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Lets review the Shield/Dodge/Grab Mechanism !

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Now that the Shield/Dodge/Grab mechanism has been officially launched, we have some stuff to go over

Hi Party Players! This is Dusk from the community team. Today I wanna talk about operations: what I’ve seen in the past year or so, our development mindset for the Shield/Dodge/Grab mechanism, and our follow-up considerations.

First I wanna talk about how long it’s taken to make the Shield/Dodge/Grab mechanism. Coincidentally, BBKing released his 8th documentary today, about the “self-own” that is the design process of Shield/Dodge/Grab. Incidentally, it’s been 6 months since the first documentary mentioning Shield/Dodge/Grab .It’s been over 6 months, and after repeated discussion, we’ve finally overturned the old ways of thinking and added Shield/Dodge/Grab to Flash Party. It’s been almost a full year since Early Access went online; in one year, a hardcore gamer might get bored and retire from playing. Additionally, there’s been countless new players joining us, and an increasing number of registered users. At this point, for Shield/Dodge/Grab to finally make its entrance… basically we do understand that while we’re debating, the time till launch is ticking away and it’ll only get more and more belated.

This slow launch has caused a problem – active players are gonna find it hard to adjust to such a big change. Any change to this content will require a lot of muscle memory acclimatization, (whether it’s Shield/Dodge/Grab or nerfing Triple Jump, standardizing the auto attack of all characters, or outlining the hit recovery of air moves), but we’ve decided to launch it all in one go.

This brings me to my second topic, why we’re looking to make such a big change:

For Flash Party now, we’ve gotten to a point where we need to add in stages that require logic and strategy. To meet this goal, the Shield/Dodge/Grab mechanism is basic and integral. All jumps and hit recovery are supporting mechanisms that can’t be adjusted in phases.

The gripes everyone’s had about the projectile system sucking, Magicians who are OP, Sivi punches people right off the stage, and the fact that being hyper-conservative in playing style gives more benefits... If we wanted to avoid these without utilizing the Shield/Dodge/Grab mechanism, we’d have to avoid making ranged-attack characters, or avoid making characters with high mobility. In the long run, that’s what all devs want to avoid.

There’s been a lot of discourse after Shield/Dodge/Grab was launched in Early Access, and there’s also been players who understood exactly what we were trying to achieve. These were the major concerns:

1.Shield/Dodge/Grab has increased the game’s difficulty level, and is too hardcore for a mobile game. It’s not user-friendly and it’d be hard to expand to peripheral players in the future

2. Without Triple Jump and Final Jump, there’s a lot of deaths from falling outside the arena and being unable to return

3. Shield/Dodge/Grab slows down the pace of the match, and one stock might take up to 2 minutes. 4. With the standardization of characters, muscle memory becomes sluggish and it’s hard to execute combination attacks, so gameplay loses its snapIf there’s other important feedback, y’all can send us your opinions in the comments section.

Based on the feedback above, I want to tell you what I know so far about our future plans:

1. We’ll upload a more complete tutorial with December’s update. It’ll be like other mature games’ tutorials guiding new players through new combat mechanics. Additionally, there’ll be no lack of Entertainment Modes – our R&D have been focusing on Shield/Dodge/Grab and other combat mechanisms , we can definitely try a variety of gameplay types, such as Soccer Showdown. Please give us your feedback on Soccer Showdown! We’ve also heard that players would like Speed Mode or Asymmetric Mode… suggest it! You can suggest anything!

2. We’ll continue to observe- Triple Jump becoming Double Jump, and the removal of Final Jump, were supposed to make differences in player skill clearer. However, if this makes it difficult to return to the ring, we need to solve this. As for what the solution might be… this also requires us to keep an eye on the backend data (for example, an increase in accidental fall deaths etc) before we can make any judgments.Concerns 3 and 4 should be considered together:

The original intention behind changing 1v1 matches to 6 minutes is our hope to minimize the advantage of being hyper-conservative by increasing the duration. We will evaluate future changes in match duration based on the data situation and your feedback. A bigger concern is the feedback we’ve been receiving on the sluggishness, there’s been mention of S-17’s landing feels delayed but it was actually an adjustment to some heroes air moves landing hit recovery. We need more of this sort of concrete feedback to help us adjust the gameplay feel.

Regarding the combo system, it’s an essential part of traditional combat, but in platform fighting game combat designers consciously “avoid deliberate combo designs” because the uncertainty of every moment is a core component of this type of game. Of course, removing combos are not part of our original intentions in adjusting combat mechanics. We’ll keep adjusting new characters based on design flaws you discover. Sivi’s Shockwave Bomb combo and Sophia’s side special and up special were removed due to being OP.

In this next period, we will continue to collect your thoughts on the new version. We’ll need you to play more so you can tell us concretely what doesn’t feel nice, which moves, skills? Does the Soccer Showdown experience change after repeated play? Are the current tutorials useful? Do we need to add new Tips? These are all valuable information we get from the community.

Lastly, we’d like to thank all the followers who spoke up. A lot of former players just sneak off quietly and we never find out what caused it. We are very grateful to all of you who’ve been here for our tests this whole time. If you decide to take a break, we hope you’ll check back to see if we’ve kept our promises!

Most Sincerest Thanks!

26 November 2021

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