The first spark didn’t come from a game.
It came from watching a fencing visualization project — the kind of video that strips combat down to timing, distance, and intent. No flashy effects. Just movement and decision-making made visible.
Sword fighting isn’t about swinging swords. It’s about where you stand, when you move, and how you control distance.
That idea stayed with me. Eventually, it became Blade Impact.
A Lifelong Obsession with Swords and Making Games
I’ve been fascinated by sword fighting for as long as I can remember.
As a teenager, that fascination collided with another obsession: making games. I spent years building small, messy prototypes in GameMaker — not because I wanted a career, but because I wanted to make things move and react.
Years later, I picked up the original PlayStation VR on sale. That changed everything.
What followed was a slow but inevitable progression: PSVR, Quest 1, Quest 2, PSVR2, and eventually Quest 3.
What fascinated me the most wasn’t graphical fidelity. It was standalone VR. No cables. No setup ritual. Just put the headset on and be somewhere else.
VR finally felt like the medium sword fighting had been waiting for. And yet — something was missing.
The Problem with VR Sword Fighting
I played the big ones: Blade & Sorcery, Swordsman VR, Broken Edge, Ironlights. All of them are good games. Some of them are great.
But none of them gave me the feeling of an actual duel.
The core issue is unavoidable: VR has no physical feedback. No blade weight. No shock through your hands. No fear of real injury.
Most games compensate by leaning into sandbox chaos, relying on animation-driven systems, or abstracting combat into poses and cooldowns.
And almost all of them ignore the most important aspect of real sword fighting:
Footwork, positioning, and distance control — 間合い (ma-ai).
This isn’t theoretical for me. I’ve trained some Kendo, taken a few classes of classical fencing, and practiced Iaido — the art of drawing the sword — where I hold a 3rd Dan.
In real practice, you don’t fight blades. You fight space.
Wanting to Feel Like a Jedi (Without Lying to the Player)
Let’s be honest: part of this dream was wanting to feel like a Jedi.
I love the lightsaber fantasy — powerful strikes, dramatic clashes, opponents being thrown apart by sheer force. Vader Immortal’s Lightsaber Dojo nails the spectacle, but the combat leans more toward rhythm than spatial dominance.
I didn’t want realism for realism’s sake. I wanted something closer to Star Wars logic — especially scenes like Ahsoka versus Anakin — where every clash feels decisive, heavy, and spatially meaningful.
The Core Idea: Make Space the Win Condition
That’s when the core concept of Blade Impact clicked.
What if you don’t win by draining health points, but by controlling space?
The rules became simple:
- You fight on a levitating platform
- The goal is to push the opponent off
- One clean hit kills
- Body hits launch the opponent away
- Blade-on-blade clashes block — but both fighters are pushed back
Here’s the key mechanic: when blades collide, the game calculates where the collision happens.
If you block your opponent’s weak (the tip) with your strong (the base of your blade), you gain more pushback power. If you do it poorly, you lose ground.
Valid Targets, Less VR Chaos
Another VR reality is that you don’t control your legs. So Blade Impact limits valid target areas to the head and torso, similar to Olympic fencing or Kendo.
No ankle hits. No accidental controller flailing deciding the match. That removes a lot of VR jank while preserving player intent.
Movement Inspired by Real Fighters
Distance only matters if movement matters.
One early movement idea was to hold the sword in the dominant hand while using a world-grab style movement with the off-hand: pull back and release, and you launch forward.
It mirrors how fencers use their upper body to initiate movement. Not realistic — but believable.
Building It Alone (Mostly on a Mac)
I started learning Unity piece by piece. I bought assets, broke things, and repeated the process.
VR development on macOS is not ideal. There’s no proper Play Mode testing, constant headset builds are required, and iteration becomes slow.
Multiplayer was the original goal — but I abandoned it for the first version. It was too risky, too complex, and beyond what I could reasonably maintain solo at the time.
So I pivoted to AI.
The AI That Was “Good Enough” Until It Wasn’t
The first AI was embarrassingly simple: equip animation, walk forward, and play random animations when close enough.
And yet, it worked. Too well.
Players quickly found ways to exploit it, so I went deeper. I learned inverse kinematics, implemented guard states, and built a modular behavior system reacting to blade position and distance.
It’s still imperfect. Sometimes brute force works. But it’s getting smarter — and more readable.
The first visual direction was darker — anime-inspired character designs, gritty cyberpunk aesthetics. It looked interesting but felt wrong for what the game was trying to be. I scrapped it and rebuilt the visual identity around holograms and light.
I dove into shaders and Unity’s VFX Graph, building a holographic aesthetic that looks striking, is easy to extend, and improves combat readability.
Shipping a Real Game
Last summer, I decided to do the scary thing: I shipped it.
Age ratings. Meta verification. Store assets. Reviews.
People played it — and for a first solo commercial game, the reception was genuinely encouraging.
It’s niche. It barely makes money. It’s still very much a hobby next to my full-time engineering job. But it’s real.
What’s Next: Depth, Not Just Features
Right now, I’m working on procedural sword generation, an in-game store, and progression systems.
The data is clear: Blade Impact is currently a “play once or twice” experience. That has to change.
Multiplayer is still the end goal — but only once swords are personal, styles are visible, and winning actually means something.
I also want to explore non-pushback modes, mixed-reality fights in your living room, and new ways to imply impact without lying with physics.
The Hardest Part: Marketing
By far, the biggest challenge hasn’t been technology.
It’s marketing.
Raising awareness for a standalone VR game is extremely difficult. Discovery is limited, algorithms are opaque, and you’re competing with both massive studios and free-to-play content.
No matter how much care you put into mechanics, none of it matters if people never see the game.
Because of that, I’m seriously considering bringing Blade Impact to Steam once I get the necessary hardware — especially with Steam Frame on the horizon, which could make PC-VR iteration and testing far more accessible.
More platforms mean more visibility. And visibility is the real fight.
Why I Keep Going
This was never about money.
It was about one question:
Can VR make you feel like you’re really fighting someone?
Not swinging wildly. Not posing. Not exploiting systems.
But controlling space, committing to movement, and accepting consequences.
If Blade Impact gets even a little closer to that feeling, then all of this is worth it.
And I’m not done yet.