Major Art Update Available Now!

Mega Knockdown is getting a major graphical face-lift, and this is just the beginning! More visual updates to come throughout Early Access.

A New Hand-Drawn Art Style!

Paul, Billy, Lewis, Nick and Noel are now animated in-game with hundreds of character sprites hand-illustrated by artist Alan McMillian.
Sprites for Marv will be added in the next regular update.
Players can choose between the new art style and the old ones ('Green Screen Jeremy' and 'Abstract') in character select.
Work on these hand-drawn sprites and animations is ongoing, and fully finishing them will take some time. There will be regular updates to further improve and polish the game's graphics.

New Comic-Style Story UI

In the Arcade story mode, the old dialogue windows have been replaced with speech bubbles, flanked with large character illustrations.
Added a camera zoom effect to the transition between dialogue and gameplay.
Endings have not been significantly updated yet. We plan to replace these with new illustrations (and in some cases, expanded dialogue) in a future update.

Other Visual Improvements

Main menu screen has been overhauled with new key art.
The 'side switch' effect has been improved to look more natural.
Chip damage now displays instantly, instead of after a delay.
Wakeup animations now take 20 frames to complete, so they are easier to see. This is not a balance change, as the frame advantage of a knockdown is still +10 (the attacker is now delayed slightly during the opponent's wakeup).
Character sprites can no longer block the input display at the bottom of the screen.
If a character is hit or grabbed, their sprite will now (usually) be drawn behind the opponent's.
The 'frame disadvantage' (clock) icons now have outlines for better readability against different colored sprites.
The hitbox grid is now a little more transparent.

Tutorial and Training Modes

Paul is now the player character for the tutorial, and Nick is his opponent.
If a player hasn't done any tutorial missions and hasn't selected a difficulty, the game will default to Easy. Otherwise it will default to Normal mode.
In training mode, displayed damage numbers have been multiplied by 100. Training mode now displays correct damage values for moves with (previously) fractional amounts of damage.

Audio

Lewis has a new music theme by @DankPasta2099.
Dialogue sounds now vary in pitch slightly from word to word.

Gameplay and Balance

The damage of Billy's normal throw has increased.
Billy's normal Sweep (forward/back+C) is now the same speed as other sweeps (effectively 40f), but is still armored. His Sweep now does 250 damage (down from 350). This move should now be much more useful in Neutral,
Air throws and PileDebunker now send the opponent 2 squares away (up from 1).

Online

When playing online, you should now be able to see if the opponent has locked in their moves, if you are still choosing yours.
Art Style toggle is now a drop down with 3 options: Default (hand-drawn), Abstract, or Greenscreen.

Interface

The game should now be able to map buttons to "unknown controllers" not in its hardware database.
As a debug option, you can now hold L1 for 2 seconds in the main menu to reset all your gamepad bindings. This may be useful if there is a problem with the bindings that you have set.
Changed the execution order of the input system to (hopefully) counter possible issues caused by Steam modifying which controllers are 'seen" by the game

Bug Fixes

Hit-detection is now more consistent versus jumping attacks.
Fixed issue where sometimes characters would appear to teleport if they attempted to backflip after whiffing an air throw.
Fixed issue where hitting a throwing player with a dragon punch would de-stabliize the game state.
Fixed issue where throw animations would sometimes not display properly against a waking-up player.
Fixed an issue where N+A would sometime beat N+Throw if the throwing player was -20. Some competitive players actually liked this quirk, so this may later be added back in as a feature, not a bug.

Demo Updates

Demo updated with all the recent changes to the main game, except Online Lobbies, which requires the full game.
Paul and Nick are now the two characters playable in the Demo (previously Paul and Marv).

Miscellaneous

The character previously named Dr. Flatskin is now Dr. Flaskin. She now goes by her first name (Noel) in-game.
The game's credits have been updated.
When playing with time controls, you should now have an extra second to act on your first turn.