Chapter 26 Further Reading

The resources below are the ones I return to most often when working on combat. Not everything in every resource is gold; I've annotated each with what you should take from it and where it falls short. Combat design has a famously strong oral tradition — a lot of the best material is in conference talks and postmortems rather than books — so expect a mix of media.

GDC Talks (Free, Usually on YouTube or GDC Vault)

Matthew Davis — "Crafting Dead Cells' Combat: From Concept to Execution" (GDC 2019)

Motion Twin's combat lead walks through how Dead Cells' responsive, weighty combat was engineered. Davis is explicit about the frame counts — recovery on a heavy attack, the i-frame window on a roll, the hit-pause on a critical. If you watch one GDC talk on combat feel, this should be it. He also discusses playtest data: how Motion Twin measured "feel" by tracking how long players spent per room before dying, and how they correlated those numbers with combat tweaks. Applicable to any 2D action game.

Derek Yu / Jon Blow / Tommy Refenes — Various Indie Gamemaker Talks

Several indies have given talks on combat feel. The 2013 GDC "Indie Soapbox" talks include Jon Blow on pacing and Tommy Refenes on Super Meat Boy's moment-to-moment feel. Not exclusively combat, but the feel principles port directly.

Mark Brown — "Boss Keys" and "Game Maker's Toolkit" (YouTube)

Mark Brown's YouTube channel is the best free video resource on design analysis. His "Boss Keys" series dissects specific bosses — the Sekiro video, the Hollow Knight video, the Dark Souls III Soul of Cinder analysis — with diagrams, frame references, and clear design takeaways. Not an academic source, but consistently rigorous. Watch the whole channel. You will come out a better designer.

Nathan Brown (no relation) — "Juice It Or Lose It" (GDC/YouTube)

A foundational 10-minute talk by Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho, often cited as "Juice it or Lose it." Shows the same small game with progressively more game-feel layers added. Not specifically combat, but the juice principles are directly applicable. If you are new to game feel, start here.

Books

Steve Swink — Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation (CRC Press, 2008)

Still the definitive book on game feel. Swink defines feel across three axes (real-time control, simulated physical space, polish), and while the book is older than many of the games you care about, the framework is timeless. Chapter 6 on polish is the most directly relevant to combat. Borrow it from a library rather than buying unless you are doing academic work; the book's pace is slower than a practitioner usually wants.

Ian Schreiber — Game Design Concepts

Available free online at gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com, this is a MOOC-style course that covers combat in passing but positions it well within the broader design context. Useful if you are coming to combat from a systems-design or tabletop background and need the bridge to action games.

Jesse Schell — The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (4th edition, CRC Press, 2024)

The "Lens of Skill vs. Chance" and "Lens of Fairness" chapters are directly applicable to combat difficulty and telegraph design. Schell is more academic than practitioner, but the lenses themselves are tools you will use for the rest of your career.

Fighting-Game Frame Data Resources

SuperCombo.gg (web)

Community-maintained frame-data database covering most competitive fighting games in print: Street Fighter 6, Guilty Gear Strive, Tekken 8, Mortal Kombat 1, and archives for older games. Browsing a character page is a master class in how precise frame data can be — startup, active, recovery, on-block advantage, on-hit advantage, invincibility windows, cancel tables. Even if you never design a fighting game, two hours reading SuperCombo will tune your eye for frame data forever.

Dustloop (web)

Specialized in Arc System Works games (Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, Granblue Fantasy Versus). Similar frame-data depth to SuperCombo with additional community analysis. Useful for understanding how a single character's frame data translates to gameplay — which normals are "plus," which punish what.

Maximilian Dood's YouTube Channel

Maximilian is a fighting-game content creator who has spent 15 years teaching the mental game of frame data. His "Assist Me!" series and general breakdowns of new fighting games include heavy discussion of what frame-data differences mean to feel. Helpful if you learn better from watching than reading.

Dark Souls Combat Analyses

Matthewmatosis — Dark Souls Critique and Bloodborne Critique (YouTube)

The definitive long-form video analyses of FromSoftware combat. Matthewmatosis diagnoses specific combat interactions, from boss tells to roll i-frame consequences. Nearly 10 hours of material across the series. Dense; take notes.

Joseph Anderson — Hollow Knight Critique, Dark Souls Critique (YouTube)

Similar genre to Matthewmatosis, often with more structural analysis. Anderson's Hollow Knight video is particularly useful for understanding how a combat system can be built to teach itself, which is directly relevant to the Hornet case study in this chapter.

Daniel Kanoa's Dark Souls II Design Analysis (Blog archive)

A series of long blog posts (mostly 2015-2016) that dissect Dark Souls II's combat with an eye toward where it differed from Dark Souls I. Useful for understanding combat design as a moving target — design choices made in one game may not survive into a sequel and the reasons why.

Deep-Technical / Engineering Resources

Fighting-Game AI and Rollback Netcode (Code Mystics, 2020-2024 talks)

Less relevant to single-player combat design but invaluable if you plan multiplayer combat. Understanding rollback netcode's input-to-action pipeline reveals what single-player combat designers can take for granted (and what they cannot). See especially the GDC talk "It IS Rocket Science! The Physics of Rocket League Detailed" which, despite the title, covers input-to-feedback latency principles that generalize.

Godot Engine Documentation — Physics, Area2D, Collision Layers

Specifically, the "Using Area2D" page and the "Physics introduction" page. Required reading before you write any non-trivial hitbox code. Godot's collision layer/mask system is powerful but has a learning curve; budget two hours to fully internalize it.

Unity Combat Tutorials by Ketra Games (YouTube)

If your combat target is Unity, Ketra Games' tutorials cover hitbox-hurtbox architecture, state machines, and hit-pause in clean concrete form. The same principles translate to Godot; the syntax does not.

Essay / Criticism

Rob Wilson — "The Geometry of Dark Souls Combat" (essay, Sufficiently Human newsletter, 2021)

A precise essay on how Dark Souls combat encounters are geometrically designed — enemy placement, arena sightlines, where ambushes live. Short and sharp; good as a primer before doing your own Exercise 26.1 analysis.

Leigh Alexander — "Violence in Games" (various columns)

Combat is violent, and combat designers owe some ethical thought to what they are making. Alexander's long-running column on games criticism addresses how combat representations shape player experience beyond the mechanical. Worth reading alongside the craft-focused resources; the Chapter 33 (ethics) discussion will draw on similar themes.

What to Play

The following games should be played to completion, or near-completion, by any serious combat designer. Play them actively — pause and note what is working, why.

• Dark Souls (or Dark Souls Remastered). The baseline reference for tactical action combat.
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. The deflect-central combat that Case Study 01 analyzes.
• Hollow Knight. The reference for teaching-through-combat. Play through at least the first Hornet fight closely; see Case Study 02.
• Hyper Light Drifter. Three-verb combat that is richer than it has any right to be.
• Devil May Cry 5. The stratified mastery model — combat accessible on minute one, deep for hundreds of hours.
• Into the Breach. For perspective on perfect-information strategy combat. Radically different from action combat; will teach you things action combat hides.
• Street Fighter 6 or any modern fighting game. The original home of frame data. Even if you never design a fighter, playing one online for 20 hours will tune your sense of combat timing sharper than any book.

Combat design is, above all, a taste discipline. Your taste grows through play. Play widely; play critically; play with a notebook nearby.