Game modes

[Enigma]

Alright, I'm working on a game called Dust to Dusk, and was thinking of putting a fighting game style engine to go with it (me or my 'speaks binary code instead of English' freind ) so I was wondering about people who didn't like / lack the dexterity to play fighting games. I actually thought of two options.

1.a 'Visual Novel' difficulty, that skips the fights. The only problem is that it makes the story mostly devoid of comabt, and many character abilites (like the main character's ability to use his powers to grow wings) are mentioned only a few times out of combat. It makes a lot of the abilites seem to come from nowhere.

2.An idyosyncratic difficulty called "Hemophobic" (there is a bit of a biology/ medical science theme.) which either makes it so you preform the characters complex combos by button mashing. Or alternitively, simplify the attacks tremendously (half circle backwards, forward, punch becomes down, forward punch.)

Other things I'm kind of troubled about is the idea of the 11 differnt perspectives that the story is told from. Meaning that you might go over the same dialouge once or twice. I tried to counterbalnce this by having the narration of all the charcters be different (main character has a simple 3rd person limited perspective, another has a story written like an old detictive story, one that is in he form of a diary/medical, and so on) I do try to avoid using the same scenes over and over when the character perceiveing the event doesn't have any interesting opinions about the event.

Well that about sums up my concerns, I look forward to your feedback.

[papillon]

I think some games have had a 'visual novel' difficulty setting which just makes the fights unlosable. For a fighting game, if you made the PC unable to die and prevented the enemies from doing stunlocks, the player is going to win eventually and they can have some fun trying out the moves to see which ones they can pull off. It might therefore act as training wheels for some to eventually decide to play it on a more normal setting.

[SusanTheCat]

I am terrible at fighting games. (I am even worst at jumping in platformers.)

Skipping fights: I think this is a viable option for those like me that aren't so great a fighting. Maybe have a image sequence that shows the fight with the special abilities so they aren't coming out of nowhere in the main story

Easy Mode: I like this mode

Another option that might fit
Turn based: I am terrible at fighting because my reaction speed is bad. I like games like the old Final Fantasy because I got time to pick what I wanted to do.

Susan

[Enigma]

See, that's the problem with fighting games, some dexterity required.

Making the character immune to death would be a pretty easy method, but then the player wouldn't ever have the need to use those flashier moves like Fatal Aetherion level moves (read instant kill only useable under certin conditions). They could just keep spamming a regular slash. Of course, increasing the character's health or defense could help.

Using an animation wouldn't be that hard tough (seeing as the character sprites would already be assumed to be in motion half the time). Plus it could show the fight how it really happens (case in point, even if Doom were to Fatal Aetherion finish Scylla, he sill would have lost in the next cutscene.)

[LVUER]

Instead of unlimited lives (immunity to death), perhaps you could use unlimited supers (or very easy to recharge the super bar) and could also be combined with one button special/super moves. That should make things easy enough even for those with slow thumbs (or finger in PC case).

[Enigma]

These are all very interesting options. I think having an unlimited super bar would probably lead to some good old fashioned super combo spamming, though that in and of itself is fun (To me at least). Besides that, I think tilting the battle in the player's favor with some extra defense could help too.