Combat UX
When I joined the Spirit and Steel team, the combat was intuitively engaging, but very simple. All combat consisted of pulling the left or right triggers on the controller to throw a punch instantly with little to no cooldown, which had playtesters spamming the triggers furiously during combat. While this is exactly what we wanted players to do, we encountered a few issues: unlocking new elemental punches wouldn't feel like a significant upgrade, and players saw no need to change weapons for different fights. So my goal as a designer was: How do we make the weapons feel meaningfully different to use while still keeping the button-mashing playstyle that folks love?
To fix this, I proposed adding rhythm and texture to the punches: in other words, a combo system. Each punch thrown by the player would become part of a pattern of different types of punches. For example, the water element combo would be 1-1-2-2-3, and the fire element combo would be 1-2-1-2. Each type of punch had its own timing, damage, and animation, and the controls would remain unchanged.
