Anatomy of a moveset design process
One of the aspects I’ve seen people struggling with often is “how do I design a moveset for my character in my fighting game?”.
This might feel a little bit surprising: All of us creatives have tons of colorful characters ready to punch the living heck out of each other in the virtual world, but sometimes we stumble on the process of actually giving them life.
Most of the questions I’ve received during the years can be summarized as:
- What should I focus on?
- How should I fill the gaps in the moveset?
- How do I make it feel cohesive?
- How do I make it thematically appropriate?
There is no silver bullet and no real golden path to do achieve this: Every game is its own story and a moveset designed for e.g. BlazBlue won’t really work in a more grounded game like Tekken.
However, what I can offer is a small summary of how I personally approach it. I hope this might help you finding your way!
Stick to a theme
My first step in designing a moveset has always been “finding the character’s theme”. Simply put, try to describe your character in one, single sentence. This sentence is their essence, the core of the character, is often based on their visual appearance (but not always) and defines how they will play.
As an example from my very own Schwarzerblitz, here’s a couple characters and their themes:
- Elena: “professional assassin in hiding”
- Jenn: “secret agent with military training”
- Evilobster: “heavyweight wrestler with big claws”
- Shaz: “drunken pub-brawling sharkman”
- Cyphr: “armless ass-kicking tomboy”
- Krave: “trolling robotic killing machine”
The theme itself is the gateway to defining the flavor of the moveset and helps with collecting ideas for single moves: a “drunken pub-brawling sharkman” will have powerful swinging hooks and very uncoordinated, raw movements; a “secret agent with military training” will have options for every situation and a very no-nonsense fighting style.
In short, focusing on ONE idea and diving deep into it allows you to cut the branches and go right to the meat, thus reducing the risk of decision paralysis right at the outset.
Find one key move
Okay, you have finally settled on your theme, but you don’t know what to do with it. The next point is coming up with a key move. What is a key move? Well, with this term I’m indicating a signature move around which the gameplay of the character could revolve. Examples include Hadoken and Shoryuken for Ryu in Street Fighter, Electric Wind God Fist for Kazuya in Tekken, Rook Splitter for Siegfried in Soulcalibur. A signature move should be both a crutch for players trying to learn the character for the first time and a tool that doesn’t lose effectiveness when played seriously.
The key move is usually a consequence of the theme. Krave’s key move in Schwarzerblitz is his Mr. Driller, an advancing drilling attack that can be looped into itself with hilarious effects but can also be a significantly good pressure tool when used sparingly.
This move is an extension of his theme of “trolling robotic killing machine” and is one of the 2–3 moves that define the character, together with his spider stance, his air drills and his taunt.
Signature moves provide an easy way to start fleshing out how the character will play and you can use them as a baseline to build the rest of their toolset. Once you have that nailed down, think about how can you make that move the centerpiece of their offence or mobility, try to find ways to facilitate it through other moves.
Notice that in order to come up with a key move, you need to be confident about the rules of your game. Is it an air-dasher? A grounded, honest footsies game? A Tekken-like? This makes a huge difference: You’ll have to adapt your key idea to the kind of feeling you want from your game.
Because, honestly, you wouldn’t give a Shun Goku Satsu to a French policeman from the ‘800s in a semi-realistic, grounded game setting, right? Oh, wait. Huh. Arm Joe did it. Nevermind, scratch that.
Filling the gaps
Once you have 1–3 key moves ready, you need to start filling the gaps — which usually means taking care of the normal moves. Now, if you Stick to the Theme and you have one Key Move ready, you’ll probably already have a general idea of how the character is supposed to play. If the key move is a fast lounging attack, you might want them to be very aggressive. If the key move is a full screen projectile, chances are you are building a zoner.
This choice informs the rest of your moveset. For example:
- A zoner will probably have bad options up close but better tools at the mid-range level. This can be reflected in having slow-ish attacks that deal little damage at close range but having some mobility tool to go back to mid range;
- A grappler could make use of slow but powerful normal moves, with some armor on top of it, to become a slowly advancing wall of doom
- A very aggressive character will benefit from very fast close range moves that allow them to keep up the pressure
Once you have this step figured out, use YouTube videos, comics, anime, movies or other games to find a motion that suits your vision, if you can’t figure out what you want on your own. Real-life footage from martial arts tournaments can be especially helpful to see how a real body moves when punching or kicking. Heck, even static comic panels can help a lot, I personally drew some inspiration from the Savate guys from the IDW run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!
Life… huh, finds a way.
Don’t forget to add clear weaknesses!
Unless you are building an Unfair SNK Arcade Boss character(TM), you should consider what the weak points of your character should be, always using the Theme and the Key Move as a reference.
For example, you might want to have a character that is very good at dealing damage and keeping the pressure up but not so good at mixing up high and low attacks; a character with a very powerful command grab that however doesn’t hit crouching opponents; a character with very good projectile might have troubles against jumping attacks.
Weaknesses define characters as much as strengths and, somehow, help them feel more unique. So, when filling the gaps, be careful about giving your character a tool for every situation — because it might come back to bite you later either by creating a Mary Sue or by homogenizing the gameplay feeling.
As a real-life example (again, from Schwarzerblitz), Skeleton is a complete character with decent zoning and 3/4-screen supremacy, together with very good close range tools… but he absolutely fails at mid range due to his stubby punch and kick attacks, forcing him to play either up-close or relatively far from the opponent. If he had good moves at mid range too, he would simply be too good at everything. Having him struggle at a certain range forces the players to adapt to his strongest tools and avoid finding themselves at a distance where he can’t use them effectively.
The purpose of a move: Function and flavor
Now, before you start brainstorming about your fillers, remember that every single move of a fighting game character must fulfill a purpose. Development time is limited, resources are limited, and the numbers of buttons too, so adding moves “just because” is not going to help your case.
Unless you have a big team and Bandai Namco’s resources, you aren’t going to have 150 moves or strings per each of your characters. Sacrifices must be made and a little bit of focus is required. So, when adding a new move, ask yourself what function it covers. For example…
- is this move a gap closer to get near your opponent?
- is this move an anti-air?
- is there a move with similar uses already in the character’s moveset?
- if so, what are their differences? How is one better or worse than the other?
Still, raw functionality isn’t always the most important aspect. Once you filled the gaps and have a reasonable amount of moves that make your character feel complete, don’t forget to add flavor. Taunts, situational moves, weird stances, you name it! In fact, you could be tempted to add a move just because of one simple consideration: because it looks cool — and there’s nothing wrong with it, as long as it’s not to the detriment of the character and you have resources for it.
In fact, several moves from Tekken’s legacy humongous move lists are almost useless but A) look cool when performed B) are great to pull out in casual play among friends C) sometimes just add flavor to the character, such as Miguel’s La Burla.
Flavor is something that might be more useful in games oriented to a more casual audience, but you can combine it with function to achieve the best of both worlds. As an example, GranBlue Fantasy Versus does an incredible job with its animations, with e.g. Percival posing every now and then during his moves in a way that exudes character.
Startup, damage and all that jazz
As surprisingly as it might sound, the mechanical part of a move (damage, startup frames, recovery frames) comes relatively late to the party for me. I usually settle first on the function, then on the use cases and then, lastly, on how much damage the move should deal. I tend to use animations with some additional startup and recovery frames that I can freely shave off while testing the move out, so that even making significant changes wouldn’t destroy the visual impact of the move itself.
This is because damage and startup/recovery frames can’t be chosen in a vacuum — the interaction with the other characters and game mechanics is what define how good a move is and you will probably need to iterate on these values a lot. Think about it like this: A move starting in 10 frames is very slow in Street Fighter terms, but it’s the fastest normal attack in Tekken 7.
So, either you define your rules with care before moving to the moveset design step or you need to be ready for a long session of trial, error and “back to the lab again” moments.
Other points of view and approaches
As I made clear in the introduction, this is my personal approach to moveset design. There are countless other ways to do this and there isn’t a unified approach.
As an example, some developers start from frame data and numeric charts, before even settling on how the move looks like, while some build everything “by feeling” in a bottom-up sort of way. The first approach can be useful to avoid nasty gameplay surprises (e.g. unchecked infinite combos) as well as setting clear boundaries for animations ahead of time, but might also be fairly daunting since you’ll need to set everything up top-down. The second is more apt for people who don’t like to plan things from the get go (hi, that’s me!) but can lead to huge problems with cohesiveness and unwanted interactions later down the line.
Each developer needs to find their own way of creating, but taking inspiration from multiple sources is good for getting to that point.
Oh, just one more thing…
If you absolutely can’t find any inspiration but you want to add that cool character at any cost… let the idea rest for a while: Don’t force yourself to come up with a moveset if you can’t manage to make heads or tails with it — move to another character and go back when you get your creative spark back.
The Evilobster in Schwarzerblitz was almost shelved because I couldn’t come up with any interesting ideas for his moveset and was kept on the bench for two whole months… until I had an EUREKA moment and decided to play into his monstrous, slow, armored, powerful, menacing presence and had the idea of making him the grappler of the game.
That said, the time for words is over and now it’s up to you all! Let me know if this short blog post was any helpful and if you have any specific questions in the comments! Alternatively, you can reach out for me at my usual Twi(x)tter account @AndreaDProjects!
