Combat Design

Designing how a game fights: weapons, abilities, enemy behaviour, timing windows and the feedback that makes a hit land.

Combat design is systems work with a very short feedback loop. Postings ask for weapon and ability sets with readable trade-offs, enemy archetypes and encounter pacing, and the frame-level detail that decides whether a fight feels fair: wind-up and recovery windows, hit reactions, cancel rules, invulnerability frames, camera and controller feedback. Most of it is tuned by playing, so prototyping in the engine and a tolerance for many small iterations are standard requirements.

The craft is shared with other disciplines by necessity. Animation owns the poses that sell the timing, VFX and audio the moment of impact, and in a live game the balance pass never ends - telemetry and player sentiment keep reopening decisions that once looked settled.

System Design covers economies, progression and rules at large; Level Design shapes the space a fight happens in. This skill is about the exchange itself, measured in frames.

Where these positions are: Barcelona (1 position), Helsinki (1 position), Kraków (1 position), Montreal (1 position)