[ ARC ] // Cabinet 13
Four champions, rendered for real, in a ring with no walls. One strike, no combos — everything that matters happens in the space between you and the distance you choose to close.
One strike, no combos. Guard turns a hit into a scratch but roots you in place — and tapping guard at the last instant parries, stunning them long enough to answer. Miss, and you are open for twenty frames. There are no walls: step out of the ring and you lose.
[ 13a ] // Design
The fighters carry five animations each, so a six-move list would mean one animation standing in for six attacks — which reads as broken, not deep. Instead the depth moved into space and time: a single strike with real startup, active and recovery frames, where the entire match is about baiting a miss and taking the twenty frames it costs.
Holding guard turns a hit into three chip damage, but you cannot walk while you hold it. In a ring with no walls that is a real price — block too long and you are being walked toward the edge, and stepping out loses the round outright.
Tap guard in the last six frames before contact and the attacker eats twenty-six frames of stun. It is the highest-reward option in the game and it needed no new art at all — the model simply holds its stance while the rules do the work.
The champions came out of the modelling pipeline at 58-78MB each, built for print. Simplifying the mesh, resampling the animation and recompressing the textures took the four of them from 244MB to 9MB with the rig and every clip intact, which is the only reason they are on a web page at all.
Scores are saved on this device. A shared leaderboard needs an account, and travellers are not wired to the arcade yet.