I can't help but notice, as I look around, that everyone is super busy working on a thing you all might be waiting for. You know what that means?

There's still no one to stop me from telling you about my day! Muahaha!

So, allow me to once again hijack the shiny train and discuss one of my favorite topics: Combat!

Last time I spoke about combat, I took some time to explain how much positioning, especially of the camera, matters in combat. But one of the things I didn't touch in that conversation is that how your character moves through a fight matters to feel, too. There's a momentum and a weight to attacks that bring with them a sense of inertia. Your attacks can pull you through the space of a fight, or you can try to rigidly control your movement through a fight to maintain a tactical advantage.

In fact, part of a combat consideration for a fighter involves using the attacks you know to move you or your enemy in a way that grants you a superior position. Whether that's knocking an opponent off their balance so they have to take a step back, or deflecting an opponent's attack to move them out of position and create an opening, positioning is a major piece of what dictates success in a fight.

It probably comes as no surprise, given what I've just said, that we spend some time "shopping" our attacks before they ever make it to the game proper.

Before we even get to this level of pre-alpha:

We start back in the Fight Lab, with something like this:

Most of the momentum of the attacks don't exist yet at this phase, which lets us play with the attacks to figure out where we'd want them to move us in the fight, and determine whether that actually reconciles against the attack's visual language. When they don't match up, the attack feels wrong in a subliminal way that is far easier to feel than it is to see on paper, or probably even in a gif. But, because of that, we can quickly vet whether a rough combat animation is going to work before we take the time to build in the motion and weight that makes an attack feel right.

It really goes back to what I was saying last time: Taking the time to think about feel early is important. It feeds into all sorts of other aspects of the game. If the only way to make the momentum of an attack feel right is to move you into a position that doesn't fit the overarching style we're building for the attack, or if it just results in an untenable tactical position for the player, we won't include it.

In this particular case, checking the feel isn't just an "it'd be good if we did this" sort of thing; it's literally how we get to the in-game attacks you saw at the top of this post from this:

Thanks for letting me talk shop a little, I do hope you enjoyed it!

Stay shiny, Elyrians! :)