David Sirlin is one of the smartest game designers that I’ve read. In particular he opened my eyes to the design requirements for making and playing games at the highest levels of competition something that I, as a generally casual player of multiplayer games was never really all that aware of.

Here’s him in an interview about the soon to be released Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix which is in charge of balancing.

The last question and answer made me smile.

Does it still look like moves are connecting in the right spots where they did in the past?

DS: It does. I think we’re saved here by, if you analyse what the original game was like, it’s much worse than you think. You think it was pretty good, but there’s all kinds of cases where moves are intersecting pretty far before they hit, or even more cases the other way around, where you think they’re not even close to hitting but they hit — and you get tricked by the hit spark.

We actually had one version of the game that had no hit sparks, and I thought the entire game was broken or something: how come people are hitting from so far away, and nothing looks right? It’s just that those hit sparks solve all your problems for free. There’s a much bigger margin of error than you might realize. I think we’re within the margin.

When we were developing Cars we ran into this exact problem. No matter what we did, collisions would seem off, either cars would overlap or they’d bounce off the air, sometimes both in the same build. It wasn’t until the lead artist added in hit sparks for the collisions that everything came together. Once that visual queue was in place, the exact same hit behaviour seemed smooth and flawless.

Nice to know that Capcom arrived at the same solution all those years ago.