Talon’s Blade
Directional Melee Combat
Talon’s Blade is a third-person action-adventure game set in a medieval dark fantasy world. It features a directional combat system that uses player directional inputs to determine the direction of attacks, blocks, and parries.
Preproduction for Talon’s Blade began during the spring of 2021. I worked as the lead combat designer and director of Talon’s Blade.
Project Status
Released Q2 2025
Platform – Steam
Roles
Director
Gameplay Designer
Level Designer
Gameplay Programmer
Combat Actions
The goal of directional combat is to create fluid, immersive, and grounded fight sequences. Allowing the player to decide the direction of their strikes and blocks provides them with high degree of control over their character.
Attacking
Primary Damage Inflicting Action
Blocking
Primary Damage Avoidance Reaction
Parrying
Secondary Damage Inflicting and Avoidance Reaction
Feinting
Primary Advantage Gaining Action
Shoving
Secondary Advantage Gaining Action
Dodging
Battlefield Maneuvering Action
Combat System Breakdown
Directional combat is where the player determines the angle of their actions relative to the forward-facing direction of their character.
The player determines the direction of action by moving their mouse or right thumbstick in the corresponding direction. The motion of the control then triggers the action without necessitating a button press per action. This creates a fluid interaction as the player changes direction at will and with minimal system friction.
Process and Evolution
I started my process for designing the combat system for Talon’s Blade by exploring games with similar systems to the one I was interested in creating, such as “For Honor”.
I explored historical swordsmanship and sword-fighting techniques for inspiration.
Prototyping
Early on, I designed a system where the player would input one of the four directions, initiating a block in that direction, and then press a button to trigger an attack from that blocking stance.
Reactive Enemies
Once I had a core set of player inputs and actions, I directed the creation of an enemy dummy that performed the same actions as the player in opposition.
Creating Flow
I decided that it was unnecessary for the player to press a button each time they wanted to attack, and instead changed the system so that holding down a button allowed the player to freely trigger attacks by moving the directional input.
By tying attack triggers to the directional input itself, the resulting combat feel was much more fluid and responsive.
Expanding the Combat
I added a perfect parry system to reward skilled players. Parries are executed by attacking in the same direction as the enemy several frames after the enemy triggered its attack. Parrying would both block the enemy attack and initiate a player attack in the same motion.
A feinting ability allowed the player to fake an attack in one direction before cancelling it into another. These feint attacks decreased the likelihood that enemies would block a player’s attack, but increased the overall stamina cost of the attack.
Yiorgos Bereveskos 