adventures in game design: Five simple steps to designing melee attacks

Designing melee attacks has been part of my weekly routine for a while now, and I think it's time I sit down and distill the process. Here are the steps, along with an example.

First, I sit down and identify the key points of the attack. What is the primary purpose? Is it a heavy or light attack? Is it part of a chain or series? Does the previous pose matter? How long should it be?

So lets say that we're implementing an overhead katana attack. It's a one-off attack, but it needs to come from the base-combat pose. This attack should appear powerful, as if the character is slicing through a tameshigiri

Second, we get it to the animators! The important part of the above step is to know ahead of time what is the main thing that needs to be communicated with this attack. The animator will inevitably put his own creativity into this, and needs to know what to keep in mind. I try to act out a couple swings myself, but always try to end with "the main thing is ____". Props are great for this part.

Makeshift weapons are great props. A nerf sword, piece of PVC pipe, or practice kendo sword works great for this attack. The most important part is to convey the notes we made above. So as I practice a couple swings in front of the animator, I repeat the words that matter most: Powerful, slicing, and from the base-combat pose. As soon as we get that part communicated, get that prop in the animator's hand! He's much better at imagining this stuff than you. Let him work it out. Some animators like to draw the poses out first too.

Third, we have the animators only work on three poses. This is called pose-to-pose animation. What we want to do here is not waste anyone's time. The animator's best use of time right now is getting 3 poses on screen for you and anyone else to critique. The Anticipation, Actualization, and Follow-Through. In fighting game terms, this is the Wind-up, Hit Frame, and Recovery. Eric Williams has a great blog post about this. This lets everyone agree quickly on the framework of the move.

In our example, we happen to be designing Haohmaru's A+B attack from Samurai Shodown. Here are the poses we end up with:

Wind-Up/Anticipation

Hit Frame/Actualization
Recovery/Follow Through

Fourth, We plug these poses into the game, hook up damage collision, the necessary input sequence, and the scale the timing for each pose so that we get a basic timeline for the motion. We then report the timeline to the animator in terms of something he can use when he animates the in-between frames. We might also report if anything isn't quite right, like if the sword is going over a short enemy's head. It's very important that the designer has the tools, or the knowledge and authority to tweak and tune the timing of attack animations. After all, you're responsible for making the game play correctly, right?

So using our example, we'll set it up so that it does damage appropriately, causes the right hit react on enemies, and then we'll adjust the timing between the poses until it plays about right. Once we're set on the timing, we'll report back the animator with something like this: "Hit Frame should be at frame 14, and recovery should end at frame 34".

Fifth, the animator makes everything look awesome using the guidelines we've set. He plugs it into the game, and we play with it and scale the timing one last time.

We might notice that once the animation is complete that our original timing doesn't work as well now that the animation is fully keyframed. We fine tune the timing this time so that it looks and plays as good as possible. And we're done!