How Sifu’s developers made Kung Fu easy to understand

digitaltrends.com:

Sifu is a fairly difficult game with a simple premise: A martial artist sets out on a quest for revenge. Using the kung fu they’ve learned over the course of eight years, the hero must defeat five bosses all within the span of one life. They don’t die outright after getting beaten up, but become a bit older every time instead.

This leads to the game’s central question: “Is one life enough to master kung fu?” For what it’s worth, I’ve beaten the game and, yes, it is. But developer Sloclap doesn’t have a lifetime for players to know kung fu. I beat the game over the course of 30 hours, but was hooked immediately. From the game’s start, I felt that I knew it. That’s thanks to how easy it is to see the character’s movements and to watch them hone their martial arts skills.

In an interview with Digital Trends, Sloclap executive director Pierre Tarno and animation director Kevin Roger described the work that went into bringing Sifu‘s kung fu to life and how they made sure players would understand it.

Sifu stands out from a lot of other media that uses kung fu to market itself. The name brings back memories of old, American kung fu movies, full of cheesy special effects and bad dubbing. Those movies were loud, with actors exclaiming “hi-yah” or some other unrealistic stereotype every time they attacked. Bad guys would grunt and heave with “oofs” and “aghs” every time they were hit before being left on the ground, groaning.

While Sifu also partially markets itself as the video game version of a kung fu flick, its depiction of a martial artist in action is more akin to what I’ve seen in a dojo (I earned my black belt in Shotokan karate years ago). That’s thanks to two decisions on the part of Sloclap.

First was the choice to have