For my 40th birthday my friends are coming over and I'm hosting a 2 day Avatar fighting game event, wife is making custom baked goods from the world, gonna be a whole thing. By the end of it my hope if my friends (and wife!) get how it can be fun once you learn a few bread and butter combos, pull a shimmy on someone, and do a bit more than thinking than joyfully mashing buttons and watching cool shit happen (which is super bad ass, but when that no longer works or they lose enough online matches their interest goes way down).
We've played them before, they sorta like DBZ Fighterz, Dead or Alive, Soul Caliber, but after a week or two the interest goes out the window when that time comes to learn a few combos or understand the deeper mechanics. I really love labbing and investigating the under the hood stuff, but I get how that is dreadfully boring to some people. Losing streaks without visible progress kills momentum. I want to help them realize they don't suck at fighting games, there's just different aspects of the game to learn and work on. They aren't strangers to competitive games or difficult games.
So I'm here to ask y'all to help give me ideas, I've designed bingo cards to give out with a basic mix of fighting game fundamentals, such as 'don't get hit by an air attack this match' to encourage learning antiairs, hit your big level 7 chakra super, do a 5 hit combo, things like that. Prizes for all for things marked off.
I also made a spinny wheel of various alternate game modes like 'no jumping allowed' to remove a chunk from the mental stack and learn a little footsies. First hit wins the round, ect...
Am I going about this the right way? I'm very open to thoughts on how this could be done better, I want to make it fun and show them there's multiple tiny steps to improve on and it isn't as daunting as they think. Shift that mentality from 'I suck at fighting games' to 'I gotta work on my anti-airs and combo consistency'.