[Guide] Inventing Parkour Tricks

[SwiftSmoky 8,445]

Inventing Parkour Tricks

 

 

 

The video shows how inventing tricks can seem so magical to people - like, you need to be a genius to think about this stuff. I am one of the best trick inventors in Tanki and my brain is completely normal. I just approach this task in a better way, and you can too.

 

First you'll get familiar with a few basic terms, and then you'll learn two good methods that I use to invent tricks. One of them allows me to invent several tricks in a few minutes, and I'm not kidding, but do not expect to achieve such results quickly and easily.

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Game Mechanics and Concepts:

 

In this whole article, I use color coding to highlight game mechanics and concepts. It will help you to get used to these terms and understand the difference between them.

 

Each game mechanic is like another building material you can use to build tricks. For example, a basic game mechanic is the impact force of mines - one of the simplest and most used things in parkour. Being able to notice game mechanics and experiment with them is important to expand your tool set for inventing new tricks.

 

A few examples of game mechanics and ways to discover them:

• Look at what happens when you try to touch walls from the invisible side of them (tanks go through the invisible side of walls)
• Try to spawn a bunch of ghost tanks at the same spot (you get several tanks inside each other getting pushed out of each other, if aligned precisely enough they can form a tower of tanks)
• Stick your turret as far as you can through another tank and see if you can shoot through tanks (you can, as long as the turret doesn't get in the way. Easiest to do with Magnum and Isida)

At some point it'll get very hard to discover new game mechanics, much harder than inventing new tricks. But you don't need to know every single mechanic in the game to be a good trick inventor, as almost all tricks use less than four game mechanics. Discovering completely new game mechanics is great for coming up with entirely new tricks that don't have much in common with existing tricks. But, do note that most of the recently invented tricks are based on very old and well known game mechanics.

 

Concepts are like a higher level category that includes game mechanics, ways to use them - including complete tricks (such as jumping on mines using their impact force, building a tower of tanks, and pushing tanks without rotating them by using splash impact force), and more general trick properties (such as having dynamic helpers, a flipped jumper or multiple jumpers).

 

You can learn many game mechanics and concepts from parkour videos, the Myths & Facts topic and the Parkour Dictionary, but that's a terribly long read. There's nothing like having your own experience with it - so you better test these game mechanics in the game yourself.

 

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Trick Construction:

(building tricks out of game mechanics and concepts)

 

Most people approach it backwards, they try to get the final result before going through the details. The question most people ask is something like "What trick has never been done before?", "How can I make a big jump in a new way?" - and it is the wrong question to ask, and here's why:

 

Let's say thirty tricks exist in the game, and a hundred more are yet to be invented. You have so many options of not invented tricks that could work - so how can you not think of any of them? And how the hell does the parkour team Fight & Flight brings new tricks at an increasing rate when with each new trick there are less possible tricks that no one thought about yet?

 

That is because we don't look for the not invented tricks to magically come out of our mysterious subconscious part of the brain. We start from something known and let it lead us to the unknown. We ask ourselves: "What known game mechanics/concepts have we not used?" and "Is there anything else we could use this game mechanic for?" - we look at what we know can happen in the game and try to find uses for it. To fully understand how we do that, here are some examples:

 

Let's focus on the characteristics of Hammer. No, let's be even more specific and narrow down our options as much as possible, let's focus just on Hammer's ability to bounce pellets off walls. You can probably think of a few ideas right now, like shoot straight down to make the pellets bounce back into you and push you up into the air, or have other tanks shooting down at slight angle to have more hammers hitting you and pushing you up. So you have the concept figured out - shooting the ground with Hammer to bounce the pellets into a tank and push him up into the air. The next thing to do is experiment with it, invite your friends to a parkour battle and try to position the tanks in a way that can make the trick work. For example, have the tanks lean on a wall or a cliff so they can easily aim down, then flip the jumper sideways so he can aim down and shoot himself too. It could be any different setup, I just used this one as an example because it's the simplest implementation of this concept.

 

 

Now, you have a working trick that you just invented by thinking about ways to use something that you know exists in the game. The difference is huge between the chances of you thinking about this trick using the first question ("What has never been done before?" versus the second question, "How can I use Hammer's bouncing pellets in a trick?".

 

Let's take a look at another one of Hammer's characteristics - shooting multiple pellets. Obviously we can hit more than one player with it; but we can do better, let's take our inventing skills to the next level. Now we think about more than one game mechanic, now our question is: "How can we use Hammer's ability to shoot multiple pellets together with the ability to bounce pellets off walls?". We can hit a wider area with multiple pellets, that means we can hit two different walls and then the pellets will bounce to two different directions. There are also a few objects with different shapes that can bounce the pellets differently and to more than two directions. We could try hitting two tanks with these split pellets, now that we have an idea it's time to go experiment with it in the game. So we tried shooting corners of buildings and it splits the pellets into two opposite directions. But we ran into a problem: half the pellets means half the power, so we weren't able to impact tanks enough to do a big enough jump with it. We just couldn't find a good spot for this trick with a low enough target in front of a corner. We could take it to space mode where we need less power and can use things that are too weak in normal gravity, or we could work harder on making it work without space mode - it all depends on our knowledge of other game mechanics and concepts and on our creativity. Not all ideas will end up being successful tricks, but they are worth remembering in case your future knowledge will help you solve problems you weren't able to solve before, and because the game will probably change and make new things possible. For example, after gathering knowledge about what shapes that exist in Tanki maps, you could notice that round cliffs can be used to spread Hammer's pellets into a V shape going up. Now you have a good spot for your trick - two jumpers use one Hammer's split pellets to jump together to the roof of this small house:

 

 

When you think about game mechanics and concepts it is important to not miss any little detail, because they can make a big difference. The trick you've seen in the video on top of this article was the best trick of Masters of Parkour 2016 finals, and I didn't need to do anything special to invent it, except paying attention to small details. I was just thinking about an existing concept in the game - a tower of tanks. We all know how tank towers are used to climb houses - the tower is just a tall thing that you can stand on and it will drive to the house you want to climb. Here's where the little details are important, when you think of a tower you usually think about it's normal use instead of what it actually is. It is tanks stacked on top of each other, these tanks also have turrets that nobody uses. So I decided to use the tower's turrets, but it's hard to hit a tank with all these turrets together since they are all at different height. (note: here comes a good example of how knowledge of other concepts can be used to solve problems while inventing a new trick) If I get the tank into handstand in front of the tower, everyone could hit him together, and he could also shoot down with Thunder for extra boost from his/her splash. The easiest way to get into handstand is to jump from above, and the best place to jump from is of course the tower itself.

 

I did all of this in my head, but if it's hard for you, then you could start experimenting with the tower in the game before you have an exact idea of how to use it in a trick, the ability to do more of this in your head can be developed by learning more concepts and game mechanics, and experience with using them.

 

There are many more ways to use towers for parkour - for instance, the trick of splitting Hammer's pellets we couldn't find a good spot for the trick until we discovered that round cliffs can be used too. If we were going through more concepts in our head we could realize that a tower of tanks can be a small target to jump on and pretend it's a house - just build the tower in a convenient spot for the trick, and you even get to choose how tall exactly your target tower is. That's a perfect solution for those who couldn't find the other solution (round cliffs), and just like that there are many solutions to almost every other problem you could have.

 

Earlier in this article, I didn't highlight the concept of using a tower as a tall thing to stand on, that is because I didn't want to spoil the surprise. But I also didn't highlight many other concepts simply because there are too many of them, you can look at pretty much anything as a concept that you can use to build your own trick. You probably wouldn't expect me to highlight the concept of driving you to the house when talking about a tower of tanks, but once you try to think about other tricks that implement this concept you can probably come up with other ways to drive a tank to a house. (such as the taxi trick)

 

To sum up the whole process:

• Choose some known game mechanics/concepts (preferably ones that weren't used much in parkour).
• Try to find ways to use them in a trick (pay attention to every little detail).
• Experiment with it in the game.
• If it's not enough on it's own to create a working or big enough trick, use your knowledge of other game mechanics and concepts to try to find a solution.
• If you failed, write down your idea to get another shot at making it work in the future, or share it to see if anyone else can make it work.

I just introduced some new concepts in this article, like using tanks to build custom terrain and practical ways (that I tested and they work) to use one Hammer's split pellets to hit two jumpers. And that is while thinking of just two basic game mechanics and another one little more complex concept in the game (bouncing pellets, shooting multiple pellets at once, tank towers). Of course it's not gonna be easy for everyone and it does require creativity, knowledge of game mechanics and experience in the game, but it is doable and you don't need to be a genius for it.

 

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Trickstroming:

(building tricks out of game mechanics regarding the environment)

 

This is a method I use a lot when I need to come up with many new ideas quickly. In fact, it is so efficient that it helps me to come up with new trick ideas as fast as around five (or rarely even ten) ideas in under thirty minutes. The process of testing the ideas and building complete and working tricks out of them takes anything from a few minutes to a several days per trick, but that's still very fast. 

 

I am absolutely serious, I'm not exaggerating with these numbers. You probably know the tricks from Fight & Flight's videos, most of them were invented while @darrrex and I were trickstorming. It is what it sounds like - brainstorming about tricks. It can be done alone, but two minds are better than one. We join a map, look at our environment and think about ways to use it. Just like game mechanics, the environment itself is a tool for creating tricks. You could find many uses for a ramp, a wall, a crater, a house with a bridge going over it, and absolutely anything else. We ask ourselves: "How can we use these terrain features?". We think about what can be done with each object we have in the map, and that how could a tank successfully use it. This is where knowledge of game mechanics and concepts comes in, we need it (of course the more, the better) to know exactly what tanks can do in this environment. The thinking process of trickstorming includes what I described under the previous title in this article, but instead of being game-mechanic-oriented it is environment-oriented. It's almost the same method, but instead of building the tricks out of game mechanics and then finding a place to do them, we limit our choice of places and create a well defined list of options to choose from (which is the terrain features of the map we are in) and then start the process of building tricks from game mechanics and concepts that can be used in our environment.

 

Why is this method so much more efficient than the first method?

 

We focus on a real situation with limited options instead of assuming that every game mechanic and concept can be used. If we pick a spot in a map, we know what game mechanics and concepts are relevant and don't even bother thinking much about the much longer list of irrelevant game mechanics that are impossible to use within our environment. In fact, we don't even think about any list, we let our environment guide us through the thinking process and remind us about what concepts can work there. For example, having cliffs reminds us of concepts such as using them to make wheelies, jumping off the cliff onto tanks (maybe onto tanks on wheelie too), using the cliff's angle to bounce Ricochet's projectiles or Hammer's pellets into a jumper, and a whole lot more... Each terrain feature like that associates with things we know we can do with it. It will be virtually impossible to get so many instant associations with like this unless you have experience with the concepts that these terrain features are related to.

 

Another factor is that we allow our brains to do something they do much better and faster - brainstorming (throwing out random, incomplete and mostly unrelated ideas) instead of having to almost randomly choose game mechanics that might have nothing in common and then, using the Trick Construction method, trying to analyze every possible way of using them.

 

But, trickstorming is not an entirely separate method, it is deeply connected to the Trick Construction method. The brainstorm part of the trickstorming method is the process of choosing sets of environment properties, game mechanics and concepts to apply the Trick Construction method on them, but with the focus on the given environment instead of just game mechanics.

 

Also, it is always useful to not keep in mind the ideas that can't work in your environment. If while trickstorming you have an idea of a trick that almost can work, but it can't because you are missing a way to make something happen (because you need a different environment or the possibility to use another game mechanic), then you should remember this idea (write it down or something) and keep trickstorming. Afterwards, get back to this idea and use just the Trick Construction method, let yourself assume you can have every environment and game mechanic you want available. Once you figure out how this trick could work, you can get to searching for a real place to implement this idea.

 

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You obviously have to practice these methods to get better, you shouldn't expect to get results as good as what I can achieve with trickstorming (unless you know for sure that you have as much knowledge and experience in parkour as I do), such assumptions will most likely lead you to disappointment and will make you want to give up and conclude that you are not creative enough for it. It will probably be difficult at first, but believe it or not - your inventing skills and even creativity itself can be trained and improved!

 

I hope this was helpful, please let me know if you managed to come up with any new trick ideas with this method!

 

Edited June 5, 2017 by Blackdrakon30

[Blackdrakon30 2,943]

So, due to some complications, Antartica edited this but I'm approving it, so I have no idea what he did as edits.  :P So perhaps if he comes here later he can shed some light on the topic, if you feel the need to know what was changed (if anything). All I did was add the title.

 

Overall really nice! I liked how thorough and simplistic the guide was, and honestly it is top-tier article.  :)

 

Approved.

 

 

Edits:-

 

1. Redesigned and removed [.hr] lines.

2. Standardized to Trebuchet MS, size 14.

3. A couple of grammar and typo edits.

Edited June 6, 2017 by Hexed
Added edits.

[Possibility 282]

Nice!

With this, I might become the next AgileRicochet  :P