Use when designing, tuning, or reviewing combat and game feel — juice/feedback budgets, hit-stop and impact, telegraphing and danger cues, enemy silhouettes and role-based rosters, multi-enemy readability, encounter pacing, and high-lethality (Souls-like) commitment/stamina/checkpoint loops. Also use to diagnose combat that feels floaty, noisy, unfair, swarmy, or like a memorization "knowledge check". Triggers on "combat design", "game feel", "juice", "hit-stop", "screen shake", "telegraph", "wind-up", "readability", "enemy design", "encounter design", "aggression", "gank", "stamina", "souls-like", "lethality", "this death felt cheap", "combat feels floaty".
Installation
Install with Codex or Claude Copy this prompt, paste it into Codex, Claude, or another assistant, and let it review the skill page and install it for you.
Use when designing, tuning, or reviewing combat and game feel — juice/feedback budgets, hit-stop and impact, telegraphing and danger cues, enemy silhouettes and role-based rosters, multi-enemy readability, encounter pacing, and high-lethality (Souls-like) commitment/stamina/checkpoint loops. Also use to diagnose combat that feels floaty, noisy, unfair, swarmy, or like a memorization "knowledge check". Triggers on "combat design", "game feel", "juice", "hit-stop", "screen shake", "telegraph", "wind-up", "readability", "enemy design", "encounter design", "aggression", "gank", "stamina", "souls-like", "lethality", "this death felt cheap", "combat feels floaty".
Combat Design & Game Feel
How to make combat that feels powerful and reads fairly — especially in a high-lethality game where an unreadable hit is a broken promise. Juice sells the hit; telegraphing keeps it fair; encounter structure keeps the fight legible; commitment + a generous retry loop make hard feel fair instead of cheap.
When to use this
Tuning game feel: juice budgets, hit-stop, screen shake, the impact bundle
Authoring or auditing telegraphs and a game-wide danger-cue vocabulary
Designing enemies (silhouettes, combat roles) and multi-enemy encounters
Building a Souls-like lethality loop: commitment, stamina, comeback mechanics, checkpoints
Diagnosing combat that feels floaty, noisy, unfair, swarmy, or memorization-gated
Scope
This skill owns moment-to-moment combat and its feel. Adjacent concerns live in sibling skills, cross-linked from the guide:
General game feel — input/latency, forgiveness windows, the full juice toolkit, the 12 animation principles, camera & UI feel → game-feel-and-juice (the universal foundation; this skill applies it to hits, impacts, and telegraphing)
General reward/flow/difficulty theory and the "interesting decision" test → game-design-fundamentals
The single-save consequence model & meta-progression → permadeath-and-lethality
Loot/itemization that feeds builds, damage tiers as economy → rpg-systems
Enemy placement in the world, sightlines to a fight → open-world-design
Generating enemies/encounters within these constraints, and gating them → procedural-generation, procgen-review
Multiplicative systems that make fights emergent → systemic-emergent-design
Boss/quest framing → narrative-and-quest-design
How the pieces fit
GUIDE.md — the cited why, in four sub-domains: combat juice (the inverted-U dose curve, applied to hits — general feel theory lives in game-feel-and-juice), readability/telegraphing (fairness as a contract), enemy & encounter design (silhouettes, roles, readable chaos), and Souls-like lethality (commitment, death-as-teacher, comeback, checkpoints). Each rule carries an exemplar, a source, a test-for criterion, the named failure mode, and the procedural/headless implication.
CHECKLIST.md — Do/Don't + machine-checkable Test-for criteria, grouped by sub-domain. Written to be enforced as automated validators in a generation loop, not just read.
The one idea to anchor on
In a lethal game, telegraphing is fairness, not decoration. Every attack that can kill must be preceded by a readable, consistent wind-up whose salience scales with its damage ("relative damage must match perceived danger"). The general feel foundation this rests on — the inverted-U juice ceiling (Kao 2020), input response, and the animation-principle inversion (anticipation warns on enemies, lags on the player) — lives in game-feel-and-juice; this skill applies it to the specific case of hits and the fairness contract.
Why this matters doubly for a generator: a human team feels an un-telegraphed kill or a juice-overloaded screen as "off." An autonomous generator does not. Hand-author the cue vocabulary, the damage→telegraph curve, the feedback table, and the stamina/checkpoint numbers as inviolable contracts, then let generation recombine vetted parts inside them — and run headless validators (telegraph checker, juice linter, fairness ghost-runner) before any content is committed.
