The surge of Abrasion in Stormlight always looked kinda lame to me (bear with me) up until I started working on this game. It’s not the Surge’s fault; it just seems that some of the powers look vastly outclassed by some of the other Surges.

The books even kinda touch on this in TWoK, where in the Chasms, we’re being told the Radiants can fly, run on walls, heal sickness, etc. and Kaladin just says “Wait, if the Radiants could fly why would they be sticking to walls or running fast?” Why apply magic oil slick and skate at wild speeds when you can literally pick yourself off the ground and fly far, far away?

I think this is vastly influenced by the fact that Abrasion is not very well explored and Gravitation has been at the forefront of the series since the beginning because of Kaladin so its not a fair comparison since we just haven’t seen the Abrasion-using Radiant orders in the spotlight yet.

Unfortunately, my video game cannot wait 4 years for Lift’s viewpoint book to release to see Abrasion expanded on. So I once again allow myself to possibly blasphemy the source material by introducing my own interpretations of the powers, and take some liberties with it.

Unlike Progression which has been lovingly mangled into an RPG-esque buff system, Abrasion I think is much closer to what the Sanderson intended. Gravitation is going to be clear to me; flight, wall running, throwing objects, etc.

So, to make Abrasion distinct, it needs some things that are strict advantages, such as:

1. Faster movement through elimination of air resistance
2. Snappier movement from increases of friction
3. Better dodging, as you ‘slick’ away from enemy attacks

And yeah, take that Gravitation, you starving overrated main character power set. You may have cinematic appeal and a more useful utility in Roshar, but in my game you get something way better: Frame data.

But, the problem is that it’s a bit of a boring power set. Most of this is very easy to implement in game as numerical tweaks; Increase movement speed, reduce lag on direction changes, increase invincibility frames on the dodge and parry mechanic, etc. It would still be interactive, but it’s not visually exciting.

Luckily, we can make it a bit cooler to look at.

At the beginning of the project, I put together an after image script based off this post. I slightly tweaked it to make it work recursively with all sprite renderers in the game object’s children and disables all associated scripts other than the sprite renderers before instantiating the images (and increasing transparency).

So, in addition to the tweaks I made above, I added after images to the dash, adjusted the running animations, and added a custom ‘friction’ protocol that reduces speed more gradually when stopping.

Here’s a comparison normal movement:

And here’s a comparison with the Abrasion movement:

So it’s not actually that much faster, but it definitely feels faster and for a proof of concept I’m happy with how it looks for now.
The next step now is to add some other functions; Abrasion might be able to

1. Let you wall climb
2. Increase air resistance and prevent fall damage
3. Trip enemies

Whether any of this is relevant, we’ll see on how the game turns out.

Until next time, I’ll leave it like this.

Some TODOs for next time:

1. Add wall running
2. Adjust air speed and acceleration