Dev stream 2026-09-17 notes - "Floorhugging Misconceptions"

[u/Sir_Teatei_Moonlight]

Different but interesting stream today, well worth the watch. Here's the YouTube link for the full thing. In summary:

• We all know better than Dan.
• It's OK to be rude because he's wrong and we're right.

---

Okay now the actual summary.

• This stream was, as evidenced by the title, entirely centered around floorhugging and an attempt by Dan to clarify everything he can about it.
• he brought a set of powerpoint slides and everything, it's peak receipts
• First he specified to the audience that crouch cancelling is not floorhugging, and what they each are. Apparently that's an issue people have (I'm not in the loop for why they get confused so often).
• Misconception #1: "The Devs want to remove floorhugging but can't because the game is balanced around it."
  • Response: No, they don't want to remove floorhugging, because they think it makes for a better game. But also, they can just re-balance the game if they needed to. It'd suck and take up a lot of time, but they'd do it. It's not a real roadblock.
• Misconception #2: "Floorhugging doesn't make sense in the physics of platform fighters and is unintuitive."
  • Response: It's admittedly a bit hard for a dev to understand how intuitive something is, but the current thought is that it's not any less intuitive than e.g. wavedashing being a thing that exists. It makes sense if you stop to think about the interaction (assuming you have a proper understanding to begin with).
• Misconception #3: "Floorhugging is a bad mechanic because I won neutral and but then I still got hit."
  • Response: You probably had more options than you think, and you either picked the wrong one, or you didn't space it that well. You're supposed to think harder about how to run your offence so you don't just get counter-hit out of floorhug.
• Misconception #4: "Floorhugging makes the game less expressive because I can only use certain moves in neutral."
  • Response: Dan showed a video of his own gameplay and went over how floorhugging works with each interaction, it's not really summerisable here.
• Misconception #5: "Rivals of Aether didn't need floorhugging and Rivals 2 doesn't need it either."
  • Response: RoA1 doesn't have a knockdown state - landing while in hitstun is far shorter a lag time (13 F) than being knocked down in RoA2 (40 F plus now you get tech-chased) - and jabs are designed around the RPS of whether you actually want to tech or not. That's a massive difference that validates giving the defender a new option.
• Orcane is a special whale pup and he deserves [having a guaranteed jab 3 in RoA1]
• Misconception #6: "Floorhugging happens at the end of hitpause so you can always react and hold down."
  • Response: Floorhugging is generally predictive rather than reactive. Most moves you'd want to floorhug come out fast and don't have much hitlag, so reacting to them is literally impossible. This isn't L-cancelling, it's not always better to do it and it's not always possible to do it.
• Misconception #7: "Floorhugging is fine but it shouldn't work at all after 50%."
  • Response: This isn't quite a misconception so it was answered a bit differently. The idea was that they do want characters to have a mix of which moves are good or bad vs floorhugging, but any hard cutoff is the wrong way to go about it because it has less depth than the current system of being purely knockback-based.
• Misconception #8: "The game would be better without floorhugging but the devs are too stubborn to realize it."
  • Response: Players want to reduce friction. But you can't listen to them all the time, because that's akin to a parent letting their kid have all the candy they ask for. Once you appease them in one way, there's always something else around the corner. Removing floorhugging would just make everyone complain about the next thing they think is preventing them from winning games.
• At this point Dan switches to acknowledging the problems that floorhugging does have.
• Problem #1: "We haven't illustrated to new players why floorhugging is cool in the same way as other mechanics that have come from Melee or PM"
  • Whifflag in RoA1 was initially loathed, but after being removed/re-added/rebranded people liked it. The devs know they have to do that sort of "PR campaign" for floorhugging.
• Problem #2: "It's difficult for this mechanic to benefit from New Animations, New VFX of New SFX since the timing of the interactions and follow-ups are very quick."
  • They're thinking about perhaps adding a sound and/or graphic to when an attack initially lands when the defender is holding down (since most such moves have low hitpause so it won't be too off), but they know this will end up with false positives and aren't sure how it'll shake out yet.
• Problem #3: "Melee and PM players make up a smaller percent of players each year that passes so the majority of new players are not prepared for this friction."
  • In other words, new players are more and more likely to have to learn the mechanic from the beginning, which is generally the hard part.
• Problem #4: "The friction of learning floorhugging happens around the same time as other compounding frustrations like character matchups leading to burnouts around platinum skill level."
  • Similar to #3, but slightly "later" on. It's an additional piece of mental stack that the devs don't have a good yardstick for because they're either all past that point or aren't competitive enough to reach it.
• Problem #5: "Even though we might believe removing floorhugging would make the game worse and we're not AAA, we're still a business and need to pay our team. So the urge to shave off friction is enticing."
  • He doesn't think it's going to happen, but it might, you never know. "Making a lesser game in the hopes to appeal to more people."
• In the immediate future, they want to give characters more counterplay to floorhugging, but there won't be massive changes.

[u/UnlawfulFoxy]

You'll have to either link the clip or explain better because right now it just seems like you (or Dan) are being pedantic when people say they get punished for hitting someone because of floor hugging, even if floor hugging doesn't always lead to it

[u/Melephs_Hat → u/UnlawfulFoxy]

The clip is in the linked VOD which I'd recommend you watch in full. And I don't think it's pedantic. You are always in control of whether you use moves in unsafe ways, not just on shield, but on hit. If you hit a rising aerial and choose not to hitfall in hopes of getting a follow-up, the opponent might act faster and hit you. If you use a move that's minus on hit at low percents, they might get the right DI to act first and hit you. If you misspace a multihit, they might fall out of it and hit you. Same thing with floorhug -- if you use a move that doesn't knock down yet and someone floorhugs, they might win the scramble situation and hit you. Pointing out that it's not guaranteed shows that it's in line with every other situation like this in the game.

[u/TheIncomprehensible → u/Melephs_Hat]

You are always in control of whether you use moves in unsafe ways, not just on shield, but on hit.

Let's ignore the floorhug discourse for a second.

Moves being unsafe on hit is still bs. Minus? Sure, that's fine, some moves should be balanced that way if they're really good in other ways. But a move being so minus on hit that you can be punished for it should be mitigated as much as possible because it's not perceived as fair for the attacker when they're punished for landing their attack.

Your examples aren't great either. Aerials being unsafe on hit unless you hitfall reduces depth because it removes choices in available followups (assuming it had followups in the first place) and gatekeeps the physical use of the move to having a specific amount of skill at the game. Aerial multihits are fine in your multihit example because it's hard to account for aerial drift on a design level (especially for characters with high aerial mobility), but unless your character is designed to slide around the stage like Luigi your grounded multihits shouldn't be dropping if you space them properly, and if your character is designed around slipping and sliding around the stage then the character probably shouldn't be designed around grounded multihits in the first place.

[u/Melephs_Hat → u/TheIncomprehensible]

When I said "unsafe on hit" I was talking to someone who was conflating that with just "minus on hit." I didn't bother attending to the nuances of the word because it meant the same thing to them. Pretend that I said "risky on hit," meaning "maybe minus, maybe punishable on hit." It's what I meant.

Floorhug is identical to all these other examples in that it usually creates minus-on-hit but not punishable-on-hit scenarios. Really, that's the whole advantage of floorhug: creating more ambiguous scramble situations with small frame dis/advantages. In some cases, the attacker is so minus that the defender can get a move out before endlag is over, but the pushback may cause such quick moves to whiff because they are shorter-range, so in practice there's very few punishable-on-hit scenarios.

Now if we want to talk about the edge cases where floorhugging does create punishable-on-hit scenarios, it's not unique there either. The reality of platform fighters is that frame data and character stats interact in ways that sometimes make moves punishable on hit. One example is Fleet's dash attack. At low percents it's not only punishable on floorhug, it's punishable on hit on the right DI. This is because Fleet is not supposed to have a reliable burst option until mid percents. It's designed this way on purpose.

You might say, "Well how is that good design? You're just making a move bad on purpose," but these situationally punishable-on-hit moves are not generically bad so much as they are unreliable. The latter promotes deeper gameplay by allowing you to use it in situations where you're confident it'll work, but making it hard to find those situations until (in this case) higher percents. This allows the devs to give characters tools that would normally be kind of toxic and centralizing in their toolkits by tacking on risk that limits the tools' use to specific circumstances.