Honor Duels

A deep dive into hardslop

This is an email.

As you know, my new game Q-UP is launching in two weeks. I say “my”, but the game is a close collaboration between me and 3 other game devs, the main one being my son James, who is an award-winning game designer in his own right and was the project lead. Honor Duels is one of the many brilliant game design ideas James came up with for the game.

Q-UP is, on one level, a parody of esports, and it’s multiplayer, but it isn’t a directly competitive game, it’s more of a single-player game with social dynamics, let’s call it hardslop. So, we always knew we wanted to have some version of “combat” in the game, and we wanted it to be a 1v1 showdown within the game’s overall team-based structure, like the laning phase of a MOBA. But we didn’t want it to be conventional combat, and we didn’t want it to take over the game, we wanted it to be one mechanic among many, and to fit into the game’s overall design ethos, which is — it’s not about winning or losing (the coin decides that) it’s about how fast you can make progress through the metagame; and mechanics should be novel, through-the-looking-glass versions of established tropes; and they should be interesting.

As soon as James pitched his idea for combat I instantly loved it. It goes like this:

• combat is a duel for bonus resources

• these resources are split between the 2 players based on their relative HP levels at the end of each round

• the gear that players equip for combat determines the size of the bonus resource pool, so gear is both the loot they are fighting over, and the tools they use in the fight

• and, most importantly, gear with high combat stats has low loot value and gear with low combat stats has high loot value

It might sound melodramatic, but reading these rules made me feel a bit like Salieri looking at the sheet music of a Mozart composition. Why hadn’t I thought of this? It’s a very “game designery” idea, let me see if I can explain what I think is so cool about it.

What this mechanic does is put the player into a little game-theoretical dilemma. You can increase the size of the loot pool, or you can attempt to increase the fraction of the pool that you, personally, will receive. Why is this a dilemma? Because, assuming that the values are set correctly, you almost always do better by boosting your stats rather than increasing the size of the shared pool. But, if every player follows this logic, than everyone is made worse off, just like in the classic cooperate/defect dynamic of the famous prisoners’ dilemma.

For example, here’s a payoff grid for a simplified version in which the pool starts at 100 points, and both players chooses whether to add another 50 points, or increase their stats such that they will get 80% of the payout against an unimproved opponent:

No matter what your opponent chooses, you are better off increasing your stats. But, if both players increase their stats, they cancel each other out and the result is strictly worse off for both of them than if they had just cooperated.

This kind of non-zero-sum payoff puzzle is catnip for economists and a certain brand of game designer to which I very much belong. It is found not just in artificial thought experiments but also in evolutionary biology, where, for example, how aggressive you should be in defending your territory depends on how aggressive the rest of the population is, on average. In a population full of hawks, doves do better than average, and vice-versa.

Just because you can’t see Legolas, doesn’t mean he can’t see you.

One reason game designers like this kind of thing is that it makes the player’s decision complicated and ambiguous. There is no one right answer, it always depends. It forces you to ask what “right” even means — by what criteria? This one encounter? Your expected value across all the encounters you are likely to have? In this one game session or all of them? What’s our actual goal, anyway? What are we even doing out here, in donkeyspace, without a helmet?

In order to have these kinds of social dilemmas at work in a game, you need a specific kind of structure. You will never get interesting dilemmas in a one-session game with a clearly-defined goal and outcomes. Sure, you can label some outcomes as “everyone loses”, but players will naturally prefer the outcomes where everyone loses to the ones where they, specifically, lose, while other players win.

Regardless, in any one-session game, however you rank the outcomes, there will be a correct optimal strategy. What you want is a situation where there are multiple sessions, and each session is generating a payoff that has value in some larger context. For example, in the fight between hawkish traits and dovish traits in a particular population, the outcome of each encounter pays off in a resource (fitness) which is measured by how many offspring you have, not simply how many nesting sites you successfully defended. The fitness game is a bigger game than the territory-defending game, and, in a sense, contains it. This nested (ugh, sorry) structure is what allows the interior game to have non-zero-sum dynamics, because it is generating a resource that has value within the larger metagame.

Q-UP has the ideal structure for this kind of non-zero-sum infra-game. Every player is trying to succeed within the metagame of “get to the highest rank as quickly as you can”, the loot you get from combat gets its value from its utility in this larger context. You really do prefer whichever outcome of combat gives you more of that resource. Ideally, players would feel the ever-present temptation to defect, to get just a little better outcome for themselves, and also recognize the larger dynamic, that everyone can do better, overall, by always cooperating. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll even get a holy war, where players try to persuade each other about how to think about this topic, using memes.

At the same time, we also want combat to provide some of the ground-level pleasures of, you know, combat. Hitting your enemy with a stick. In particular, we wanted to capture, in miniature, some of the stats-driven fun of Fire Emblem or Advance Wars. Hence, within our non-loot, stats-providing gear, there’s a weapon triangle, and other complex interactions, like speed, dodge, and crit.

Fire Emblem in particular was a big inspiration for how we display combat. The Game Boy Advance version of that game has, in my opinion, the greatest combat animations of all time. Also, like Fire Emblem, Honor Duels provide a setting in which our heroes will occasionally talk to each other, because sometimes game pieces are also characters in a story.

Snake? SNAAAAAKE???

Finally, combat interacts directly with some specific hero metagame skills, some of which affect combat outcomes, and some of which pay off in other resources, but are conditional on certain combat states and events.

Everything outlined above was meant to fit into one small corner of an already big and complicated game. So it is, perhaps, no huge surprise that Honor Duels, as first implemented, were kind of a mess. Mechanically, they were working fine, in terms of how much of this bonus resource they generated and how that fit into the overall metagame. But they never felt like they mattered. You barely noticed them. They happened, there was a bunch of complicated details that you didn’t really care about, you noticed the outcome, and occasionally made a decision to acquire a piece of combat gear you thought would probably improve that outcome. And you would notice and care about specific combat events if they interacted with a hero skill you were building around. But other than that, it was just sort of a blur.

Problem 1 - Stats Oatmeal
In our first version, all gear had both loot value and stats value. High stats gear had low loot value, and vice-versa, and some gear had mediocre amounts of both. But it ended up being number soup.

Problem 2 - Drafting & Scarcity
Even though you are buying gear, you are buying it from randomly-generated shops that are, themselves, a limited resource. You may not see that much different combat gear over the course of one run, so you aren’t really picking and choosing so much as improvising around whatever you find, so the kind of fine-grained trade-offs in our first version of gear didn’t make sense. Moreover, because you didn’t see that much gear, you never really built up any intuitions about what the overall range of values were, what was especially good or bad, which exacerbated problem 1.

Problem 0 - The Attention Economy
But the main problem was that we were just overloading the player. Which was, in part, intentional. In a way, attention is the key skill of Q-UP. There’s a lot of things you can look at, and they all matter in different ways. How are my items working? When is this skill going off? How much of this stuff am I generating? Is that thing I tried working? And they all kind of happen at the same time. It’s a lot of valuable data, and you have to decide where to look. Combat enters the game at a point where the player is already juggling as many pins as they can, and just needed to be simpler.

Solution 1 - The Stances
So, what did we do? We added more stuff. In an effort to make the central dilemma of Honor Duels visible to players we forced them to toggle between two settings — Merciful or Ruthless. Merciful gives you a direct reward (not into the shared pool) but prevents you from ever killing an opponent. Basically, it’s a bonus that sweetens the deal for cooperating. But mostly it’s a way of highlighting the central trade-off between the two overall strategies and forcing you to consciously choose between them, a way of bundling a bunch of complicated details into one discrete chunk.

The Real Solution - Either/Or
Stances improved combat, made it feel more interesting. You would notice when you nobly spared the life of some random bot, only for it to kill you ruthlessly on the next round. The impudence! But it was only masking the deeper problems (1 - 0 above). What was really needed was a radical overhaul to all of our combat items, making each one of them either pure loot or pure stats. This was easier than we expected. It turned out that most of our items already had a core identity they were trying to express, behind our complicated stats. A dragon tattoo isn’t slightly good defense, it’s no defense at all, that’s what makes it high honor! An open palm doesn’t do a little bit of damage, it does no damage at all. That’s the whole point of an open palm!

So that’s where we ended up. And now combat is… fine. It’s fine. It’s actually good. And I’m quietly excited to see what happens when we pour a bunch of players into it. But it’s still a sideshow in the circus that is Q-UP. It’s still a bit of an afterthought. Which is fine. In fact, I would say it’s intentional, that it’s a comment on the status of combat in video games. Except that, if Honor Duels turn out to be something players care about a lot, if it somehow does end up being a big deal that matters a lot, I want to be able to say that that was intentional too.

Banger Alert

After we release the full game on November 5th, we are going to turn off the demo. Some people are already worried about losing the demo versions of the songs, which are going to have more finished versions in the final game. First of all, y’all are not ready for the finished versions of these songs, they are incredible. However, out of the kindness of his own heart, kariomart has seen fit to bless us with an album of the rougher, rawer demo versions of these tracks so that we will always have access to them. Get it now to experience maximum nostalgia for the present.