Devlog 5: Feel the Bite, More on Shaping Combat

Andrea Rubio

Head of Marketing

Stay Dead - Blog #39

This month, we zoomed in on what matters most: combat. The team entered a full combat system sprint to focus on the interconnected mechanics that drive the moment-to-moment experience. Why the emphasis? Because the game combat system is the core loop. If it doesn’t feel great, nothing else does. So we built new tools, added polish, and ran a lot of internal tests to push the system further.

⚔️ Basic Attacks: Light, Heavy, and Everything In Between

Every playable character now has a defined set of light and heavy attacks:

Light Attacks are quick, chainable, and reflect each character’s rhythm and style.
Heavy Attacks are slower, riskier, and capable of big damage or special effects.

For example:

Hades is a close-quarters punisher.
Bram excels at crowd control.
Stu is your reliable DPS engine.
Gory Ann strikes hard with surgical precision.

Speed, range, and area-of-effect values are now tuned across the board, giving players more tactical freedom.

📊 How Stats Shape Strategy and Enemy Behavior

Combat is more than button-mashing. We’ve expanded our stat system to include not just damage, but the mechanics that shape how enemies react to attacks and how characters differentiate their playstyles. These include:

Knockback – How far enemies are pushed on hit
Slow – Temporarily reduces enemy movement or attack speed
Stagger – Briefly interrupts an enemy’s action
Stun – Fully immobilizes the target for a longer window

Stats are now deeply woven into how you play, and how you survive.

🤖 Smarter Enemies Through Modularity

We’ve been building a modular enemy system, allowing us to mix and match skills, behaviors, and AI logic to create new foes quickly.

This month we prototyped 10 enemy types, each designed to challenge player strategies in different ways. Combined with smarter AI and varied attack patterns, combat is starting to feel unpredictable in the best possible way.

🧪 Our Internal Combat Lab: Wave Testing System

To keep things balanced, we created a custom Wave Testing System, a sandbox where we simulate different combat scenarios. It lets us:

Assign which family members are playable
Spawn controlled waves of enemies
Progress through rounds with countdowns and transitions

It’s already helping us refine difficulty curves, pacing, and synergies between family members.

🧠 Smarter Navigation with A* Pathfinding

Good enemy behavior needs good navigation. We implemented A-Star (A) Pathfinding*, which improves how enemies and teammates move through levels.

It allows for:

Dynamic obstacle avoidance
Cleaner movement in narrow or cluttered spaces
Better positioning for AI-driven characters

This is a subtle but important change that makes everything feel smoother during chaotic fights.

🎨 Art Direction in Progress: Finding the Look of Stay Dead

While the dev team was elbows-deep in combat systems, the art team took a step back to look at something just as vital: What should Stay Dead look like, really?

October gave us the chance to slow down a bit on animation and design output, not because we were slacking, but because we needed time to rethink our pipeline, align our art direction, and define the rules of this world we’re building.

Using Hades’ plan as a pilot, the team started crafting environmental styleframes for different times of day: Daytime, Sunset, and Night. Each one pushed our lighting language, palette, and texture rules a little further.

This is quickly becoming our first internal 2D Art Guidelines doc—a resource we’ve badly needed. While it’s still in progress, we’re close to locking down a visual bible for Stay Dead’s world.

💬 Wrapping It Up

We’re in the zone. With new AI tools, smoother navigation, better dialogue support, and a punchy combat feel, our game combat system is stepping into its next phase.

Comming up: more testing, more visual effects, and more chaos. And as always, we’ll be tuning things based on what feels right.

Until next

— The Stay Dead Dev Team

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