Date of Award

Spring 5-18-2026

Access Restriction

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Computer Science

School or College

Seaver College of Science and Engineering

First Advisor

Ray Toal

Second Advisor

John David Dionisio

Third Advisor

Jason Douglas

Abstract

Combat feel, the moment-to-moment subjective character of real-time melee combat in ac- tion games, is a central concern of game design and a recurring subject in design literature, but practitioners currently navigate it through intuition and reference to admired prior work, with no shared formal vocabulary for the design trade-o!s being made. This thesis presents a decision-theoretic framework that formalizes combat feel as a Bayesian network in which designer decisions act as interventions on measurable system variables, those variables drive latent perceptual states whose conditional distributions are grounded in the psychophysics literature on input-lag detection, duration discrimination, and audiovisual temporal binding, and the perceptual states aggregate into an expected utility representing overall combat feel. The framework’s descriptive value is demonstrated through a development study: the author built a melee combat prototype, iterating on animation timing, cancel structure, and impact- emphasis e!ects (hitstop, screen shake, camera response). The framework was constructed afterward as a formal description of the design tradeo!s encountered during iteration, with four published action games —Dark Souls III, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Devil May Cry 5, and Hollow Knight— serving as design-literature reference points that informed specific tuning decisions. Two complementary forms of validation are reported: descriptive coverage of the development study, demonstrating that the framework names and structurally relate the variables actually tuned during iteration; and alignment with design-literature recep- tion of the four reference games, demonstrating that the framework’s vocabulary maps each game’s commonly described feel to a structurally distinct region of the framework’s percep- tual space. The principal contribution is a structured vocabulary, traceable to the empirical literature on human perception, for the kind of practitioner reasoning about combat feel that currently happens informally. Numerical inference, parameter fitting against player-survey data, and prospective use of the framework during development are identified as the most important directions for future empirical work.

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