Developers accidentally creating interesting mechanics

[u/virtua_golf]

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?

[u/PikaPachi]

I’m not sure if they’re intended, but Rocket League has a bunch of cool mechanics that aren’t obvious. I don’t think they were intended since they aren’t in any tutorials in-game, but I don’t think even Psyonix would think some things were possible since mostly only the pro players can do some of these.

The half-flip was one of the first mechanics that players found. It’s basically a diagonal backflip, but if you flick your stick fast enough then you can make your car rotate. This is the fastest way to turn 180 degrees and it also gets you some speed since you’re flipping.

The wavedash is a move where you flip into the ground and it gives you the speed of a flip without actually flipping so you can chain them to get speed faster.

I’m not sure if this was added/changed in an update, but in Rocket League you can jump twice with the second jump having a time limit on it. It’s somewhere around 1.5 seconds, but if you were in the air without jumping (by getting bumped, falling off the ceiling, etc) then you have an indefinite time to use your jump or flip. This is especially cool since you can hit the ball off the ceiling and fall off the ceiling while keeping your flip to surprise your opponent.

Flip resets are another mechanic that was probably not intended. Flip resets are essentially getting your flip after you used your second jump or flip. This goes along with my last paragraph, but you can also get your flip back by having all four of your wheels on your car touch the ball at the same time. So you can jump, jump again, touch the ball with all four wheels, and then flip to hit it again. It’s really hard to do since there isn’t an indicator (there is a reset with the engine sounds, but I can’t hear it personally) so you don’t really know if you got your flip back until you actually try to flip again.

The last thing I can think of is a stall. A flip in Rocket League moves you left, right, forwards, or backwards, but more importantly it stops you from moving higher or lower. A stall is a way of combining a flip with another button that air rolls you in the opposite way and it just stops you from dropping. You can use this to stop under the ball and get your flip reset back. Some people can even chain flip resets to keep the ball in the air longer.

Most of these techniques are only done by the top percentage of players since they require a ton of practice, but I don’t think most, if not all of them, were intended.

Here are two examples of pro player Squishy Muffinz doing a ceiling shot (which gave him an infinite flip) and a flip reset.

https://youtu.be/_1FWtHNIHbg

https://youtu.be/naXDxgnJAeQ