Skyfall, part 2: wall jumps, a real bow and a quiet network

Part 2 of the Skyfall story. Part 1 covered the Defold prototype and the first weeks in LÖVE, up to a quiet March.

Table of contents

• Feel first
• 30 Hz on purpose
• A network that stays quiet
• The arena fills up
• The last week of April
• By the numbers
• The Skyfall story

Feel first

In the Defold version’s README, I had written down a rule for myself: the online extras (shop, cosmetics, missions, challenges) come last, because there’s no point working on them if the game doesn’t feel nice. When I came back to Skyfall on April 6, that’s where I started.

• April 6: input buffering. Press jump a few frames before landing, and the jump still happens.
• April 7: coyote time. Run off a ledge, and you still have a moment to jump.

Then a lot of tuning: jump buffering, coyote time, wall-jump force and the movement physics were adjusted again and again over the month.

30 Hz on purpose

On April 10, I documented a decision that shaped everything after it: physics runs at a fixed 30 Hz, the same rate as the Nakama server. Offline play feels exactly like online play, so you practise with the physics you get in a real match.

The visuals don’t pay for it: players and arrows are interpolated between two physics steps and drawn at the screen’s own refresh rate.

A network that stays quiet

Skyfall is a competitive game, so bandwidth matters. On April 11, I went after it:

• Events, not polling. Clients send an input when a button is pressed or released, never on every tick.
• Two decimals. Every number that goes over the network is rounded to two decimals.
• Short IDs. Players get small integer IDs instead of long user IDs.
• Only what changed. The server skips anything that didn’t move. A player standing still, or an arrow stuck in a wall, costs zero bytes.

The same day, the run script learned to launch several copies of the game at once, each window tagged with a coloured dot in its title. That’s how I test online matches alone, on one machine.

The arena fills up

The next two weeks turned a moving dwarf into a fighter:

• April 12: a ready system with an automatic match start, local multiplayer, and shooting, back after the February rebuild.
• April 13: arrows wiggle when they hit a wall.
• April 20: ammo synced online, arrows picked back up from the walls, and a bow among the new assets.

The last week of April

Most of the moves Skyfall still has today landed in a single week:

• The bow. Hold the button to draw, aim in any direction, release to fire. The arrow sits on the bow while you aim, and the bow snaps to 16 directions, which also keeps the aim messages small online.
• Wrapping. Leave the map on one side and you come back on the other, arrows included.
• Self-kills. Your own arrows can kill you.
• Movement. Wall slides, wall jumps, ledge grabs, a variable jump height, and separate acceleration in the air and on the ground.
• The dash. Dash into an incoming arrow to catch it. On May 1, dashing into a player also steals one of their arrows.
• Head stomps. Land on someone’s head, and they’re out.
• Bumping. Players push each other around.

The menu followed, with Practise and Local Multiplayer next to the online buttons.

By the numbers

• 81 commits in April.
• About 5,700 lines of Lua on May 1, up from 3,700 in February.

The Skyfall story

1. From a Defold cube to a fresh start in LÖVE
2. Wall jumps, a real bow and a quiet network (this article)
3. Rounds, rain, torches and a VHS replay
4. The War Room and the armory
5. A map editor, a ghost and the Champion Forge