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