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Sucker Punch Gameplay Engineer Questions

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Sucker Punch Gameplay Engineer Questions
Question 1
Imagine that you’re designing a new attack for an enemy in a melee-focused third-person action game. Just to choose a random example, let’s say it’s a Minotaur in a God of War-style game. What factors do you consider when designing the attack, and how do you prioritize these factors?
Basic factors about the attack:
1. Area: The area in which the attack could potentially fall upon
2. Duration: The duration of the attack
3. Frequency: How often this attack is used
4. Range: The maximum distance the attack can reach
5. Size: The area of effect of the attack
6. Damage: Damage per attack
7. Effects: Extra properties of attack, like poison or slow effect
8. Cooldown: How long does it take to …show more content…

For example, the attack speed will be compared to player’s movement speed, and attack area will be compared to the size of the fighting room.
Among these factors, the most important one should be Dogdgeability. Like in the famous action game Dark Souls, bosses and enemies attack damage is usually quite high and cause players to die a lot. However, the game still makes players think it is fair, because a lot of attacks are dodgeable by skillful players. If the attack cannot be dodged systematically, we will be limited when adjusting other factors of the attack, because the players will always receive damage from the attack. As a result, the attack cannot be too strong, and the game will be less exciting. On the other hand, if the attack can be dogdged, we can make it as strong as we like and with all kinds of effects. This increases the feeling of achievement when player successfully dodged it.
After we design how it could be dodged, we can measure by playtesting how difficult it is to dodge the attack. After that, we can assign the damage inversely proportional to the rate of successful dodge. In summary, we could prioritize the factors by groups as following:
(Dodgeability: Area, Duration, Range, Size, Subattack Counts, Preparation, Room Coverage, Smartness, Movement) > (Frequency, Damage, Effects, Cooldown, Animation) > (Properties, Environment Destruction)
We could further prioritize the factors in dodgeability group as follows.
First we could decide (Area,

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