Reteaching Myself Movement

Since my end goal is to become the best possible Yoshi player I can be, something that needs to be fixed before I start anything else is my movement. I’m a pretty fast player, most people who look at me doing handwarmers think that I’m technically competent. While a lot of my movement is flashy and looks nice, it’s all pretty useless in terms of practical applications. I have two glaring flaws want to fix:
  • Technical Inconsistency - I used to spend many hours a day practicing movement. That’s why a lot of my movement looks pretty crisp and solid right now as it is. In reality, though, my process caused for a lot of really sloppy inconsistencies. I would move around the stage as fast as I possibly could, and only put real time into fixing my inputs when they looked sloppy. So that means as long as a missed input didn’t look like a missed input, I would put no effort into fixing it. I had an incredibly poor improvement mindset that honestly is going to take a bit of working backwards to fix.
  • Right-handed Bias - Whenever I used to practice my movement, I always practiced on the right-hand side of the stage. This started pretty early on when I first started learning ledgedashing; I got it down on the right-hand side of the stage, but never bothered to learn it on the left side. As I kept learning more and more ledge techniques, I only practiced on the right side because I wanted to be able to go seamlessly between the ATs. This means that my movement on the left-hand edge and on the left-handed edges of platforms is significantly less tight and clean.
In order to fix these fundamental issues as quickly as possible, I’m going to work with some drills that I read about a long time ago on KirbyKaze’s Blog [part 1][part 2]. From here forward, I will assume you’ve read his writeups. I’m also going to take them and summarize the drills, and add/remove a few sequences.
Movement States:
  • 0 - Stand
  • 1 - Turn
  • 2 - Crouch
  • 3 - Walk
  • 4 - Dash
  • 5 - Run
Drills:
  • [A1][0-1-0-1-0-1-0-1]
  • [A2][0-2-0-2-0-2-0-2]
  • [A3][0-1-0-2-0-1-0-2]
  • [A4][0-1-0-1-0-2]
  • [A5][0-2-0-2-0-1]
  • [B1][0-3-0-1-0-3-0-1]
  • [B2][0-4-0-1-0-4-0-1]
  • [B3][0-4-0-3-0-1-0-4-0-3-0-1]
  • [B4][0-4-0-2-0-1-0-4-0-2-0-1]
  • [B5][0-4-5-2-0-1-0-4-5-2-0-1]
  • [B6][0-4-5-2-0-4-0-1-0-4-5-2-0-4-0-1]
These drills are all simple enough that I feel totally confident I can perfect them in a very reasonable amount of time. What I will do to make sure I have fully mastered all of these is the following:
  1. Practice each sequence until I’ve performed it perfectly 50 times in a row. This seems like a big number, but these are simple sequences.
  2. Once I’ve done a sequence 50 times perfectly, I will test myself 5 times a day on that sequence. If I’m able to do it 10 times in a row on my first try, that’s great. If I mess up and don’t get 10, then I have to practice it again until I get to 50 in a row.
  3. As soon as I have gone 3 days in a row performing the sequence perfectly during each test, I no longer have to practice it daily. I only have to practice it once a week from then on.
Once these are all fully mastered, I will continue building onto these foundations with new, more complex drills. KirbyKaze wrote about an additional 4 action states that I will be creating drills for:
  • 6 - Wavedash
  • 7 - Shield
  • 8 - Jump
  • 9 - Waveland
  • 10 - Doublejump

In addition to implementing these additional action states, I will be creating more strict positions for each step of the later routines. I’ll cover this in a later writeup about Micro-positioning.

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