Vahrin's Call Progress Report - February 2026

Hope you're all doing smashing as always and are ready to see how the world of Leyda has developed over the last month.

Throughout February, the team has been contuining to polish a multitude of things across the board, with a variety of updates, changes and improvements made in all areas. However, it's undeniable that our primary focus has been refining the combat, and so that's largely what we'll be covering in today's update.

With that being said, let's dive right in!

Blocking and Parrying

Last month we teased some of the changes we've been making to how blocking and parrying feels in the game. On our Gameplay Overview video, we saw some comments suggesting the need for more "impact" to help sell that an enemy has just struck you at full force.

This is something that was actually already on our todo list. Just didn't quite make it's way into the game in time for the new video.

Anyway, check out the video below to see how blocking and parrying used to feel, compared to now with all the recent changes.

Updated animations and adjustments to VFX and SFX are just a few of the changes we've made to the blocking and parrying mechanics over the last 1-2 months. We hope you'll agree that it now feels like there is a lot more power behind enemy attacks.

A Quick Side Note:

We saw many of you suggest implementing freeze frames/hit stops, to help convey a greater sense of impact on both your attacks and enemy attacks.

Well, they're actually already in the game!

We have the ability for you to toggle freeze frames on and off in the settings menu, as during playtesting we found that some people loved having them enabled and others didn't. So why not just give you the choice to customise them to your liking?

There was likely some confusion/inconsistencies in our Gameplay Overview video, as we had many devs recording footage for it, some who had freeze frames enabled and others who didn't.

With that clarification out of the way, let's move swiftly onwards!

Input Buffering and Cancel Frames

I'll try to keep this section as brief as I can, as although both of these things are helping massively with the overall feel and flow of combat, they're not really changes we can convey to you in an image or video. They're very much improvements to how it feels to control your character.

Input Buffering

Input buffering happens when you press a button on your keyboard/mouse or gamepad, while already performing an action in game.

When pressing a button, the input is stored and then executed as soon as the next available opportunity arises.

As an example: You get knocked down by a heavy attack > You click the attack button while getting back up > When that animation has finished and you have regained control of your character, your input kicks in and your character attacks.

This system is a bit of a double-edged sword, as it's beneficial in some instances, but just ends up feeling annoying in others.

It works nicely in the example I mentioned, as it relieves the need for you to spam click to get an attack to go through. It's especially useful on quick enemy attacks, where your character only flinches for a very short period of time.

However, having this same set up for switching weapons is not so ideal. We've found this results in players accidentally spam switching their weapons during combat,