Development
How the moves are made
Every move in the game is twelve points, traced by hand from reference footage of the fights everyone knows, one key pose at a time. The game plays those keys exactly as drawn.
Reference figure · guard and the traced moves
Twelve points, one head
The figure is a head, a neck, a pelvis and a bend point in the torso, then an elbow and a hand on each side and a knee and a foot on each side. That is the whole rig. It stands 3.8 heads tall, the head is 27 percent of its standing height and the limbs are drawn a third of a head thick, which is what makes it read as the stick figure people already know rather than a diagram.
Traced, not computed
A move starts as footage. Each key pose of the move is traced onto the twelve points by hand, at 24 frames a second, and the trace is checked against the footage until the timing reads right: the wind-up, the moment of contact, the recovery. Hand-authored poses, carefully timed motion: the game preserves the deliberate holds and the sharp impacts, with controlled transitions between the poses, so what you see on the phone is what was drawn.
That is why a move can be traced on a Tuesday and thrown on a phone on a Wednesday, and why players will be able to make their own.
Six on the buttons, forty-six in the library
Six buttons: jab, uppercut, front kick, jump kick, sweep and block. The library holds forty-six traced moves, and twenty-two of them are mapped to those buttons and their directions; the rest are the bench, kept so the vote among founders is a real one. The figure at the top of this page is running the same numbers the game runs.