Mailbag: Mental stack management, getting into Gear, learning stick, and working in game production

The first is: just ‘keep playing and it gets better’. There isn’t really a single sentence you can read that will immediately make your mental stack management better; the whole point of these games is that you’re learning how to quickly recognize situations, make decisions, execute them, and change all that when the situation changes. The faculties you’re exercising in order to do this stuff quickly rely on both your brain and your body, and improvement here looks more like the incremental gains you make through regular strength training than it does like, cramming the night before a test. The second answer is ‘learn how to play Chipp’ or whatever character you’re struggling with. If you do not have first-hand experience doing the stuff you’re losing to, then you’re not really going to understand how a character flows from move to move, or what they want in each situation, or which tools are reactable or fuzzy blockable or whatever. The easiest way to learn all that is just to learn the character yourself, set the situations up in training mode, and practice dealing with them individually. Once you’ve learned to do that stuff yourself, you’ll have an easier time recognizing your friend’s particular patterns. Maybe they always do leaf grab after a specific knockdown because it’s easier than running up and timing a regular throw, or they go for the wall uncling mixup in the corner after this specific knockdown, or whatever. Instead of treating each knockdown as a unique and special situation where literally anything could happen, you’ll begin to see a rhyme and reason to them that will make the situations less scary. <a href="https://pattheflip.medium.com/mailbag-mental-stack-management-getting-into-gear-learning-stick-and-working-in-game-production-2bc57f9c2b2e">Read More</a>