Devlog #2

Heads up: today’s update is a slightly longer read behind-the-scenes story about a combat system that used to be at the heart of Critical Shift - and why we ultimately moved on from it.

Early on, we were obsessed with making a tactical game that didn’t rely on the classic “90% chance to miss” moments. So we built our own approach: Concentration - a stamina-like resource that absorbed most incoming fire.

The idea was simple: in a real fight, you can dodge and stay sharp… but you’re spending something. Focus, breath, reaction speed - stamina. Concentration was that “evasion stamina.” Enemy shots didn’t just magically miss - they forced you to burn that resource to avoid turning mistakes into injuries.

Steam post image Early alpha version of the game As long as you had Concentration, you could survive through smart movement and good positioning. When it ran out, then your health started taking real damage.

Important nuance

Concentration wasn’t a universal shield. Some attacks were designed to bypass it entirely - think explosions, melee hits, and other “can’t-dodge-cleanly” impacts.

The intent was to keep the system honest

positioning and cover could help you avoid bullets, but certain threats should still feel immediate and dangerous.

To make combat even deeper, we gave weapons very distinct effective ranges (close / mid / long) in clear “steps.” We still had the classic, intuitive examples - shotguns dominating up close and falling off with distance, snipers doing the opposite - but other guns were deliberately less obvious. Some automatic rifles, for instance, were strongest at mid-range and surprisingly weak point-blank, which pushed you to treat positioning as part of the weapon.

Steam post image Alpha version of the game On top of that, different weapons dealt different amounts of Concentration damage (even within the same category, like pistols), so two guns could look similar at first glance but play completely differently in practice. When you finally internalized all of it, it felt like learning to operate a complicated vehicle - and winning tough fights was incredibly satisfying.

But as we brought in more external playtests, we noticed something important. A lot of players read Concentration as “extra HP” (which, in practice, it partially was), and they also felt the system could be too ruthless - especially when you got punished hard for ending up at the wrong distance.

We could’ve kept pushing in that direction and tried to tune it further, but our resources aren’t infinite - we’re still an indie team. And rather than spending months sanding down a concept that would always be a bit polarizing, we decided to preserve it as something we might return to in a future game - especially because some players who did get into it told us they genuinely loved it.

At the same time, many players told us they wanted that familiar tactical tension - the uncertainty, the risk, the roulette feeling - without having to decode a whole new layer first.

So we rebuilt combat around hit chance again, removed Concentration, kept ranges, and replaced hard steps with a smooth accuracy curve. It was a big rewrite, and honestly - it plays even better now.

Want more devlogs like this?

We can start doing short deep-dives into the current mechanics of Critical Shift - accuracy & positioning, initiative, noise, and running/escaping tough battles, hostile enemy factions, meta progression, and more.

Which system should we unpack next?