Jump normals are always a challenge to get right in fighting games. Because movement is so much more limited by a jump, a lot of factors like range, start-up and active frames become less important than the are on the ground game. This often leaves characters with a plethora of jump normals that are hardly ever used.

We have decided that we want every single jump normal to have a specific function, so that every single button can plausibly be used in high level play. Julia is a good example of this design decision. Every single one of her jump normals has a specific function, and you will have to make specific decisions on what button to press with every jump you do.

Jumping Light Punch

Julia’s jumping light punch hits fairly high up, and will whiff on most crouching opponents. Its main use is therefore air-to-airing opponents. While its hitboxes are not amazing, the long active period (12 frames) of the attacks, allows Julia to cover a large part of the jump arc with an attack box. This makes it a low damage, low range, but easy to use air-to-air normal.

Jumping Light Kick

Together with the jumping hard punch, this move is one of Julia’s main jump-in attacks. The damage and blockstun that this move does are lower than that of the jump hard punch, but it makes up for this because of its cross-up potential. As you can see the attack box extends behinds Julia, this allows for her to jump over the opponent and still hit them.

Jumping Hard Punch

This damaging, and very deep hitting jump attack is Julia’s main jump-in tool. It easily hits crouchers and does a lot of blockstun. The attack box is somewhat smaller than that of other moves, making this move specifically geared towards jump-in attacks, and not particularly useful as an air-to-air.

Jump Hard Kick

The excellent upward angle on this move and the formidable damage, make this attack Julia’s scariest air-to-air normal. Different from the jumping light punch, this move has shorter active frames, forcing the player to be more specific about when to press it. But when it connects, it hurts.

Because Julia pulls her legs up during this move, she is able to dodge some incoming fireballs. This is once again an example of an emergent property inspired by the animations Bob Sagat has drawn.

That concludes our discussion of Julia’s basic normals. Next post we’ll discuss Julia’s single command normal, specials and super.

-Phoenix

This post we’ll talk about Julia’s crouching normals. It should be noted that the hitboxes that we present are technically still in development. And while they will not change a whole lot, small tweaks are still being made to this day. In fact, one of the boxes presented today was changed minutes before writing this post.

Crouching Light Punch

Julia’s crouching light punch is a fairly straightforward move. It’s a quick chainable light attack that doesn’t hit low. It does beat out other attacks as easily as the crouching light kick, but it can be cancelled into specials and supers. The crouching light punch is one of Julia’s main tools for setting up combos off light attacks.

Crouching Light Kick

This crouching light kick doesn’t have any hurt box on the limb when it is active. This makes it a potent low hitting attack that can easily beat out other pokes, as the limb itself is invincible. However, there are still reasons to choose to press cr.LP over cr.LK, despite its superior hitbox.

cr.LP hits slightly higher and there are fewer moves that could easily dodge attacks that high, and you might even hit your opponent in the start of a jump where cr.LK might whiff. Moreover cr.LK cannot be cancelled into specials or supers, so you will have to chain into cr.LP if you want to combo into a special move.

Crouching Hard Punch

The move is used to beat out jump-ins with relative ease, as it only takes one button press to hit the opponent out of the air.

Because Julia stays low to the ground and the attack box is fairly wide, the cr.HP is a fairly consistent move to use as an anti-air in a variety of situations. It can beat out both crossups and normal deep jump-ins quite effectively. One has to be careful with timing it though, because the recovery is long, so you do not want to whiff it.

Because of its fast start up, it also functions as a reasonable move to use in block strings. The sequence cr.LP, cr.HP is a tight string that will beat out opponents mindlessly mashing buttons after blocking.

Crouching Hard Kick

Julia’s crouching hard kick is a very potent and long range poke. Unlike other four button fighters, cr.HK in our game does not necessarily function as a sweep that knocks down. Julia’s cr.HK is one of those moves that isn’t. It’s an awesome, fast, low hitting cancellable and long ranged move, which plays an important role in the footsie game of Julia.

One might notice that Julia’s hurt box for this move is considerably lower than the other crouching attacks. Because of this, Julia is actually able to use cr.HK to dodge fireballs. This is one of the wonderful ’emergent’ results that we have gotten while working on this game. When me and Coal designed this move, we never intended for it to go under fireballs. But when I added the hitboxes that best fitted the animation that Bob Sagat drew, this was the natural result. We feel that such cases of the game ‘designing itself’ should be embraced, as it makes for natural and understandable hitboxes, as well as interesting intricacies which simply cannot be added by brute force.

Next time we’ll look at the jump attacks.

-Phoenix

As promised in our previous blogpost, the coming weeks we’ll be discussing some details of Julia’s hitboxes and properties, to give some insight into our design philosophy and something to study for those who are into that sort of thing.

While the hitboxes are fairly straightforward, here are a few things you need to know to make sense of them.

• Red: Attack box, the part that actually hits the opponent.
• Blue: Hurt box, the part that can be hit by the opponent
• Cyan: Collision box, this is a character’s ‘physical’  body, when an opponent walks up to you, this is what you bump up against.
• White cross: The pivot, this is the point that decides what the ‘front’ and the ‘back’ of Julia is.

Let’s first talk about some general design philosophies. In the old days, many fighting games would have a fixed ‘limit’ of certain boxes that could be on the screen, and therefore you would have quite consistent amount of attack or hurt boxes. Some games would allow two hurt boxes and one attack box per character per frame, while other games allow, for example, three hurt boxes and two attack boxes.

In this modern age, there is of course no true physical limit to the amount of hurt boxes and attack boxes you could use. Nevertheless, we feel that it is still useful to have such limits as a rule of thumb, as we feel it makes properties of moves a bit easier to feel out intuitively. As can be seen below, our rule of thumb is to have two hurt boxes and one attack box on the screen. We can easily break this rule, and when we feel that it will be necessary, we certainly will. but for Julia, it has not yet been necessary.

Now let’s get to the actual hitboxes, this week we’ll be discussing Julia’s standing normals.

Standing Light Punch

Julia’s standing light punch is a fairly straight forward punch. It has good advantage on hit and on block, but it will whiff over crouching characters, making it not particularly strong as a pressure tool. However,it is a good low-risk anti-air option against hops, that you can throw out pre-emptively to cover the space in front of her.

Standing Light Kick

This standing light kick is one of my favourite moves in Julia’s moveset, not because it’s so strong but because it’s so specific. The normal is a light normal with quite a bit of startup and recovery. However, it is a formidable footsies tool.  As you might notice her hurt box is very far behind her collision box. Whenever Julia does this move, her hurt box moves backward. With proper spacing, this can make long ranged low attacks whiff completely. The great range on the poke then allows her to hit the opponents move. This allows her to do this move any time she sniffs out a crouching hard kick of the opponent and hit them out of it.

This move can be super cancelled. So if you are confident about your read, you can stick out this move and buffer the super.

Standing Hard Punch

Julia’s standing hard punch is her most damaging normal, and it can be special cancelled. Therefore, it is very important for maximizing damage on a punish combo.

But outside of punish situations this move has great uses too.  The move has great range, which makes it useful in footsie battles. One needs to be careful however, as the move will whiff over crouching opponents.

The standing hard punch covers much of the same space as the standing light punch, while having more range and is more likely to beat out an opponent’s attack. Combined with its high damage output, this move is a very scary anti-hop tool. However, this move is both slower to come out and longer to recovery than the standing light punch, making it a high-risk/high-reward answer to hops.

Standing Hard Kick

This standing roundhouse is the only standing normal whose attack box stick out above the hurt box. As a result it is able to hit people who come in on Julia with a normal jump. The range is good, but the start-up is fairly long. Making this a good anti-jump normal to hit people that are not necessarily jumping in to hit a combo, but rather to poke or cover some distance.

I hope this has given some insight into the design and application of Julia’s normals. Next time we’ll discuss her crouching normals.

-Phoenix