How the Combat System Was Built

Every strike in Game of Canvas resolves in under a tenth of a second. Getting there took two years and a great deal of deleting.

The first version of the combat system had eleven attack types. The shipped one has four. Almost every cut came from the same observation: players were not choosing between options, they were choosing the option they had already committed to before the fight started.

What replaced the breadth was timing. Each of the four attacks reads differently at a distance, recovers at a different speed, and can be interrupted at a different point, so the interesting decision moved from what to press to when to press it.

The result is a system that is quick to learn and slow to exhaust, which was the target from the beginning even when the design was pointed somewhere else.