We Almost Built Our Own Combat System. Then We Deleted It.

Here is a thing nobody tells you about making a game with a tiny team: the hardest calls are not the ones about what to build. They are the ones about what NOT to build.

We spent a good while building on-foot combat from scratch. Swinging a cutlass, blocking, the whole dance. It was coming along. And then we sat down and played a combat framework called Ascent Combat Framework, and within about ten minutes we knew.

The combat is mean, in the best possible way. You cannot face-tank a fight. Mistime a parry and you are dead, fast. It is the kind of weighty, read-your-opponent melee that a soulslike fan feels in their hands. And the honest truth is that a two-person studio was not going to hand-build that to a shipped standard in the time we have, no matter how stubborn we got about it.

So we did the humbling thing. We pulled it apart at the source instead of trusting the marketing, and asked the two questions that actually mattered to us: does it survive co-op, and do we still own our own save data? Both yes. Then we adopted it and started deleting our own work.

That part stings a little. You get attached to code you sweated over. But the job is not to be right about who wrote the combat. The job is to make the fights feel dangerous, and to spend our real hours on the things only we can build: the ships and the world and the pirate-RPG heart of the whole thing.

What it means for you, the person who will eventually be holding the controller: boarding a deck is going to be a real fight. Not a stat-check you click through. A fight you can lose because you got greedy. We are pretty excited about that.

One honest aside, since this whole post is about what we chose not to build ourselves. We are a small team, so we lean on good tools, and one of them is Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant. It helps us move faster through the more tedious stretches of the code, the boilerplate and the plumbing. It does not design the game, and it does not make the calls. That part is on us.

More soon, including the week we spent making trees fall over.