David Sirlin is the man when it comes to Street Fighter II. A national tournament champion and author of Playing to Win, Sirlin is now the lead designer on Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix; he’s responsible for tuning the characters we know and love to — imagine this — play better than they did in the 1991 original. It’s not an easy task.
Gamasutra obtained a detailed interview with Sirlin, where the former member of Street Fighter Team USA discusses how to tweak the game — just so slightly that opportunities open up — while maintaining the balance that will keep competitive players dropping those virtual quarters on Xbox Live Arcade. Here are some of the highlights:
Balancing priority:
So for Fei Long, for example, he’s invulnerable for a certain amount of time, and then he’s vulnerable. Some people suggested he should be invulnerable for a greater amount of time. Now, I don’t need a spreadsheet to tell me that’s a good idea or not. I just know that his Dragon Punch is pretty much effective as it is, and that’s not the reason he loses matches. So, when I look at expert players try to play Fei Long and try to be successful with him, it’s just that they cannot get in, can’t get close enough, and once they do, he has a lot of options and a lot of ways to deal damage.
There needs to be a trade-off, it needs to be kind of hard, but not as hard as it currently is. So I have to look at things and ask, what can I do to let him get in a little more easily? One example is that he has a flying kick where he flies through the air as one of his special moves. It’s really hard to do before, we made it much easier to do.
Nuances of timing, AKA don’t fix what ain’t broke:
There’s still a lot of nuances of timing. One developer I worked with during the project, at one point said, that Cammy’s Dragon Punch move — call it a thrust kick or cannon spike depending on who you ask — is too good and has too high a priority. That was the claim.
I was playing as Cammy at the time, and he was playing as Fei Long, and later we switched characters so I was playing as Fei Long, and he said that Fei Long’s Flame Kick has too much priority, it’s like his Dragon Punch.
The thing is, the priority on these moves is actually about the same; I don’t have the frame stats off the top of my head, but I have a feeling that both of them are invulnerable for a certain amount of time, and both of them become vulnerable later.
It’s really about, did you do yours a little bit before mine or a little bit after? It’s all about those nuances in timing, and we’ll deliver there just as much as ever.
Read the rest at Gamasutra, and check out more details about individual character tweaking at the official Capcom blog.
Tags: Arcade, David Sirlin, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, XBLA
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