Thoughts on Combos
when you look at a game like Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition... G feels like you can make up his combos as you go, but one time i realized E. Honda (my main) can only combo two EX hundred hand slaps together, even WITH v-trigger... unless the opponent is crouching, in which case he can combo three EX hundred hand slaps together with v-trigger because i guess the increased pushback while the opponent stands makes the combo impossible?
like, i feel like *a game's combos are designed WELL* when it feels lenient & easy to basically just make up combos on the fly, *but* any loops you do will of course, work for a while, but will eventually have a reason why you can't keep doing them (the loop stops working because of gravity-appreciation or hitstun-deterioration) or optimally shouldn't keep doing them (like you should just cancel into super or in the case of Skullgirls, play the truecombo/baitburst mindgame) as opposed to *wouldn't* keep doing them (where the combo is just insanely boring to do until death or timerscam but is technically still optimal A.K.A. the sign of a badly-designed infinite combo!)
making a combo system work like this can be really hard... from my observation there's typically 2 kinds of approaches, and realistically every fighting game is somewhere between the 2... you can meticulously try to make the game's attacks just never lead to an infinite combo thru sheer strength of design... or you can just make the game's attacks whatever you want but *then* layer some kind of system on top of it to prevent combos from lasting forever, like hitstun deterioration or gravity-appreciation or the infinite prevention system from Skullgirls or the "every kind of normal can only hit twice, only one groundbounce and one wallbounce per combo, and all combos just end at 99 hits no matter what" system from Street Fighter X Tekken.
