Minimalistic combat, and Sifu

Click to play the game https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1172034203/

These days I am playing Sifu, on a PS5, on a huge projected screen. The game is so amazing that it is easy to forget all that I am about to write and just enjoy the game.

Still, it is sad that such a great game hasn’t quite been able to revolutionize combat systems. Some obviously annoying things:

1. Enemies perform combos in the air. The enemy starts a combo, I dash 20 feet away, and then the enemy still has to finish the combo hitting the air? That’s even more unrealistic than me taking on 20 bad dudes armed with machetes.
2. Your frenetic opponents suddenly freeze just to watch you execute a lengthy and complex finish combo.
3. More generally, the AI is average (i.e., poor): the enemies are very predictable, even though the game isn’t easy (When I played God of War some years ago, I set the difficulty to maximum and beat it straight, without thinking twice. I tried to play “maestro” with Sifu but I was forced to go back to “normal” difficulty… at least for the time being.)

This has reminded me of one project that I have been thinking about forever, on and off, without ever giving it any serious thought. If you are a student who like me likes gaming, especially combat games, and is looking for a crazy project, this could be for you.

An obvious approach is to use some heavy hammer like deep learning and see if you can get better AI for the characters with their existing moves. I am not sure to what extent this has been tried and I’d be interested in references. But here I am looking for something a little different.

In short, I ask what is a simplest combat system where people can be consistently ranked and exhibit different gaming strategies; as for example in chess, where people are ranked, and players play differently, some are more aggressive than others, and so on. Also, I’d like to be able to train AI to perform like humans, at various levels and exhibiting different strategies.

I am thinking something extremely basic, like rock-paper-scissors but based less on chance and more on skill and in particular reflexes and speed, or bullet 1-d checkers, but more like combat. Perhaps, a system involving only two moves (high or low attack) and maybe a parry. Skill could be a matter of memory (like, players incrementally build their combos, and the opposite player has to parry in the right sequence) or a matter of reflexes (like, moves get faster and faster, the player with the fastest reflexes will prevail) or a matter of precision (like you need to get exactly the right distance), or obviously some combination of this.

I coded up such a minimalistic combat that you can play at top. As time passes the moves get faster and faster. So it’s your guess when enough time has passed and you think your attack can’t be blocked. The action could look like opponents studying each other, waiting for the right time to strike. You can either parry or strike. Being hit halves (or something) your speed, parry multiplies by 1.5 (or something). Both parrying and attacking cost you speed. First to go below a threshold loses. As always, any comment is very much appreciated.