SRB2P and Game Design
Welcome to this Blog Series! At the time of writing this, I have no idea if i'm doing this right or if I will have uploaded this properly on WhiteWind. Either way, if you are reading this, it means that I have finally decided to document my experience with modding Sonic Robo Blast 2 Persona and what I've learned over the course of 2 years.
Since I'm getting my feet wet with blogging on the AT Protocol, I'll talk about how I came to be aware of this fangame and my general discretion I hold when I'm designing content(which I can say now that I've been credited as a developer on this project!)
Will any of this be applicable to anything outside of SRB2P? I'm not really sure, but I feel like there's some inklings of Game Design lessons I have learned, with an ample amount of learning how a community can interact and influence a product.
This blog was edited on April 2nd to remove video links by request and to modify portions of the section related to it.
PART 1 [In which I discuss how I came across this game in the first place]
SRB2P released on November 13th, 2020. I was about 3 months in to the initial Pikmin 2: Colossal Caverns craze and was participating in the weekly races(at least at first before deciding to do other things). I was aware of the game when it came out, but wasn't interested enough to play it at the time.
2020 was quite an interesting year(barring COVID-19) since I had managed to get my initial Discord account completely nuked. I first thought it was because of Linux oppression, but now I'm pretty sure it was because of how I was getting people to playtest the Pikmin 2 Multiplayer mod with me(they never game me a straight answer about it).
From that point on, I had to redefine my primary online persona, giving me insight into what I was doing in my spare time, especially since I was heading into my final year of secondary schooling. I had just put my main project, THICCmin, on hold after a years worth of work spread out across 4 years and wasn't quite sure what I'd be doing next. I was in a few other modding scenes, like Persona, but I was still a staunch Pikmin modder. Of course, it became ovbious that I was beginning to open myself up to the idea of packing my bags and joining another modding scene.
I started off 2021 by looking into other games I liked and seeing if anyone had modded them before me. There were some that had tools, but no active base and some with an active userbase, but no tools. The Denpa Men series fell into the category of having some tools and an active userbase that I could(hopefully) get advice from, so I decided to leap into their community under the guise of a staunch Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo fan.
Strangely enough, it actually ended up going very well! In about a month I took a QuickBMS script made by an anonymous user used for Denpa Men 3 archives and had created a fully featured toolkit for the whole series based off it, allowing the community to begin peeking into the game files. I also made guides for messing with the various file formats used by the games and became the first to peek into the QR codes that the games would make for each Denpa Man. This little experiment proved to me that I had the experience and mindset to replicate where I had gotten with Pikmin 2 modding, I just needed the interest and drive to get things done.
This series of events finally lands me sometime around Late-October/Early-November which is finally where we can begin to talk about SRB2P. By chance, the youtube algorithm decided to show me videos of SRB2P again and my interest was piqued. I dont exactly remember where I found the server link, but I ended up staring at it for a good while.
It's not always easy for me to join a new discord server. I think the record for how long I deliberated on joining a server was about half a day. I've mostly gotten over it now, but a big part of my unease was about how I'd present myself. I was practically the new kid on the block, and I had NO idea about the state of the server, its culture, how well i'd get along with the members, so on and so forth...Eventually I'd revisit that same old question, and either repeat the deliberation or finally click the darn button.
This time around, things were a little different. I knew who I was, what I was capable of, and the first thing I was likely going to do once I joined.
PART 2 [In which i discuss what I've learned and how I go about making mods]
SRB2P falls into the category of games that are quite easy to mod, but have a more challenging design cycle because you start getting into Game Design. Pikmin 2 is just like this, since the cave files and overworld objects are defined in text files. You can easily make a Pikmin 2 mod with just text editing, but its hard to make a GOOD Pikmin 2 mod with just text editing.
SRB2P(as of version 1.3.6) allows you to make Characters, Vision Quests(timed challenges where you battle a boss or waves of enemies for points), and Dungeons relatively simply. Of course, there's quite a few nuances, but for this post I will only discuss general design considerations of each.
Characters
I'm most experienced with making characters, only because thats the main thing I make. No matter what, a given character is going to have a set of base stats for Strength, Magic, Agility, Endurance, and Luck, and a skillset. The skills may be custom, or they're plucked from the pre-existing vanilla line of skills. If I were to start making a new character right now, I'd probably be fudging in the numbers at first with what I think works. This is in STARK contrast to other modders, who obsess over every stat point and attack power relative to their character. I don't think thats the right way to go about it, maybe as a beginner who's trying to get a feel for things, but I'll get into that later. Point is...
Fret Over The Design First, Not The Numbers
A character needs an archetype, they need strategy. There's gotta be a REASON for why you'd want to have that character in your squad when setting out into Tartarus or squaring off against a boss. The base stats do have some importance in this regard, because it determines ALOT about how they will interact with the rest of the game, but that should really be the only numbers you seriously consider. Now, I'm not saying that the numbers are mostly irrelevant, the game WILL make that ovbious to you when you tweak things to the extreme. The reason I bias so much towards overall design is that for the most part, the numbers are already figured out for you. That's cause...
You Can Only Rely On Vanilla
In case you aren't aware, I use the term "vanilla" to refer to official SRB2P content, so thats the set of skills available to you when you launch the game, the kinds of bosses and enemies that appear in the dungeon, the items, etc. Balancing, and determining what's "balanced" is the absolute bane of the SRB2P community, and there's a wide mix of those who balance towards vanilla, those who maybe fudge it slightly, and those who do whatever they want, either because of "Thats how it is from my source!" or "big number grindset"
If you balance around vanilla, you save yourself an eternity of headaches! The simple reason is that that's the only piece of content you can rely on existing alongside your mod. You save time when you balance the amount of healing or damage done to others or your character around what vanilla has. Of course, a character doesn't need numbers to absolutely dominate out in the field, but before you make the equivalent of a Persona 5 Anubis(-10 points if you get that reference), consider this...
This Is A Multiplayer Game
The game is currently a demo, but to do a full run of any of the blocks can take a hefty amount of time, sometimes people will play for 10+ hours because they do back to back vision quests and dungeons. Bionis Fields, a mod that introduces a whole new campaign, can be beaten in under 2 hours at best with good routing. Now imagine that, but you've got at least 3 other people there with them, choosing to spend a portion of their day playing this game. That reality is quite real, and it is VERY easy to become bored.
If I were to gauge the largest source of boredom during a run, it would probably be within the battles. If you have the highest agility, you get to have your turn first. If you have the highest agility AND the right toolkit to sweep a majority of the fights within a dungeon, then the other party members really don't have a reason to be there aside from the few cases where they have to clean up a fight or do some healing. That's boring, I cannot tell you how many times I just have to pull up my phone, because I picked a character that was too slow to be able to effectively participate in the main battles.
Another problem with battles is that people keep starting them! When the only time you have to do stuff is running around the dungeon floor, then battles just become an interruption to that, since now the fun comes from scrouging up weapons and figuring out what you'll do for the eventual boss fight. There's a bit of irony here that a vanilla mechanic that actually forces the party to leave the floor and hurry up their run, the Reaper, is often completely disabled with mods because hosts don't want to deal with the other problems the Reaper brings.
Vision Quests do not have this problem, since usually every action you can take is quite valuable. The only problem there is that you lose out on choosing weapons or subs, so you have to make do with the skillset you have.
Vision Quests
Speaking of Vision Quests...They are fun in their own right, the limitations allow you to strategize alot, and its fun to find team compositions, modded or not that can most efficiently sweep a boss. Multiplayer wise, they end up becoming an insane mish mash where 8 people are squeezed onto one party and hilarity ensues from there. Some vision quests are actually designed for this, and will have tens of thousands of HP to account for them, but therein lies the problem...
You Can Never Assume How One Will Tackle Your Challenge
Those "raid bosses," as I will deem them going forward, are fun to play when you have 8 party members. But with 4, you practically double the amount of time the boss takes. With only vanilla, you have to use the "Silver Metric" to determine whether or not you'll need to station yourself on the toilet(The Silver Metric is a metric where you input the bosses HP, and you derive the amount of time it takes to beat said boss solely through Silver's Mind Charge->Psycho Force strat, which is one of the easiest ways in high level vision quests to do large amounts of damage). I need to stress something very important here, a long boss fight is not necessarily a boring boss fight. Vision Quests often leave me frustrated not because I'd have to beat them within an insane amount of time, but for another reason...
The Vision Quest Is Over Once You Understand The Cycle
"The cycle" in this case is basically what you have to do on your turns, and then what the boss will likely do in response. Most Vision Quest bosses can be boiled down pretty easily, and once you figure out the general flow of a fight, its only a matter of time before you either defeat the boss, or you lose due to something you didn't account for. In essense, you are participating in a herculean task in repetition and attrition, rather than making strategic decisions that may change throughout the fight. Again, it boils down to what the creator intended for how one interacts with their vision quest, but as discussed above that's unfortunately hard to actually enforce.
Dungeons
I think dungeons are one of the hardest things to make, just like how levels in SRB2 are hard to make. You gotta make it look nice, give it some music, design enemies, design bosses, design a story...so on and so forth. There's quite a lot to consider, and whenever I tried, I always ran into roadblocks. I found it easier to expand the system to allow for more creator freedom than to actually make a dungeon myself, but I have a few pointers from playing custom dungeons, mostly because of how ovbious they were.
Enemy Variety Is Everything
What kind of enemies you run into when starting a battle is dictated by a table of enemy waves. Vanilla does a pretty good job of making enemy waves that provide their own unique challenges, maybe too good of a job. See, theres problems that, when you solve them, no one notices anything. Enemy variety is one of those problems. Poor enemy variety exposes a span of issues that can make battles boring or repetitive. Low variety in enemy affinities allows a single character to sweep THE ENTIRE DUNGEON. It's not even a problem related to the character anymore! If you end up with the right combination of skills that hit the weaknesses, you win! Pair that with high agility? You become the protagonist of the multiplayer session.
Low ENEMY variety becomes equal parts low affinity variety and overall engagement in the dungeon. If the dungeon you are sourcing from has a single goblin as the enemy variety, I feel like you have a moral obligation to at least make versions of that goblin that are blue, green, red, checkered, and plaid. Just with those 5 variations, you can double or triple the variants with tweaked stats and affinities based on dungeon progression, and you end up with more enemy types than Monad.
Battle variety is one of the ways you can make a dungeon engaging to go through, but remember when I mentioned "scrounging up weapons and figuring out a build for the next boss"? Here's why...
Character Progression Is Also Everything
You're at the final floor of the dungeon, you've gotten quite a few levels, maybe enough to reach the limit for this particular place. You've either got stacks of cash or flies because you didn't really plan out your spending. A couple skillcards here, a couple subpersonas there...Now is the time where you can experiment with what you have and make the ideal build for finishing off the job.
I LOVE the final portions of dungeons when I can figure out how to maximise my strengths and minimize my weaknesses. It's a reward for trudging through the dungeon and collecting gear and money. If a dungeon started me out at level 99, or barely gave me any items, then I probably won't enjoy the dungeon as much. If your dungeon decides to forgoe the collection of shiny things you can equip, you better have a good reason for doing so, since character progression justifies the risk of fighting enemies.
If you don't get anything out of fighting enemies, whats the point in fighting them? Unless you need the money from fights to stock up on restoratives, its more efficient to just bum rush to the bosses and avoid as many enemies as possible. In fact, it kindof turns into a quasi-Vision Quest, with the difference being that you can run around and have breaks between each boss. That's why its important to let the players build up in strength and gear, since its an integral part to the game cycle.
Conclusion
That's all I want to talk about for now. Now that I've got my thoughts about the game as a whole and what I feel is important when experimenting with it, I'll be able to go over works of mine in particular that I think would be worth talking about. The next blog post will likely be about the more technical side of things, since I feel it important to explain the unique nature of this game's code.
