A combat prototype that departs from traditional fighting games, built around reading enemy attacks in real time and reacting to them. Characters don't die — the goal is to gain the advantage by stunning your opponent through correct direction selection and perfect timing.
MABW is an attempt to build a reflex-driven combat system that rewards observation and timing over trading damage. The enemy telegraphs its attack by randomly committing to a direction and winding up; the player's job is to read that tell and react in time.
Reading the correct direction at the right moment stuns the opponent and opens a punish window; a wrong or late reaction leaves the player exposed instead. The result is a fast, reflex-driven combat loop that rewards observation and timing over raw mechanical execution.
This project taught me a lot about state machine design, synchronizing input-driven systems, and the timing precision reflex-based gameplay demands. Building the Attack Mode transitions and direction-comparison logic end-to-end gave me a much stronger grasp of state management. Designing the enemy's pre-attack "tell" taught me that AI needs to feel both readable and fair — signal too early and it becomes predictable, too late and it feels unfair, and I had to find that fine timing balance. Coding the stun/damage resolution logic also showed me that a rule that looks simple on paper (right direction vs. wrong direction) actually has to evaluate multiple states at once (direction, timing, stun status) — an experience that sharpened my sense for reactive system design.