In our previous Samson dev diaries, we first tackled the most frequently asked questions, then shifted focus to vehicles with our designer, Alex Williams.

Today, we’re turning our attention to fighting. Strati Zerbinis, one of the programmers behind our combat systems, answers many of the combat-related questions we’ve seen circulating. We’ll talk about how combat is designed to feel raw and desperate, why we chose to focus entirely on hand-to-hand fighting in a modern crime setting, and why we don’t use guns. We’ll also talk about the film and game influences that helped inspire the experience.

Interested in Samson and its development? Wishlist the game on Steam, and join our Discord to get first-hand updates and chat with the community: https://discord.gg/xPHpQgKUwG

How does fighting feel in Samson?

We really love old ‘80s and ‘90s action movies. Where some smart-mouth would start big fistfights and manage to win with grit, determination, stuntmen, and broken props. Movies like “They Live”, “The Perfect Weapon”, or “Who Am I?”. When you pick up the controller and hit the streets, we want you to feel like a hard-fighting tough guy, living in a city full of tough guys. Some people will step out of your way, and the rest of them are going to make you work for it.  

But in this game, you’re no super-hero, and you’re no soldier. You’ve got no special training, you fight with what you’ve got. You might not shy away from any one-on-one fights, but taking a punch and trading blows will hurt. You’ll get hurt, get knocked down, and have to be able to get back up again at least one more time than everyone you’re fighting.  

And don’t expect the city to offer too many one-on-one fights. A fair fight is for chumps. They’ll gang up on you, they’ll get behind you. So you’ll need to keep moving, keep swinging. Maybe fight a little dirty. If you see something heavy, hit a guy with it. Don’t feel bad, they’ve all got it coming, and it’s not like anyone is going to go to the cops.

I heard there are no guns in the game. A game about street crime in a modern city. Is that right?

Early on, we talked a lot about what kind of combat we wanted for this game.  It was important for players to feel like a real two-fisted badass, desperate and driven to violence. We wanted the player to feel like they had to fight to survive, that they were a dangerous person in a brutal, dangerous city. 

We started with a mix of guns and light melee combat, but the more we played with these ideas and the more we tried different versions, the more a focus on hand-to-hand combat felt right. We love shooters, but we also love brawlers, beat-em-ups, and lots of different kinds of fighting games. Games like Sifu, Oni, The Warriors, and Sleeping Dogs, are all fantastic.

So we were excited to dive into melee, big fights, big hits, and dramatic takedowns. Eventually, we realized that pulling out a gun was too simple, too fast, and that melee would give us more messy and chaotic fights. We could let the player grab a guy, slam him into the wall and immediately turn to beat his friend who is coming at you with a brick. We decided to see how much fun we could have with our bare hands.

So what does all that mean? Will there be combos?
The experience we’re going for is more of a wild bar brawl and less like tactical boxing. We want it to feel like you’re in it up to your neck, and you will have to make it up as you go to get yourself out. The fighting is built to encourage improvisation, there are moves that you can string together on the fly rather than fixed combos. You’ve got tools to plan your engagements, but still need to react. 

You have your movement, attack, and defence actions, as well as weapons. Enemies know when you're becoming too predictable in your fights, so switch up your tactics to avoid them anticipating your next move. Make space, dodge punches or block them, then charge back into doing damage. Stay aware of who’s behind you, and stay moving, or your enemies will crowd you from all sides. If they do, then use the crowd to your advantage by throwing people around, knocking them down, and generally getting them in each other’s way. Learn the timing and rhythm of different moves, and use that knowledge to stay alive.

We also didn’t want fights to take place in empty arenas. The space you’re fighting in matters. You might walk into a clean room and leave it completely wrecked. You might block off parts of the room or at least make them harder to reach, or you might smash open new areas.  If you’re causing that kind of chaos, we’ve made sure you’re able to use it. Broken objects can become weapons. Debris can slow down your enemies, or even kill them. We’ve made it so you can use the whole world to really hurt your enemies.

How did you do all this? We really wanted to try and get a good mix of physics chaos, impactful brutal feeling animations, movements and responsive character control. So we built a custom fighting system, designed to let us balance timings, choose and control how animations play, and how the physics interacts with it all. This way we can for example, in a single attack, start with controlled character movement, then mid frame find an animation that best fits the intended action for both hit and reaction, ease into this animation to get a good feeling and good looking punch. And then react to physics interactions like weapons, debris or cars. From there, it can transition immediately into another action, sometimes sampling objects from the nearby environment and giving players opportunities to interact with it. 

This system is trying to balance, at runtime, between response time, travel distance, alignment angles, animation timings, and a whole lot of other things. Also, the NPC enemies use the same systems as the player. This lets us build a lot of different actions that can be plugged together in different ways. Really, this isn’t some super technology. I mean, I like it, but the point isn’t the technology. The important thing is that it gives players flexibility to experience fights that feel fluid, reactive, and unpredictable.

This has all been a huge team effort. We’re a small mixed team of designers, animators, artists, and programmers. We play the game, fighting different fights, different environments, and different weapons. Trying different things, to see what works and what really doesn’t. Trying to break the game when we can. We tried a lot of different things that didn’t feel good, or look good, or were just not really fun, we experimented a lot. But mostly we played the game, and if there was something that annoyed one of us, we figured it would annoy a lot of people, so we’d try and fix it. 

When someone had an idea for something cool, we’d try it. If it was fun, then we’d build on it. A good example is something as simple as pushing people so they stumble over curbs, rocks, or other low tripping hazards, started as a joke within the team. But it was very fun to do, and it felt like putting the enemy in his place. Soon, it became a really useful part of our crowd-control tools.

How did you design NPC and character AI to shape the combat experience and make it feel engaging and alive?

Ten years ago, when I was making games, we’d talk about game AI and mean things like path finding, weapon selection, target management, animation selection and NPC dialog reactions. Now we call this NPC control to avoid confusion, but this is still the way we built this game. These days we add some tools to help designers and coders to realize our characters. As well as using standard things like BTrees, we also include HTNs to let us author the kinds of actions a character should take, and the situations they should take them in. But mostly, we’re focused on our NPCs being fun and believable parts of the game. Ultimately, they only exist for the player to play with or against them.  

Wait a second, did you say car back there? Can you hit guys with your car?

Yes, absolutely! The cars in Samson are great. Why wouldn’t you want to use them as much as you could? The game is set in the 90s and inspired by action films like Heat and Ronin, so vehicles in Samson aren't just made for getting around, but are built to be part of the combat.

We want to give players the freedom to use whatever they have in the heat of combat. Sometimes they have a car. Our developers have plenty of experience in vehicle combat. Players can use cars to smash through things, turn objects into projectiles, or simply hit your enemies.  Do drifts, do donuts, or just floor it. It’s a great way to make a dramatic entrance. Honestly, I love mixing driving and fighting, and it's one of my favorite features.

If you want to find out more details about the vehicle experience in Samson, see our previous dev diary where we had a detailed chat about this together with one of our designers, Alex.

We hope you enjoyed reading this as much as we did sharing it! There's more to come soon. In the meantime, wishlist the game on Steam, follow us on social media for updates, and join our Discord to connect with the community early and chat with the devs: https://discord.gg/xPHpQgKUwG