, you're going to have to do a lot more work with a smaller pool. This will be doubly true if your characters are of European descent and you want to avoid the East Asian martial art styles.

Type: “how do you knock your opponent off balance?” into Google and you'll find a lot of variations.

The basic concept behind putting someone on the ground isn't strength, it's balance. The key is disrupting your opponent's balance. If you're skilled enough or your opponent's footwork is bad enough, it can be done in a single move. In fact, it can be done a variety of different ways from a variety of different moves from countless different martial arts. The question isn't can it be done, the question is how does your character want to do it? The fact they are short only helps them because their center of gravity will be lower than their opponent's, they don't have to work as hard to maintain their balance, their stance doesn't have to be as deep, and they will have an easier time knocking a taller person over. Most people who've never practiced martial arts have no idea how foundational the footwork is or how important the feet are to staying upright.

I personally like reviewing Silat for studying balance, not necessarily for techniques, but because I find their instruction on the concept easy to grasp/digest. They do the string on the top of the head and the balance triangle, which if you can wrap your mind around that you'll be able to conceptualize fight scenes where the character focuses on knocking an opponent off balance better. 

The above is a more advanced video, but if you have no martial arts background or even a sports background whatsoever then you want to aim for instructional videos that focus on concepts over techniques. The advice is always write what you know and if you don't know learn. Copying techniques onto the page won't create a great fight scene. Understanding the concept, philosophy, and basic body mechanics behind the techniques will get you much further. None of them are stand ins for real experience or doing it yourself. If you really want to be good at it, find a martial art you like, find a school nearby, and invest the time.

All of your characters' martial arts moves (whether they are dueling with a sword or fighting hand to hand) function around the body's center of gravity. Your center of gravity is slightly above your hips and in your core muscles i.e your abdominal muscles. They will be trained so maintaining their balance is second nature. When martial artists talk about overextending, they're talking about putting your weight past your balance point which puts you in danger of losing your balance/falling over or being grabbed, kicked, etc and getting thrown, tripped, or forced into a fall. This can happen when you're throwing a punch, doing a kick, lunging with your sword, or doing any other sort of movement. You end up in a position where your balance between your front and back leg is destabilized, which creates the opening for your opponent to throw you. Or when you fall over on the ice, because that happens too.

Some other martial arts to turn to:

Judo

Jiu Jutsu

Aikido

Baguazhang (Seen in Avatar the Last Airbender as the basis for Air Bending)

Tai Chi Chuan

Northern Shaolin

Taekwondo (if you want to do it via kicks, all kicking martial arts innately focus on balance)

Krav Maga

Ninjutsu

The list goes on.

I also recommend dipping your toes into live action martial arts flicks to start getting yourself accustomed to more complex choreography. This is getting yourself out of the animated space (like in anime) and into the space where you have to watch a live person perform the techniques. Asian cinema has a different choreography style than the US does, because there are different cultural expectations. Overall, the choreography is more intricate and they break the action down a lot more (as opposed to American media where they zoom out to cover for the stunt double.) It's easier to see how the bodies are working and they put a lot more focus on destabilizing balance as part of the fight sequences. Hollywood doesn't get into the weird martial arts shit unless it's an actual martial arts action film. You can also do an Avatar the Last Airbender/Legend of Korra deep dive because the action there is also usually on point, but I'm a proponent of going to the source when you want to learn something. So, you know watch Alchemy of Souls instead.

-Michi

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🌤️ Share your favorite mechanic from a game you’re working on.

I have a lot of mechanics in Eureka that I really really really love and have hardly seen anything similar to them anywhere else, but for the purposes of this ask I’m going to be answering with one of the unique ones that we haven’t talked about on here yet: The Woo Roll.

The Woo Roll is a special roll named in honor of director John Woo, well-known for his bombastic and extravagant use of practical effects in shootout scenes. Eureka boasts exciting and realistically dangerous firearms combat, and what better way to make deadly firearms combat more exciting in a theater-of-the-mind or grid-based shootout than by adding flavor and flare that emulates Hardboiled?

Firstly, it should be noted that it’s actually relatively hard to hit a target in Eureka firearm combat, doing so requires a fairly high roll. That means that participants are going to be doing a lot of missing. Besides just having a higher Firearms skill, the best way to increase one’s chance to hit is by firing more bullets in a single turn in the hopes that at least one of those shots will roll high enough to hit, which is why automatic weapons are more powerful than others: It usually only takes one single bullet hitting to disable a human target, so even with a low Firearms skill, firing more bullets at once greatly increases the chance that at least one will hit.

However, realistically, most shootouts in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy will be done using semi-automatic pistols, which are only capable of firing a maximum of 2 shots per turn. We don’t want to make our combat be just and endless boring montra of “shoot, miss, shoot, miss, shoot, miss”.

So, how do we make missed shots fun?

The answer is the Woo Roll.

The Woo Roll is one of the few rolls in Eureka that doesn’t use 2D6, it only uses 1 D6.

(Quick note for those unaware: While Eureka is NOT a PbtA game, it does use a similar system of “Failure, Partial Success, and Full Success”, three possible outcomes of a dice roll instead of just Success and Failure.)

When firing a gun, all bullets fired that turn are rolled separately (we have a special speed-rolling system for when you’re firing more than 3 bullets in one turn but that’s a different post). A Full Success(10+ on a 2D6 roll) is required to hit the intended target with any given bullet, a Partial Success(7-9) and a Failure(2-6) both miss. But this is where the Woo Roll comes in.

I’ll let the actual Eureka rulebook take it from here.

As you can see here, missed shots in Eureka still have some effect on the environment and situation, even if they do not kill their intended target. This ensures that a roll in firearm combat will always do something even if it is a miss, and reminds the players of one of the fundamental rules of gun safety: Don't just be sure of your target, be sure of what's behind your target! High-velocity lead doesn't stop being destructive just because it flew a little too far to the left!

The fact that a Woo Roll is much more likely to have a negative result if the shoot was a Failure vs a Partial Success means that handing someone a gun who has no idea how to use it can be more of a hazard than a benefit, but it's not impossible for them to get that one lucky shot that makes the difference. Likewise, a Woo Roll made from a Partial Success still has a small chance to cause disaster, so even very skilled shooters have to consider whether it's worth the risk to start firing bullets all over the place at all.

We also have tables the Narrator(Game Master) can roll on just in case the shootout runs out of Woo Roll Elements or it happens in place where no Woo Roll Elements would realistically be. Here's a sneak peak at the table for Negative Woo Rolls.

Note also that this is a 2D6 table, meaning that the results closest to 7 are much more likely than the results farthest from 7.