I was pointed at Eric Willaims’ blog (combat designer on God of War) today by our team lead for his essay on Combat Cancelled, which is an insanely in-depth look at cancels in combat animations, and how they make games more fun. I wish he’d have called it the 2-in-1 system (and later the 3-in-1 system) in Street Fighter, but he mentions that SF was the father of the cancel, and that’s good enough for me.
It’s a loooooong read. And a possibly dry technical one if you’re not into combat design.
The good news is: I think after reading his mock script on how they used cancels on their moves in GoW I figured out how to finally fix what was bugging me about our own prototype combat we’re working on. And I think we already have the tools in our engine to put that in.
The bad news is: this means I’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow now, and it’s snowing like mad outside. At least I’ve got the laptop here at home I can work on.
And yes, I can run our game editor/engine (UE3) on my laptop. I love this thing.
/kisses laptop
/burns lips
/runs off to get ice water
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey thanks for mentioning my post. Sorry it was so dry, it is kinda of hard to make it all sound amazing when it really boils down to a lot of tedious time consuming work per animation. As for the 2in1 comment, i think combat systems have evolved well beyond that description since there are so many techniques available to us these days but hey call it what you want as long as you understand it hehe. Anyhow glad it helped you possibly fix a problem on your game!
Thanks for pointing me in the direction of that!
Hey Eric. The funny thing is that I knew what I wanted to do with the cancels even before reading your piece, but couldn’t figure out how to make ‘em work in our engine ’till I saw your script example. I put a bunch of them in today and our combat feels even better.
I even did some “competitive analysis” on GoW for a bit too just to see exactly what you cancel out of. Now I wish I could have gotten past the Minataur boss. Because damn GoW is a ton of fun.