Weekly report 2025 Aug 1/5

Hello everyone! Sorry for the delay...
 Thank you as always for your support.
Let's take a look at this week's progress!

Demo Update

download it from here. The new password is "9GfzY6DcQcJsQK2".

• Hitstun frame differences have been set for all attacks.

Balance Changes

• Zudo-Strike's travel distance has been doubled.

• Zudo-Fire now launches the opponent on hit.

• This makes it possible to follow up with Zudo-Strike after Zudo-Fire hits, though the timing is tricky.

Hitstun Frame Adjustment

We're officially beginning serious balance tuning.
Previously, Modius's 5A gave an absurd +15f on hit, which was clearly broken.
Now, all attacks have been assigned proper hitstun frame values.

• The frame situation changes between hit and guard.

• Crouching adds +2f of stun regardless of hit or guard.

• Counter hits add an extra +2f.

• Fatal hits add a further +4f.

Refactoring of the Request Flow

To fix a bug involving landing damage that we couldn't resolve last week, we decided to overhaul the action-switching request flow.
Previously, the flow per frame looked like this:

• Action switch before hit detection

• Hit detection

• Action switch after hit detection

The bug occurred when a player got hit on a frame where landing was expected — the knockback motion would overwrite movement speed, causing ground and air states to clash.
To solve this, we introduced a new request flow incorporating positional movement:

• Automatic action switch when current action ends

• Pre-movement action switch (based on player input)

• Positional movement

• Post-movement action switch (landing, wall bounce, etc.)

• Hit detection

• Action switch after hit detection

At first, we assumed a single switch per frame would suffice, but surprisingly, the system now performs up to 4 action switches per frame.
Nevertheless, this has led to much more stable behavior.

Charge Input Refactor

Last week, we successfully implemented Modius’s charge input, but upon review, it became clear that the design was bloated and bug-prone.
Player-input-based requests mainly fall under either normal requests (in idle) or cancel requests (during attack), but charge requests don't fit neatly into either category. Forcing it into one would have made the system convoluted.
Last week, we brute-forced the feature with three wasteful derived classes. Since charge actions are likely to become a common mechanic, we decided to standardize them and implement the core logic in the base class.
By reorganizing the functionality across three classes, the new design fits neatly and is far more maintainable.
This means even adding a charge move to Zdrada in the future will be no problem!

System for Hitstun Frame Customization

Initially, we planned to adjust hitstun by simply adding a few new damage motions that differ by 2–3 frames.
However, during tuning, we realized this approach made animations look unnatural and required new animations (that are essentially the same but with different lengths), which is very inefficient.
Adding new animations is a hassle—it involves creating new enum action types, preparing animation data, registering them in the move list, and writing frame-based processing.
So instead, we decided to assign a custom hitstun frame value to each attack, and use a single animation that plays for the desired frame count.
Thanks to our recent refactor that moved animation processing into a separate class, this was implemented smoothly.
As a result, we can now easily adjust hitstun frame differences!

New Video

Since we've barely updated Twitter lately and have lost touch with our followers, we turned the comic we posted in May into a video.
Please check it out if you're interested!

Side Note: Tsunami Evacuation

On July 30th, a magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.
Due to this, a tsunami warning was issued across Japan—including where I live—causing widespread panic.
Living near the coast, I evacuated in a hurry.
Japan has been traumatized by repeated tsunami damage from the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake, so the whole country is now extremely sensitive to tsunami threats.
I evacuated inland for about a day until the warning lifted. Fortunately, only small waves of about 50cm reached the shore.
If anyone reading this was affected by the quake, I sincerely hope you are safe and well.

Plans for Next Week

• Set A and D gauge gain/loss values and adjust damage for each attack

• Begin development of CPU AI

That's all for this week. Thanks to everyone's support, we can continue development! Much appreciation.
Have a great weekend!