Fighting games can be a great way to meet people and develop new skills, but unless you’re good enough to go pro, it’s not going to pay your rent or put food on the table. Right?

Maybe not. As it turns out, the detail-oriented, play-to-win mentality that is so important for a good fighting game competitor also comes in handy when you’re making video games in general. I was personally surprised by how many ardent fighting game enthusiasts I’ve come across in the games industry, so I chatted them up to see how they felt fighting games could help prepare you for a real job in the business of game development.

This is the third installment of a four-part series of interviews designed to highlight individuals who turned their love of breaking down fighting games into careers on the development end. Be sure to check out last week’s spotlights on Derek “omni” Daniels and Nathan Vella before the final installment is released tomorrow.

Mike “Mike Z” Zaimont (Design Director, Lab Zero Games)

Mike “Mike Z” Zaimont is no stranger to the fighting game community; after years as an active Marvel vs. Capcom 2 player, he devoted himself to building and growing indie fighting game Skullgirls, first with Reverge Labs and now with Lab Zero Games.

PM: How’d you get your start in game development?

Mike Zaimont: Like lots of wannabe game developers, I took computer science in high school, majored in it in college, and programmed things in my spare time, but I got my start in game development the same way lots of people did back before Digipen and game-focused education programs existed — by being a tester. Being a tester is a good introduction to the real work that goes into making a game; it lets you gain experience with the development process, as well as get to know the dev team, all while being slightly underpaid and vastly overworked but mostly enjoying it.

Pandemic Studios had posted some flyers around UCLA, and after much urging I applied and became a tester on Star Wars Battlefront. From there, I used my knowledge of “How was this probably written, and how might they have missed something?” to come up with bugs that annoyed the dev team enough that they finally had me take the programming test, and I ended up becoming a programmer/designer on Battlefront II.

Most of the Skullgirls engine was written from scratch by me from 1999-2011, and I did all of the scripting, design, and balancing for the main eight (soon nine!) characters. Scripting and coding are still the majority of my job on a daily basis, and I want to keep it that way. I’ve always preferred being a monkey to being a manager, and over the years I’ve passed up several career advancement opportunities that would have taken me further from being able to be part of the actual creation of the game.

PM: How do your skills as a competitive fighting game player cross over to making games?

MZ: I’m sure there are those who would argue with calling me a “competitive player.” However: To be both a competitive fighting game player and a successful game developer, you need to be able to analyze situations from all angles, make long-term plans, treat bugs and glitches in the game as features to be explored instead of ignored, be able to understand how other people probably think, and come up with innovative ways to deal with new problems on the fly.

One of the biggest things that being a fighting game player has helped with is my design philosophy. As fighting gamers, we explore every facet of the games we play in the hopes of gaining some sort of competitive advantage. All too often, I see dev teams approaching game design as “We’ll put a bunch of stuff in and then find all the problems with testing,” or “Oh that’s really good, let’s just make it really hard!”

That never works. After years of watching people use true-kara-Demons, Axl’s 1-frame Rensen FRC, standing Gigas, T. Hawk loops, crazy refly combos, and everything else considered nigh-impossible for regular people to do, and do them in tournament play under huge pressure, my design approach is rather unique: Remove player skill from consideration, assume players can do EVERYTHING, and assume they have already found a way past all your built-in safeguards. Don’t think a player can find an infinite combo because of X, Y and Z? Assume they already did, and make sure there is something stopping them anyway. Don’t think they can bypass the limit on the number of ground bounces? Assume they already have, and figure out what difference it makes in your game. Design systems that are, in software design terminology, fault-tolerant.

A good example of this difference in philosophy is the way infinite combos are prevented in XvSF, MvC2, and MvC3. To greatly gloss over lots of nuances (sorry Magnetro/SpiderDan/JChensor!), Capcom spent many years, from MSH through XvSF/MvSF/MvC1, trying to make Flying Screen (FS) a mechanic that stopped infinite combos. It never worked because it never really ended your combo, it just tried to make the opponent travel in such a way that you couldn’t pick them up again. If you found a way to continue anyway, use the FS effect for your benefit, or just ignore FS entirely, presto — you could repeat that pattern forever. And worse, the stricter they made it, the less creative and fun the game became as a whole because the limits it placed on basic combos were very harsh (see MSF).

In MvC2, someone clever realized that they could leverage the existing dizzy system to stop infinite combos by ensuring that once you would normally get stunned, you instead pop out and recover. This had three important advantages: 1) It didn’t matter what combo you did, after a while it would end, 2) It didn’t affect the combo in any way until it was triggered, and 3) It didn’t need any intentional exceptions. It applied everywhere, at all times, and did nothing at all until it ended your combo completely. So they returned Flying Screen to the much-less-restrictive version from MSH, put in what became known as “undizzies,” and called it a day. And for all intents and purposes, outside of program-pad combo videos, it worked. You could still be creative, there were still long loops and 100% combos, but there wasn’t anything that went on forever.

In MvC3, they tried to do the same thing with hitstun deterioration (HSD), but they ran into a problem: It affected your combo in the middle, before it was forcibly ended. To fix that, they put in exceptions — Captain America’s Shield Slash, Akuma’s hurricane kick, TACs, etc. intentionally ignored HSD because it could have undesirable effects during the attack. As a result of this, the system was no longer fault-tolerant. All a player had to do was figure out a way to link attacks that ignore HSD together, and the entire system immediately becomes irrelevant. Now, players are a creative group, so they did exactly that, and Capcom spent their remaining time patching out infinites. Thus the major difference between, say, Iron Man’s “infinite” in MvC2 and TAC infinites in MvC3 — in MvC3, you never, ever, ever have to stop. You’ve ignored the system entirely. If you want to do a low-damage loop for 60+ game seconds, you can.

This idea is the reason that the infinite prevention system in Skullgirls pays attention to the actual combo you’re doing / does nothing until it stops your combo / has no intentional exceptions, and the reminder that the players can and will break everything you put into the game is a constant influence on my work.

PM: You’ve managed to cultivate a remarkably loyal fanbase. Do you think your experience in the fighting game community helped you build that base?

MZ: My experience in the FGC definitely helped me know what I wanted from a game developer: No BS. I don’t want to be told this next iteration is “the most balanced game we’ve ever made,” or similar junk. I don’t want to be lied to about DLC, or told that there will never be another update unless I buy an unrelated game, or that the FGC’s opinion matters more than the bottom line if it doesn’t.

Lab Zero has tried hard to uphold this ideal, and I think it’s one of the major reasons we have such an incredible fanbase. If something is wrong about the game, I talk about it in public, and I try to fix it. If something goes wrong with development, we talk about it. If something goes right, we talk about that, too! If you want to talk to the developers, you can — either in the Skullgirls IRC channel, by PM on Skullheart/SRK/Dustloop, or in person every week at Salty Cupcakes. I also play the game, so I know firsthand the issues that players experience. We know that we’re doing what we’re doing for our fans, and we don’t want to be sequestered in our ivory tower.

PM: Got any advice for fighting game enthusiasts looking to break into making games?

MZ: My biggest piece of advice for fighting gamers looking at getting into game development is always the same: DO SOMETHING. Don’t worry about where to start, just start; by the time you get to the end you’ll have done everything necessary anyway, and learned a lot more than you would have by doing nothing.

I don’t place much stock in most game development education, because I didn’t go through it. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t help, it just means that in my opinion it’s not required. You can do just as well with a Computer Science degree or an art degree from anywhere else. Start a group, get involved in a project, do something to demonstrate that you are willing to work and have something to show for it. A demo speaks louder than any resumé.

As far as being a game designer, I do advocate a background in either programming, art, or production, because having a knowledge of one of the disciplines is extremely useful since you will be constantly dealing with programmers, artists, and producers. Some people design by feel — I am one — and some people design by analysis…but there are definitely qualities you can’t teach. Some people have “it” and some people don’t. Which always hurts to hear if it turns out to be you, but doesn’t mean those who don’t have the spark for combat design won’t turn out to be amazing level designers, UI designers, scripters, or even artists or programmers! Being a good player doesn’t make you a good designer, and being a terrible player doesn’t make you a terrible designer, but either way you must be able to consider everyone else’s perspectives.

I talk a lot about how being a designer means looking at situations from all angles. Everyone can sit down in front of a game and say whether or not they like it. Fewer people can accurately describe why they don’t like it. Even fewer people could tell me whether or not someone else would like it, and fewer people still could tell me why someone else might like it if they themselves didn’t. Being a designer means considering everyone’s viewpoint, including those you don’t agree with. You may hate a certain character archetype, but there are people who love them. Can you understand why, and make a character that appeals to them but works in your game? I hope so.

Check back tomorrow, as we’ll be posting a similar interview with Seth “s-kill” Killian of Sony Santa Monica (PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale).

(Images courtesy of Eighty Sixed)