First off: Thank you to everyone who is watching and following and sharing my stuff! Remember, you can find me on Twitch, YouTube. a podcast which you can grab on iTunes, Soundcloud, or any old RSS feed, and even a mailing list.

Now, let’s talk about gameplans.



If you watched the Why You Lose video, you may remember the part where I talked about the idea of Simplifying Your Mental Stack that Kayin Nasaki wrote about: the tldr is basically, “You’ll react to things more quickly if you already know what to look for and what to do about it.

Remember that responding to your opponent’s inputs is a three-step process. You have to:

-Process what they did (jump), -Decide on the correct response (DP), and -Execute the correct response (DP input).

That’s a pretty good model for improving reactive play – waiting for your opponent to do something and then counter it – but that’s only really half of fighting games. So, in this episode of the Patrick Miller Stream Show, we’re going to talk about the other half of fighting games: Game Plans.

Your goal in playing fighting games is to beat your opponent, either by a) reducing their life meter to zero before they do the same to you, or b) having more life than your opponent when the timer runs out. In order to do this, you’ll have to make a bunch of decisions about what attacks you’re going to do, when, and why.

When we talk about reacting to your opponent’s attacks, this part is pretty simple: You practice until you learn what attacks beat theirs and when to do them, and you don’t have to worry too much about the why. However, unless you are a God of Reads or Reactions, you’re not going to win based only off of reacting to your opponent. You can test this pretty easily: Just stand in one place and try to beat everything your opponent does. Unless you’re much better than your opponent, you won’t win.

This is where it helps to talk about a gameplan. Newer players in fighting games often have no idea why they do something, and even experienced players may play with a gameplan in mind but might not necessarily realize that’s what they’re doing.

Think of it this way: The goal of the match – beating your opponent – is the destination you’re typing into Google Maps or Waze or whatever. The route you take to get there is your gameplan. Over the course of the match, you’ll have to make constant streams of small decisions. Where should I stand? Should I use my meter? Should I be aggressive or defensive? Should I go for guaranteed damage or a reset? And so on.

Thing is, that’s a lot of nuanced thinking to do in the middle of a match. It’s even harder to do that kind of thinking alongside making reads about your opponent’s behavior and reacting to their actions. So, a gameplan is the kind of thing you want to develop even before going into the match – so that when you’re in the match, you can focus on executing the gameplan. In fact, the funny thing about low- to mid-level fighting game competition is that most matches are about who can execute on their gameplan better, and it’s not until higher levels that you really get into good mind games.

So: What does a gameplan look like, and how do we develop it? Well, let’s start with a fantastically silly example: Flowchart Ken.

This is actually a pretty great gameplan for a new player. Ken’s Shoryuken is a very powerful move! After all, it beats just about every other move in the game, and the main way to beat it is to block, which is something new players are very bad at. Even if you block it, you have to know how to hit him on the way down to get a full punish, which is something else that new players are very bad at. If you had to pick a strategy to teach someone who was about to play against a total masher, Flowchart Ken isn’t a bad one.

You can see from the diagram that the gameplan is actually pretty gratuitous; every action in the game leads to "Shoryuken!!1”. And while the flaws in the gameplan’s outcome are obvious to us – you’ll get your DPs blocked and punished – the fact is that, from the perspective of developing a gameplan, it’s really good! Whoever adopts the Flowchart Ken gameplan will never worry about what they need to do next, and their in-game thoughts will be solely focused on SHORYUKEN!!1

So that’s the trick when it comes to developing a gameplan. A good gameplan has two properties:

-Comprehensive enough that you never have to search for an answer for “What should I be doing?” mid-match -Versatile enough that you shouldn’t lose once your opponent figures out what you’re doing (blocking the DP)

The way to start developing your character’s gameplan is to ask yourself this question:

What is the easiest way for me to win with this character?

In order to answer this question, you need to sit down with your character, examine their toolset, examine your skillset (as a player, what are you good or bad at?), and then we can develop a plan that gets you there.

Note that we’re not terribly concerned with how you actually do the winning; that’s the easy part. We want to know how you get there.

Easy gameplans: Just Get In with Dauntless and Dudley

-Toolset is entirely based on endless in-close high/low/throw mixups. This is pretty obvious if you look at their moveset (no real ranged attacks, just gap closers, high-damaging options off of a high or low, good throw setups, and big damage off counter-hits to punish throw tech).

Because of this, we know that as a Dauntless or Dudley player, your easiest path to victory is to be inside sweep range, where you can threaten within ¼th screen range with all kinds of attacks that lead to big damage and knockdowns that keep you there, and if you’re playing against a Dauntless or Dudley player, you want to keep them the fuck out of there.

Now, that doesn’t mean your gameplan is “mindlessly walk forward”; it means that up-close is where you want to be. If you need to burn meter to get there, that’s fine; your character doesn’t need meter to do damage once you’re in the sweet spot. And if your opponent is trying to keep you out of there, be patient! It takes a lot of mental effort to actively control a certain spot on the screen – especially when you know you’re going to lose if you give it up – and 99 seconds of that can be an incredibly draining round.

As an aside, characters that focus on zoning at range (Sagat, Dhalsim, etc.) also fall into a similarly simple gameplan – your goal is just “Just Don’t Let Them Get In”, and you break down your options at any given range to which pokes and fireballs let you create more space.

As you can see, this is pretty simple stuff. Let’s move on to a more complicated example.

Slightly harder gameplans: Vortexing with Crow and Ibuki

Crow and Ibuki are both examples of characters that have a lot of tools to open up an opponent once they’re knocked down, because that lets them set up some crossup shenanigans that is hard to block and leads to big damage and more knockdowns. (If your main experience with fighting games is Street Fighter 4, you’re forgiven for thinking almost every character’s gameplan should revolve around a knockdown, because that was basically how the game worked for most characters.)

For you, the easiest way to win with that character is “knock them down and start my shenanigans”. However, that doesn’t mean you can just run up and sweep them – the weakness in both Crow and Ibuki is that they lack much in the way of defensive tools, so while they’re really good when they knock you down, they’re really bad when they get knocked down. So, rather than planning for all the delicious stuff you want to do to them once they’re knocked down, you should be planning for ways to create situations where you can fish for a knockdown opportunity relatively safely. In other words, “Vortex shenanigans” isn’t your whole game plan, just the end goal.

For example: Crow can start his stuff off a sweep or his throws, and that’s pretty powerful. However, against Chel, if I just walk up into footsies range and go for a sweep, there’s a real risk that I’ll get outpoked and knocked down, or pushed out of range by fireballs, or whatever. If I get knocked down as Crow, it’s very hard to reset the momentum without burning a KD burst or landing a successful Riposte, so that’s not worth it to me – Chel has an easier time getting out of my knockdown shenanigans than I do against hers. I need to find a safer route to sweep/throw mixups, so my gameplan becomes “Find ways to make them block a disc.”

With “Find ways to make them block a disc” as the core of my plan, I can figure out specific places on the screen where I can throw a disc and get an opportunity for a knockdown on hit or block: (“At ¾ to full screen, throw far disc and run in to sweep” “At ½ screen, throw normal disc and run in to throw or crossup” “At ¼th screen, poke with sweep and cancel into disc if the sweep is blocked”). If I’m in a situation where I can’t safely get to one of those ranges and do the thing – like, say, I got knocked down – then my gameplan is GET TO SAFETY by backdashing or jumping back or using KD if I have to.

Harder gameplans: Neutral monsters Chel and Ryu

For some characters, answering the question “What is the easiest way for me to win with this character?” is a bit more difficult. Let’s take a look at what a gameplan looks like for fireball/DP characters like Chel and Ryu.

These characters are tricky because their toolset is so versatile that there isn’t an immediate focus to their gameplan. With the first two types of characters, their strengths and weaknesses are easy to understand, so it’s easier to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing and focus your gameplan on it. With characters like Chel and Ryu, you can get in-your-face like the first group, but you won’t be as good at it (meaning, your options are not as scary and might be more expensive in resources); you can pressure off a knockdown like the second group, but you aren’t as hard to block; you can zone people out, but your tools aren’t as comprehensive as a dedicated zoning character.

When your toolset is as mixed as this, your gameplan has to diversify accordingly. In order to win, you’ll need to rush down when your opponent wants to zone, zone when your opponent wants to rush down, go for mixups to scare your opponent, and be measured and patient when they’re spooked. And against good players, you’ll have to switch this up multiple times mid-match – something other players often refer to as “going hot and cold.”

In other words, you’re playing against both the opponent’s character and the opponent. You need to find ways to test them and see what they want, make them think that they can get it, and then take it away from them. And most of that happens in what we now have come to call “the neutral game.” Your goal is to occupy a certain space on the screen – usually a small window around the peak range of your sweep – and use your tools to stop your opponent from doing whatever it is they want to do.

With Chel and Ryu specifically, the most powerful tool they have to do this is their fireballs. Their fireballs push their opponent away, force them to take block damage, beat most of their attacks, and occupy a whole bunch of space. If you’re one of the other character types and you’re trying to get into your sweet spot, fireballs make your life miserable. If you are trying to be patient and figure out what the right approach is, fireballs will put you on tilt. However, if your opponent accurately predicts or reacts to your fireball, you’re going to eat a big damage punish.

Because of this, your goal is to throw one less fireball than they think you’re going to throw at all times. That’s basically how you win – by making them eat fireballs and then punishing their attempts to read yours. In some matchups, you do this by throwing a LOT of fireballs, and in others, you do it by throwing one fireball at the start of the round and then never doing it again.

To be honest, it’s pretty hard to make an easy-to-read gameplan for these characters, and this is why. This is also why these characters typically do well with newer players early in a game’s life cycle, when it’s easier to figure out how to deny your opponent’s gameplan and take advantage of their weaknesses (because you can kind of do everything and other characters can’t) but as everyone levels up, you have to learn far more about the opponent’s playstyle and psychology than they do about yours (and in a best-of-three tournament situation, you don’t have much time to do that).

Instead, I’d recommend just checking out this video of John Choi vs. Daigo at Evo 2014 (and the article I wrote to go along with it) to see what I’m talking about.