Digging into the combat design of Cronos: The New Dawn - Game Developer Podcast Ep. 54Digging into the combat design of Cronos: The New Dawn - Game Developer Podcast Ep. 54Digging into the combat design of Cronos: The New Dawn - Game Developer Podcast Ep. 54

This week on the Game Developer Podcast, Bloober Team lead combat designer Shamil Yanbukhtin and senior game AI programmer Dennis Pauly share insights from making a new kind of survival horror combat system for Cronos: The New Dawn.

September 5, 2025

Today’s the day that Bloober Team's latest survival horror game Cronos: The New Dawn hits PC and consoles, unleashing another bloody adventure for the studio behind Layers of Fear and the remake of Silent Hill 2. In its quest to be a defining developer of survival horror games, the Cronos development team took a big swing at reinvigorating the genre's combat mechanics.

In Cronos, players face two new major mechanical challenges: first, they don’t have a dodge button. They can only repel enemies by using a burst from a flamethrower, which uses limited ammo needed elsewhere. Second, enemies don't just chase the player—they evolve by hunting down corpses that remain in the environment for the entire fight.

Experimenting with new combat mechanics is a daunting multidisciplinary task—and on this week’s episode of the Game Developer Podcast, lead combat designer Shamil Yanbukhtin and senior game AI programmer Dennis Pauly explain how the team pulled it off (even if it meant sometimes saying 'git gud').

Consider the corpses of Cronos

One challenge that veteran game designers should be familiar with is the question of what to do with the corpses of fallen enemies. In most other games, they just vanish—an efficient way to help players see what matters and reduce memory budgets by not rendering unnecessary objects.

But when bodies lying on the ground become part of the mix—how does that impact the programming? The AI? The level design? The art? These are the kinds of questions Bloober team faced on the road to making a new kind of survival horror experience.

The Game Developer podcast is a bi-weekly podcast chronicling the triumphs, catastrophes, and everything in-between of game development, sharing lessons and strategies fellow developers can use to hone their craft. The Game Developer Podcast is hosted by Bryant Francis, edited by Pierre Landriau, and features music by Mike Meehan .

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