Week 4 Session: The combat drill

Frame-by-frame reading of one boss attack, footage in hand, to separate a learnable telegraph from an unreadable one

15 March 2027

Before the session#

Find footage (or replay, if you own it) of three boss attacks you’ve died to more than once, ideally from the boss you started building in Week 2. Bring the clips or the timestamps.

In the session#

We step through attacks frame-by-frame on the shared screen. For each one: where does the telegraph actually resolve — the frame a trained eye could call the outcome — versus where a player without that training would still be guessing. Some attacks the room agrees are fair turn out to have very late tells; some attacks with generous wind-ups turn out to hide a delayed second hit that breaks the read anyway. Write up the three as an attack-tells cheatsheet: attack name, the frame it telegraphs on, the correct response.

Afterwards#

Keep the cheatsheet. Week 5’s Boss Blueprint asks for a two-phase boss, and an attack roster that already has honestly-documented tells is most of the fairness work done before the transition trigger is even designed.