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