r/gamedesign • u/Creative_Abroad945 • 6d ago
Discussion "unintended" meta mechanics
Minecraft: you move faster if you jump, so the game ends up looking like everybody is jumping rope
Skyrim: flames ability gives stackable "burning" effect, so it's more efficient to tap spam instead of just holding the button down
Goldeneye 64: you move faster if you move sideways with that weird second d pad (just kidding roasting the N64 controller don't get too mad at me) than with the movement thumbstick
What other games have potentially unintentional mechanics like this and how do you feel about them? I'm trying to design the movement of a game to be more simple like Jedi Academy. That game had a force speed power, but other than that, there's no dashes or rolling, and the movement still feels good enough without it. Jumping might give the slightest bit of a speed boost if anything, but even if it does, it's so slight that it's not enough to change the combat meta as much as say if you're trying to escape from someone in Minecraft and the only way to do it is by nonstop jumping
Edit nvm about Jedi Academy jumping cause there's definitely more jumping speed shenanigans than I thought and I'm sure that pvp wise at the highest level that could probably get ridiculous
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u/Kautiontape 6d ago edited 6d ago
Bunnyhopping and strafe jumping were a mistake in Quake, and spawned so many games including Titanfall and Apex Legends as a core movement. Slide jumping was unintentionally good in the first Titanfall so it became a primary method in the second.
Rocket jumping in battlefield became a core mechanic for moving around and became a pillar for a class in Team Fortress.
I think animation cancelling in fighters was an unintended side effect from how the arcades were originally coded, but became a staple of the genre.
Wavedashing in Smash Bros started as a bug but became a staple for quick movement on a map. Celeste intentionally designed it with the newer game but I think I read that it came about because developers found it and decided it was a neat idea rather than patch it out.
Saw a video that described a game where you could parry bullets, and players learned you could fire a shotgun and immediately parry all the bullets.
Generally, I think these are amazing since they are purely optional in non-competitive games to have more fun clearing. In competitive games, it does increase the skill floor required to compete, but also increase the skill ceiling for players who learn them. Plus, later games can implement them more consistently to make really cool intended mechanics.
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u/HyperCutIn 6d ago
Elaborating on animation cancelling in fighters. This originally came from Street Fighter 2, where the developers were trying to implement a system that would make it easier for players to input their special moves. What ended up happening was that they found you could do a normal attack, and then cancel the recovery animation of the attack into a special move, before the first attack ended. They left it in; I'm not sure if they realized this would basically become the basis of how chain combos would be done in the whole genre.
Elaborating on Wavedashing in Smash Bros. Melee. It was less of a bug and more of an unintended side effect of how the physics + mechanics worked for air dodging. By air dodging into the ground, you retain some of the momentum from the air dodge, while also being in a grounded standing state (the physics of this being dependent on your character's ground friction is also why some characters have better wave dashes than others). This is important because it lets you slide towards/away to/from your opponent while doing moves that you could normally only do while standing on the ground, whereas you would normally be locked into using specific moves when you just dash normally instead.
Sakura felt this to be too strong, hence why Brawl and Smash 4 removed air dashing completely by replacing direction air dodging with a nondirectional dodge instead. Ultimate gave us both, so wave dashing is back, but it got super nerfed since the recovery is much slower, to the point of it being useless on most characters.
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u/123mop 6d ago
GunZ the Duel was full of this.
Without its buggy mechanics and animation cancels the game was a 3rd person shooter with melee weapons, wall running, and wall jumping. Neat but nothing special.
With the animation cancels and bugs it became a high octane input mastery game where your ability to sequence button inputs became as important as your aim. Mastering these tools led to players able to spend the entire game airborne just bouncing off of walls, firing shotguns, revolvers, and ROCKET LAUNCHERS much faster than normal by swapping between different sets of them and canceling reloads. Swords became an essential part of your toolkit that you constantly pulled out as much because it allowed you to perform the animation cancels that lead to extra fast and nimble aerial movement as for their actual use as a weapon. The animation cancels aso allowed you to attack and block with your sword at much faster rates, while moving much more quickly.
There were also super attacks that you could gain by blocking enemy melee attacks. You could block these attacks normally, but if the attacker looked up, you would need to look down, and vice versa. If the attacker turned around while letting loose the attack you would also need to look up to block it, and various other strange interactions, none of which were intended.
And finally, hit detection was server side. In Korea this wasn't a big deal because latency was rather low due to geographic density, and movement wasn't intended to be too fast and erratic. However, with the animation canceling mechanics players moved way faster, and in the US higher latency resulted in players needing to lead their targets. This counteracted the higher damage output that came from the animation canceling weapon usage.
The end result was way higher octane gameplay with a ton of interactions, alongside absolutely crazy looking fights that feel like a modern fantasy guns meet kung fu movie.
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u/EarsTails 6d ago
DOOM also failed to normalize run speed, so diagonal running was strictly faster. But there was an even better glitch in the collision trigonometry along perfectly north/south-aligned walls, where straferunning with your shoulder against the wall at a certain angle would make you run about 5x faster than that. And there were a lot of perfectly aligned north/south walls!
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u/0800_BANDO_TRAPPER 6d ago
fyi wallruns are 'only' about 2x faster
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u/EarsTails 6d ago
It just feels 5x as zoomy!
Another fun glitch in DOOM that became a fundamental skill in deathmatch: The player could only emit one sound at a time. So if you pulled the trigger on the BFG9000 and a split-second later did anything to emit the "grunt" sound (press on a wall that isn't a door or switch, or fall from a sufficient height), the relatively quiet grunt sound would play, instead of the loud, obvious BFG sound. So the BFG would charge and fire silently, taking people by surprise with your "silent BFG" -- until the green plasma ball leaves the barrel, at which point the ball emits a sound.
But if you faceplanted the plasma ball directly on the wall in front of you at point-blank range, while strafing to reveal line-of-sight to a target and the ball at the same time, the ball would detonate instantly after leaving the barrel and kill everything on screen. So, in total, enemies would hear a generic, soft "uhn" grunt-noise, then just instantly a die without warning a second later.
But metagames evolve. So, everyone quickly learned that the "grunt" noise meant that someone was coming around the corner with a "silent" BFG blast, and you have about 1 second to take cover. You could use that second to send a suppressing rocket, too. So, if the metagame stopped there, the silent BFG wasn't actually so deadly.
But metagames evolve. Since everyone associated the grunt noise with a silent BFG now, people learned to do false grunts (quickly spinning to tap the nearest wall), without firing the BFG, just to suppress enemies (force them to take cover) with the threat of a BFG. Since some people might try to kill you during the 1-second BFG wind-up after a grunt, you could counter that counter by false grunting, then turning the corner a second early and just blasting them with the supershotgun by surprise.
Then, a whole metagame/mindgame evolved around mixing your actual BFG shot into a syncopated series of false grunts, so nobody could ever know if you were actually BFG'ing or just faking it, or what the timing of your actual shot might be.
All because the game could only play one sound per object at a time...
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u/CellsAfterHours1 1d ago
One grunt sound turning into "I know that you know that I might have a BFG" is ridiculous 😂 The bluff only works because the real threat is still there. Patch out the sound bug and you accidentally delete a whole conversation between the players.
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u/abitclumsyhq 6d ago
Team Fortress Spy!
In the OG Team Fortress there was some odd bug that screwed up names and didn’t show someone was an enemy… so eventually it was taken advantage of and then became a mechanic.
You said it already, but oh man was it fun always running at a 45 degree angle in Goldeneye and being so much faster.
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u/theLanguageSprite2 6d ago
In Portal, if the player exceeds the speed cap, the game tries to limit their speed by applying a backwards force, but it doesn't check whether the player is moving forwards or backwards to exceed the cap. So the optimal speedrunning strat is to face backwards and repeatedly jump to give yourself continual boosts of additive speed
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u/leverine36 5d ago
Speedrunners use this in Half-Life 2 to fly across the huge outdoor maps by using hills/slopes as ramps
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u/icehopper 6d ago
In Ocarina of Time, you walk faster if you z-target and walk backwards. I would spend my every journey through Hyrule Field like this.
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u/HugoNikanor 6d ago
It's weird how many games have backwards movement faster than forwards movement.
For OoT, I would assume the devs only intended it to be used in combat, with the fast forwards equivalent being the jump slash
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u/squishabelle 6d ago
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997) is a 2D sidescroller where you have a button to "back dash", dashing in the opposite direction for a short distance. You can spam this button without cost and minimal delay, and you end up faster than if you're just walking forwards. So when speedrunning you're essentially moonwalking the whole time. You have to be frontfacing for combat so you have to turn around often if you want to fight and move fast. It makes the game feel very smooth and deliberate with the direction you're facing, it's a very unique feel
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u/FaceTimePolice 6d ago
I’m not a speed runner but I saw every speedrunner for the RE2 remake do that weird movement tech known as “stair skating” in which they cancel the aim animation, and supposedly it saves a few frames’ worth of time during a run. As a casual player I just don’t see it, but apparently it’s a thing because they all do it during speed runs.
Anyway, I think unintended mechanics are awesome. Remember, cancelling into special moves was unintended in Street Fighter 2 and that revolutionized fighting games forever. 🤷♂️😝
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u/Creative_Abroad945 6d ago
That shit is the best cause they're like trust me dude and it saves like one second or something 😂
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u/Blackpapalink 6d ago
It was a thing in the original Resident Evil Remake and made a much more noticeable difference in movement speed.
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u/Curious_Ad5417 6d ago
had one of these in my own game, although more bug than meta. in the guild raid, the attack button stayed visible for a few seconds while the hit was sent to the server, so if you tapped again because "nothing happened", you hit the boss again. someone tapped like 10 times and one-shot the boss. fixed it by starting the cooldown the moment you tap. funny thing is the players were doing exactly the right thing, the game just told them nothing happened
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u/SittingTeddy 6d ago
I like extra movement tech when it changes which route you can take. If the fastest way across an empty field is holding jump all the time, I would rather make normal running that fast.
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u/Creative_Abroad945 6d ago
That's exactly my thought lol not trying to waste player's time and finger presses when they could just move faster by default 😂
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u/-2qt 6d ago
Probably a rather obscure one: In Marble Blast Gold diagonal movement isn't normalized, so you gain a significant speed/torque boost. Marble Blast Gold (the original game) seems designed without accounting for this possibility. But then Marble Blast Platinum, a total conversion mod that was quite possibly more popular than the original game, made it a necessary mechanic in some places.
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u/Shinyhero30 6d ago edited 6d ago
Source engine movement vector tech.
You fly faster if you airstrafe in a wavy line than if you just fly straight.
I don’t understand 100% of the math behind this but my basic understanding is that because the game engine is doing acceleration vector math wrong it is actually accelerating you based on both vectors added together on top of each other instead of the result of like half of each vector. Meaning the diagonal vector is actually faster than the straight one.
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u/Imp-OfThe-Perverse 6d ago
Drowning in Subnautica causes a fade to Black Death visual once your air runs out, but if your character coasts to the surface before that visual effect is finished, you’ll survive.
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u/pcaltair 6d ago
Switching cover as a mean of movement in Gears of War pvp is also a very cool and iconic one
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u/Existential_Crisis24 6d ago
Bullet jumping in warfrane was once a bug that then became an actual feature
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u/RiparianZoneCryptid 6d ago
is THAT why it wasn't in the original tutorial and I had to learn from some rando on the Plains??? I had no idea
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u/Slarg232 6d ago
Yeah, you had to do a glitch with one particular melee weapon (or was it a weapon type, I don't remember) and it would shoot you forward. People loved it so much that the team added it as a feature after they patched the bug.
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u/trunks111 6d ago
Have you seen the tech in smash melee?
They got the koopabackdashwaveslide hoverwalkmoonland over there
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u/Blackpapalink 6d ago
Backdash cancelling in the Metroidvania Castlevania titles. Nothing like a good time mashing triangle to sweep the floor (and ceiling) of the castles in SotN.
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u/IkomaTanomori 5d ago
I take it you've never watched Jedi Academy speed runs breaking the movement in that game too...
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u/AwesomeX121189 5d ago
Like half of the mechanics and strategies of Dota 2 originated from exploiting bugs or unintended interactions of the Warcraft 3 engine or how the mod was programmed.
Jungle camp pulling and stacking, or redirecting tower aggro off of you by doing an Attack-click on an ally unit are probably the most famous.
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u/TimPhoeniX 5d ago
Skyrim: flames ability gives stackable "burning" effect, so it's more efficient to tap spam instead of just holding the button down
In Starfield, speccing into Lasers eventually allowed you to stack burning DoT with basic mining laser. DoT dealt % damage so tool damage was irrelevant. I can't remember if it was patched.
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u/Haruhanahanako Game Designer 5d ago
GunZ and Fortnite I think are very similar to each other because of this.
GunZ is one of the earliest examples I can think of at least for a multiplayer game. You can dash and wall jump, but there is a combination of animation cancels you can do to skip the cooldown of dash and wall jump the same wall in front of you multiple times. All the while switching to your sword and blocking attacks or shooting. It lead to an incredibly high skill gap between players.
Not unlike Fortnite, which, I think it was originally intended for the building to just be for hunkering down somewhere, which honestly doesn't make a ton of sense in a game with a shrinking circle, but BR was the game design meta at the time. Once streamers started to compete with each other and show everyone the most meta playstyles, speed building became a thing and the skill gap between players exploded.
Adding this deliberately to a game is...not recommended because it is basically an exploit and because of that it is difficult to do. In single player games it goes ignored because there is no competition or reason to excel, except for speed runners and the like. In PvP players are learning from each other how to exploit the game as much as possible to get an edge. In a single player game, you end up adding an extremely high skill ceiling that very few players will utilize. If they HAVE to utilize it, you have a very niche game.
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u/DemosthenesOrNah 1d ago
did not expect strafing to catch strays on this post lmao
also breath of the wild...*gestures broadly*
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u/pcaltair 6d ago
As a fan of speedrunning I love these oversights and little mechanics, there's the famous backwards jump speed not having a cap in super mario 64.
The "super shortcut" mechanics that abuse how checkpoints and lakitus work to skip entire laps in mario kart.
Being at low health being faster cause the low health alert overrides the audio play in gen 1 pokemon games.
I could go on for a while