After playing Kongai, the card-battling metagame at indie game site Kongregate, you might not immediately see its resemblance to Street Fighter, but designer David Sirlin says they actually have a great deal in common.
Both games feature fighters squaring off in a 2d environment, but the similarities run even deeper. Sirlin, a champion Street Fighter player himself and the lead designer for Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo: HD Remix, called upon his experience with Street Fighter's mind games when designing Kongai.
"The mind-games in Street Fighter come from the regular patterns of behavior that emerge in players. There's often a situation where there's an obvious move the opponent "should" do. Or maybe two or three probable moves, each with different payoffs," he explains.
Sirlin tried to create similar situations in Kongai.
"Situations," he says, "where sometimes there's one obvious move to make (but will you really make it?). Or where there are three good moves, but one of those choices is so darn juicy! It would be so great if you could do that choice, but of course your opponent knows this."
Although Kongai lacks Street Fighter's face-to-face nature, Sirlin says it's still very much about reading people. "The uninitiated player has trouble even imagining how good some players can be at a reading people (without even being face-to-face). Yet I assure you, drawing on the same skills that fighting game players use, an expert Kongai player can have a shockingly good record at "guessing" what the opponent will do," he says.
Visitors to Kongregate have had the opportunity to collect Kongai cards over the past year by completing challenges on the site. Each week, a different card was offered as the reward for completing a specific task, such as reaching a particular level in one of Kongregate's many games. (Today's challenge is particularly amusing.)Eventually, you'll be able to earn cards simply by playing lots and lots of Kongai. The current deck has 46 cards, but Kongregate founder Jim Greer says that more will be coming in the future.
Balancing all of those cards was the most difficult part of designing the game, says Sirlin. "It was pretty daunting staring at a blank spreadsheet knowing I needed to come up with all the design data for the entire game," he says. "Each character card has over 50 values that need to be filled in. I filled in all these values for 16 characters before even being able to play the game in any real fashion. Somehow, it turned out at least in the ballpark of balanced right out of the gate."
Sirlin's roots as a competitive Street Fighter player show when he talks about his favorite aspect of Kongai, the Intercepts. Players can swap out their character cards during a fight, but if their opponent manages to Intercept them, not only can they not switch out, they also take damage. Or, to put it in Sirlin's words, ""First of all, you will not switch out. Second, you will waste your move this turn for trying. Third, you will take 35 damage. Now what's up? Want to try to switch out again?"
"The Germans call it Schadenfreude, or 'happiness at the misfortune of others.' The internet calls it 'getting owned.' There are a lot of other more benevolent kinds of happiness in life, but damn if it isn't satisfying to land those intercepts," says Sirlin.
Images courtesy Kongregate
