Design

Forty-four forms and twenty-six artifacts. One pillar: you do not win on reflexes.

There has to be something to read

Combat you win by reading patterns sounds simple, but turning it into a rule produces one hard requirement: every threatening move an enemy makes must telegraph.

Without a telegraph, all that’s left is reaction speed, which is the exact opposite of the point. So a telegraph is not presentation — it is a rule. An enemy without one is a design violation.

And once telegraphs are a rule, telegraph duration becomes the difficulty dial. Making something harder means shortening the time available to read it, not making it hit harder. That version is more honest: the player knows why they lost.

Ultimate attacks get especially long telegraphs, because getting hit has to be the result of a choice, not an accident. Kill someone in 0.5 seconds and they say “I never saw it”; give them 2.4 seconds and they say “I saw it and still didn’t react.” Only the second one makes anyone play differently next time.

That decision sends its bill straight to the client. Telegraph duration has to be adjustable in real time, and the first version of the code could not do it.

Giving an enemy skills is not giving it a martial art

I lost a lot of time here. Giving an enemy several attacks and giving it a martial art are different things.

A martial art needs three things — a name, a lineage, and a counter.

A wuxia fight has three beats: ① one side throws a form → ② the other recognises what it is → ③ answers with the counter-form. Usually ① isn’t even there. If an enemy attack is called “wide horizontal slash,” that is not a name — it is a description of the animation, and with nothing to recognise, ② never happens.

Don’t invent new vocabulary

The biggest temptation when designing a counter system is inventing a separate matchup table for enemies. Don’t. It doubles what there is to learn, and then neither half gets learned.

Stand the enemies on the axis the player already uses. If the player picks between four lineages, put the enemy’s forms in those same four. Then countering is an input they already know, with no new button and no new rule.

Matchups run as an N-cycle. If each lineage beats exactly one and loses to exactly one, there are N things to memorise instead of N². Three checks: nothing beats itself, the counter mapping is one-to-one, and following it N times returns you to the start.

And every matchup carries a one-line reason — “footwork beats blade: a sword has to reach you to cut you.” A matchup table without reasons has to be kept open on a second screen. With reasons, you hear it once.

Counters are never hidden. Hide them and it stops being a puzzle and becomes a memory test. Good action is hard after you’ve been told — knowing the answer and switching lineage within 0.9 seconds are completely different problems.

The middle row is what teaches

The verdict splits three ways.

Response	Result
Correct lineage	Fully negated
Wrong lineage	60% damage
No response	Clean hit

The middle row is the whole point of this table. Make a wrong answer identical to no answer and nobody ever tries — and with no attempts, there is no opportunity to learn the matchups at all. People have to feel that being wrong is still better before they try again.

The reverse is also wrong: a wrong answer must not close the window. If the telegraph is still running, they have to be able to try again.

Give it to everyone and it means nothing

Hand forms to every enemy and it stops being a system. Forty enemies charging in with forty name-cards is background, not information.

So a rarity ladder protects it — trash mobs get none, captains get one signature form, bosses get a set plus an ultimate.

How it’s read changes with the situation too. Text for one-on-one, colour for a crowd. A boss fight leaves you time to read a label; a battlefield doesn’t. In a crowd the body glows in its lineage colour — nothing to read, you just see it. For colour-blind support you have to separate not just hue but value, and that’s an art problem.

Per-enemy form assignment uses the instance’s own identity, not a random roll. Re-rolled on each call, nobody can ever learn “that one glows red.” The three captains on screen differ from each other, and each one keeps its own forms to the end.

What gets collected, and on what basis

There’s one criterion for collecting references. “That was fun” doesn’t qualify.

What qualifies is: has this game already solved a problem I currently can’t? I needed combat you win by reading, so I collected that lineage, and it became the twenty-eight forms.

And where it applies gets written down at collection time. Skip that and in six months you no longer know why you saved it. A reference that’s only a link isn’t material — it’s weight.