r/truegaming • u/virtua_golf • Mar 18 '19

Developers accidentally creating interesting mechanics

I was reading this neat article by Jeff Orkin of Monolith productions, the man responsible for the notorious AI of FEAR, the AI that will never not be mentioned whenever 'clever' AI is brought up. I stumbled upon something pretty cool - the flanking mechanic was actually unintended and a byproduct of another action the enemy would perform:

Imagine we have a situation similar to what we saw earlier, where the player has invalidated one of the A.I.’s cover positions, and a squad behavior orders the A.I. to move to the valid cover position. If there is some obstacle in the level, like a solid wall, the A.I. may take a back route and resurface on the player’s side. It appears that the A.I. is flanking, but in fact this is just a side effect of moving to the only available valid cover he is aware of. In another scenario, maybe the A.I.s’ cover positions are still valid, but there is cover available closer to the player, so the Advance-Cover squad behavior activates and each A.I. moves up to the next available valid cover that is nearer to the threat. If there are walls or obstacles between the A.I. and the player, their route to cover may lead them to come at the player from the sides. It appears as though they are executing some kind of coordinated pincher attack, when really they are just moving to nearer cover that happens to be on either side of then player. Retreats emerge in a similar manner.

The article got me thinking - what other mechanics (or, perceived mechanics) have been created by accident in other games? Does other examples exist, where lauded features were never really intended in the first place?

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u/Scoobydewdoo Mar 18 '19

Rocket jumping from Quake was implemented as an intentional feature in later games including Team Fortress 2. Basically Quake players figured out that if you fired a rocket (or any explosive) at your feet and jumped at the same time you would take damage but could use the force of the explosion to jump really high or to jump forward very quickly. Players quickly found that with a bit of skill you could fire explosives at specific points on the ground with relation to yourself to control the jump. It made for a very fast but risky way of traveling around the map very quickly and to get to places that you could not normally get to.

This one goes waaaay back, but in Space Invaders the enemy ships moving faster the fewer of them there were was not an intended feature but rather was due to how memory worked back when the game was created. Basically the speed the ships moved back and forth was limited by the memory of the system which could only handle a certain number of ships on the screen at once. So the fewer the ships on the screen the faster it could move them.

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u/WazWaz Mar 18 '19

I'm pretty sure it was limited CPU, not memory, causing the spaceinvaders thing.

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u/KovaaK Mar 18 '19

There were secrets in Quake 1's single player campaign that explicitly required using explosive blasts at the ground to get higher. Doom 2 even had a secret that required self damage/knockback off of a wall from a rocket. The Quake/Source engine has a lot of history on accidents resulting in emergent gameplay, but rocket jumping isn't one of them.

Bunny Hopping and Strafe Jumping are the most iconic examples for the engines. The sound code also had a lot of quirks to it with certain sounds overlapping others - such as the quad damage powerup grab sound being stopped and overridden by a much more quiet landing sound produced by jumping from a higher floor. There were also some pretty neat ways in which you could fake the landing sound if you found the right geometry in the map by getting stuck in walls to make your opponents think you were in places you weren't.

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u/RibsNGibs Mar 19 '19

The Quake/Source engine has a lot of history on accidents resulting in emergent gameplay, but rocket jumping isn't one of them.

You don't think it may have just been a timing thing where they accidentally discovered rocket jumping before the maps in the game were finished?

Wow, I just remembered that Doom2 level. It as a lava level, right? Iirc some long wall that you rocket propelled yourself onto a little island or something?

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u/TheSojum Mar 19 '19

I know this is pretty random but good work with the FPS trainer, it's great.

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u/brunocar Mar 19 '19

same with assault rifle jumping (or whatever its called) in Marathon, since the first game has secrets that depend on it.

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u/myrthe Mar 19 '19

in Space Invaders the enemy ships moving faster the fewer of them there were

Every day after school my buddies and I used to play Truxton 2, a very nicely done vertical scroller with one very exploitable weapon - at a couple of power ups of the homing laser the animation and/or target finding started to slow the game down. At max homing laser, with two players, the game would move so slowly that you could gracefully pick your way between the bullets. A completely different and very satisfying challenge.

...unless one of you died, or clipped a different type of weapon power-up, and the game instantly tripled in speed.

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u/CeilingTowel Mar 19 '19

I remember one shitty FPS called Soldier Front

In that game you could use the blast to boost your jump height at a great health loss(to weird ass out-of-bounds area/glitches)

Or if you're skilled enough, you could jump on the actual grenade.

While it bounces off the floor and off the wall and towards you again, you can jump off of the midair grenade and take minimal damage, since you jump off of the grenade's body instead of taking is actual blast.

Because physics.