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".
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.
