After getting to the stage in development of my game where combat became a necessity, I found myself realizing amongst the thousands of lines of design I had written, I hadn't written a word on combat. So I sat down, and with the DM engine in mind, decided to try and figure out a system that I would enjoy playing, that's both fair and skill based.

Two hours of procrastination later I realized I'd written nothing and thought alright time to do some reading up, luckily for me Yut Put had just written This article on the very topic, and it became very insightful to me, so using that as a baseline along with a few other documents and articles I found on the subject I'm going to re-attempt to write some design ideas, and I'm going to do them on the forums because as the core mechanic for my game, I'd love feedback and most of all critique. Nothing improves a game more than people telling you where it quite frankly just sucks.

To be clear and straight, it's a Dragonball Z game. If that's not your cup of tea, that is perfectly fine, but please don't make judgements and accusations based solely off that fact. It is original in everything but concept (And maybe a tiny bit of the art), and Dragonball is one of about three things I can unequivocally consider myself a fan-nerd of. I'm here to design and create my own game to play, and for likeminded players to play.

Also please note I'm writing this, as it comes to me. I'll probably leave this tab open for a few days and amend it as I go along, though I'll try not to make it too long. Oh and lastly, a fair few things that Yut Put's article named are simply irrelevant to my project, namely hitboxes, since I'm an anarchist and prefer the tile based movement to pixel movement, so bare that in mind!

Without further ado-

Movement

Ranged Combat

Movement is obviously the single most critical thing in my opinion, in a good combat system. Sure combos and timings and hitframes are all very super important, but the freedom to approach a situation from whichever direction it is that you yourself wish to, is above all the most important factor in a universe where everything else is left to player choice. Since my game is running at 60fps as opposed to the standard 20 of a BYOND game, I can push movement speeds to be pretty hefty. To this end I've decided to cap movement walking speed fairly early before it reaches anywhere near that limit. Flight will be quicker still, and there will be a travel form for flying that lets you zip around at about half the limit that 60fps will provide. Players will be able to fully use combat whilst flying (Not whilst travel form however), but with melee being more effective whilst on the ground, and ranged (Ki) based combat being more effective whilst flying. Players will be able to grab other players, which I'll go into detail on later, forcing them into the air or visa versa.

The first obstacle I need to overcome is obvious to me, actually landing anything in a un-fixed area where two people are moving around freely. Traditional (Zeta) games on BYOND usually have three combat "types".

A - Hit infront of me
B - Fire in a line straight ahead of me
C - Fire that homes in on
D - may or may not do an area of damage whenever it reaches X distance

And unfortunately, I can't honestly conceive of any type of ability that doesn't follow at least one of those three archetypes. However I can see ones that follow multiple. For example, what about an ability that homes in on the target (C), but doesn't do it extremely precisely, i.e it turns slower than a player can move, leading it to miss (B). This accomplishes the task of having a technique fired land in the "general area" of the target, but a player can still avoid it by spamming WASDWADSADAWDSADWADS like a mad man, to effectively make themselves a blur. To prevent this, I can easily implement (D), and make abilities that miss create explosions doing less, but still significant splash damage. To give an example of how I'm visualising this system-

Player A fires technique X at player B. Technqiue X is a beam technique, similar to the likes of a Kamehameha or whatever have you. X bends around from A to B, but as it comes to reach B, B moves out of the way. X hits the space just beyond the shoulder of B, and creates an explosion which is large enough to still damage B.

AMMENDUM - I'll have to think of something else for beam-based techniques. After briefly discussing it with somewhat of a BYOND-Guru, I've been informed that "Turnable beams are kind of a no-go. Trust me, I've investigated it pretty thoroughly.". What I can replace it with, is stumping me pretty hard.
/AMMENDUM

Another option to explore is the idea of movement impairing abilities. Things like Buu's... uhh... goo, to trap players for periods of time, allowing the setup of other techniques. But how does someone land one of those abilities? I can't make it do "splash-stuns" without seeming very strange. Ideally there shouldn't be too many crowd control dedicated abilities in the game period, although crowd control as a bi-product of an ability will likely be a reality of some if not most abilities (Not nessecarily hard crowd control, but still a slow or a knockback). With that in mind it isn't really too abusive to make dedicated crowd control abilities follow archetype C, and have them unavoidable direct lock-on abilities, however I can imagine many scenarios where such abilities feel "cheap" and generally toxic. Perhaps lock-on but with counters? The ability to destroy Buu's goo with another Ki attack. That would create easy to land crowd control, with counterplay for the target effective enough to not feel cheap. There's also the possibility of making Buu's Goo a larger icon than most, making it inherantly more difficult to dodge. Maybe I'll use that idea for a small number of abilities (For variance sake), but I think it'll still feel too user-unintuitive. With my previous idea, the player has to visualize all sorts of things in their head. Is their counter-ability down? Can I risk using this high cooldown ability? Should I wait and use it mid-combo? If he counters it can I still fend his own attacks off? Whereas the second idea (Larger icon - harder to dodge) it removes a fair few of those questions and turns it into a "fire and forget" technique.

Melee combat

My Melee combat will be broken into three distinct abilities.

Attack - The user attacks a player that is within one tile of them, multiple successive hits will provide increased damage. Attacks will very breifly hit stun the target, not a huge amount, but enough to offset the target and prevent a "spam attack till you win" mentality. Upon reaching a certain number of attacks the target will be automatically stunned and knocked back for a breif period of time. This serves as a double edged sword, both players get a small amount of distance from each other, allowing them time to decide upon their next move. It gives the attacker the knowledge they have done some serious damage by succesfully beating down on an enemy who hasn't succesfully guarded or avoided, and it gives the defender a second to breath and decide on the next course of action. In my trio of abilities, attack counters a grab, if you attack someone attempting to grab you, they get hitstunned for a larger amount of time, and a small multiplier is added to the damage dealt (Something like 1.3*, not too punishing, but still something you want to avoid happening).

Guard - Guard counters Attack. It makes your character take 90% reduced damage from an attack (And 30% reduced damage from a Ki-ability), successive attacks against someone who is guarding will eventually lead to a stutter. Whilst many games use guard breaking (successive attacks break the guard stance), I'm choosing to do quite the opposite, someone who chooses to continually attack someone blocking will effectively hit-stun themselves. I do this to try and force players to use all three styles, since -

Grab - Grabbing counters guarding. Grabbing actually counts for two seperate functions. The first of which is to break someone's guard, since a grab works through guard, it will deal relatively significant damage and briefly hitstun the target. The second function is as a melee crowd control, if you manage to grab someone who isn't guarding (or attacking), they'll take reduced damage compared to grabbing someone who is guarding, but more importantly they'll be stunned for a longer duration. Through this you'll be able to set up combos, which I'll cover shortly. One more tidbit of grabbing is that whilst the action is being performed, you can hold either up or down to throw them to the floor or into the air. This doesn't actually increase the stun duration or damage done, but it's merely so you can force an enemy into fighting on your own terms.

Combos

Before I get into this, a bit of Dragonball Z information, there is a technique known as "Zanzoken", which effectively means after image. It's done by moving faster than the eye can perceive, making it look like you teleported from point A to point B, and left an after image of yourself at point A. This is important to the core of my combat, as most abilities will be usable whilst using Zanzoken, alhough it will run your stamina out fairly quickly, you can use it to set up combos, such as a crowd control effect into a long-charge time ability. Or initiating a fight by quickly using it to jump to your opponent and perform a grab, maybe into the air, whilst they're stunned you could fly up with a keypress, and they start channeling an attack they will be unable to avoid, making use of flight's bonus to ki abilities! You can do Zanzoken yourself in real life! Go ahead, break out your inner JOHN CENA and wave your hand infront of your face really fast. If you can stomach looking like a complete idiot, well done, you just Zanzoken'd irl. Have a gold star. Neigh have two, I'm proud.

As far as I see, there are two types of combos.

1: Combos built out of using punishing time to use other abilities built into the game
2: Combos built in the game that require certain keypresses to pull off

An argument can be made that there's a combo involving both, but I'm just going to categorize that under the first type.

Personally, I'm not much a fan of the second type of combo. I would prefer to be given a set of tools, and told I can use those tools to create things, than be given a set of tools that whilst maybe cooler and more flashy, maybe even more powerful, but require me as the player to jump through the developer's perceived set of hoops. I'll be avoiding that system almost entirely (My consecutive hits leading to a more powerful hit is technically type 2, but it's a very simple one), and instead the meat of my combat will be based off option 1. By using crowd control, and a decent mixture of your abilities, once you know the basic duration of hit stuns and your crowd control abilities, you should feel powerful. My mythos is "If you're the one who landed the first attack, you should be the one to land the second and third ones too". Attackers should feel like they're in control, whilst defenders should be scheming to take that control away and flip it around. A combo should be one of two things -

Long, risky, with room for counterplay, but also room for high reward if you can out-think your opponent.
Or Short, fast, get in get out, do what you set out to do, before thinking out what your next move should be, with less chance for counterplay.

For example, using my multiple attack combo, you can easily and quickly get off a sizeable amount of damage. Afterwards the target is knocked back and breifly stunned. Here you can go one of two directions, you can move in further and go for the longer more riskier combo, but you risk yourself to damage in the gapclosing due to the stun not lasting long enough for you to reach the opponent. The person attacking might think they've got it all worked out when they step up and to the side, but the enemy might have pulled a full retreat and already be on the move. Attacking combos shouldn't feel oppressive to the defender, but the attacker should feel like he's oppressing the enemy. This is a key aspect of combat in almost any PvP game, in my opinion. Make it fun, easy, hard, punishing and rewarding all at the same time.

Closing statements

Regarding Ki, an abilities Ki cost will scale mostly with the damage it does, rather than it's utility or general effectiveness. An ability that is easy to land, but does little damage, will cost a very small amount of Ki compared to a large hard hitting ability, regardless of side effects of the ability. This is done to promote throwing Ki abilities into combos to create new ways of continuing combos, and ending them with a bang. Or saving your "bang" until you're sure you can maximize the damage from it. Hitstuns and other crowd control effects will also mostly scale with the damage, with some obvious outliers to that rule.

Anyway if you managed to read all of that, thanks a lot! I'd really really love to hear where you think this system sucks. Try to break it if you can, find examples of where my combat fails to engage the players in any way. Thanks - Rushnut.