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Mega Knockdown News

March Update

New Sprites for Marv & Nils!
  • Color has been enabled for Marv's animations, and several finished quality full color animations have been added. He's a very complicated character to animate so he's maybe 60% finished now. We hope to have him finished, or mostly finished, by the next regular content update.
  • A few of Marv's animations have been tweaked & retooled slighty. For instance, Jayne now vanishes briefly into smoke on a ground hit, and Marv will react more to Jayne doing different attacks.
  • In parallel, work has been started on getting Nils some finished full-color animations. Nils, being much simpler in design, is maybe 30 or 40 percent finished now. (Nils is a new character currently under test. Information on how to access Nils is on the official Discord.)
  • Nils' color palettes have been overhauled. Previously he mostly had copies of Paul's palettes, now he has 10 of his own.


Performance Improvements
  • The game will now preload several textures and other assets when it launches. This should mitigate longer-than-usual load times when you enter a match for the first time that session.
  • Fixed an issue where the combat log would use too much memory late in the match, leading to possible performance impacts.
  • Several assets now have "crunch" compression, significantly reducing their size on disk and load times. For most textures this should not lead to a noticeable loss in quality. Hard disk footprint is down roughly 15% compared to the last patch (950mb->810mb).
  • A few scripts have been cleaned up to reduce their performance impact.

Version 0.969b Update (Hotfix)

  • Fixed a problem with "Find Match" where players attempting to join a game would sometimes not get the signal that the host is ready for a peer-to-peer connection, sending the host player to an empty lobby and leaving the joiner unable to connect. This can still happen if the connecting player cancels connecting or has a connection problem, but the matchmaking queue should be much more reliable now.
  • Fixed a problem where an invisible object was blocking mouse clicks in the Rebinding menu in the character select screen. It should work better for mouse-pilled users now.
  • Found a bug, or have feedback to share? You can press F8 at any time during gameplay to send the developers a direct message. We read everything we receive.

Version 0.969a Update (Hotfix)

  • Fixed a bug where joining the online matchmaking queue, going to play other modes, and then coming back to cancel the search later would not actually close your lobby, leaving behind empty "ghost" lobbies for awhile.
  • Found a bug, or have feedback to share? You can press F8 at any time during gameplay to send the developers a direct message. We read everything we receive.

February Update

This update includes several UI improvements and quality-of-life features. Our next update is likely to include finished quality animations for Marv. (Cover image is by our artist Alan, of course).

Brazillian Portuguese Support!
  • Nearly all text in the game (anc achievements) has been translated to Brazillian Portuguese thanks to hard work by community member Stealph. You can switch languages in the main menu or in Options.
  • If you encounter an issue with the translation, you can press F8 to report it.
  • If you are bilingual and want to help translate the game into your native language, join the official Discord to learn more.


Online Matchmaking Improvements
  • The default button in Online mode is now "Find Match," which lets you wait for players while playing other game modes.
  • If enough other players are online when you're in the Main Menu, but no lobbies are open, the game will suggest you "Queue Up" and start searching for games. Currently this will trigger if 2+ people are online I may adjust this number upward. (I, the dev, am frequently flagged as in-game while testing the game in the Unity Editor, and I might not see your lobby when I'm doing that)
  • If a lobby IS open, you will see the "Jump In!" icon instead, like in the last patch.
  • We hope these additions will make it easier to find games organically. You can always hop in Discord as well.


Replay Takeover
  • In you turn off a replay's Autoplay, bring up the Strategic View and start clicking input buttons, you can override a player's actions in the replay.
  • This is currently doable with mouse/touch input only. If this feature is popular we can find some way to do takeover with other input methods, such as by holding another button down.
  • This feature started out as a bug, originally, but it was cleaned up to behave more consistently.


New In-Game Menu System
  • Across game ALL modes, the pause and end-of-round menus have been overhauled completely to use a more modular and flexible navigation system, similar to the other, newer menus in the game.
  • This new system should behave more consistently in general, allows for me to more easily add options and features in the future, and supports translations. The actual functioning of the menus has not changed much, for now.
  • This is a huge change to an important game system, so it may create new issues that were not caught in testing. If you find a bug, press F8 in-game to report it.


UI and System Changes
  • If you get a perfect KO in most modes, the announcer will shout "MEGA KNOCKDOWN" instead of "KNOCKDOWN," and the game logo will appear on screen.
  • Several UI/HUD elements that used images of text now use dynamic text which is more performant and can more easily be localized, such as move lists, the "win" screen at the end of Arcade, the credits, and many more examples.
  • The "guide" display which comes up when you hold Tab/Select is now mostly glyph-based instead of text-based.
  • You can now close the pause menu with "resume" instead of having to press pause again.
  • Dialogue in Arcade now uses a new font which better supports extended characters, but mostly looks the same besides.
  • When you unlock a new color by beating Arcade with a character, you will now get a popup in the win screen.
  • Resolved some weirdness with Guide/Pause menu elements sometimes incorrectly appearing over/under other UI elements
  • The Credits have been reformatted slightly and new names have been added. (The last update was in early 2023!) The total credits roll time is now slightly shorter.
  • You can now change your first assigned movement or combat action in certain tutorial missions, like you can in other parts of the game.
  • The Training data panel now looks more like the Tutorial HUD windows. The Training/Tutorial menus now have a green color scheme instead of purple.
  • In training, the the Manual dummy is now expressly labeled as being controlled by player 2.
  • Some in-game text fields use new fonts.
  • The "click to continue" screen which appears if your game launches out of focus has been redesigned slightly.


Gameplay and Balance changes
  • When two invulnerable attacks collide, they will now "clash" for minor damage and knockback (no knockdown) instead of passing through each other harmlessly. This will occur regardless of frame advantage.
  • Nils jC now acts like Billy/Paul jC, meaning it now does chip damage and hits "only" one square ahead. (Nils is a new character currently under test. Information on how to access Nils is on the official Discord.)
  • Nils' Natural Light is now +10 from 2 squares away instead of -10. It's still minus when used point blank. This is meant to improve the reward of connecting with Nils' projectile, and fits better with the flavor that it functions similarly to a "sonic boom."
  • At the right range, Nils' Natural Light can now hit Jayne's extended limb when Marv uses Vapor Strike. This reflects the intended result of this interaction.


Under-the-Hood and Optimization
  • Updated the game to the most recent Unity 2021 LTS version, as well as some 3rd party plugins.
  • In the tutorial, some status checks that were running every frame now only happen once.
  • Cleaned up some scripts for a very minor performance improvement
  • The "Submit" action has now been fully decoupled from the left mouse button. This was already the case in most scenes, but it was necessary for the funcitoning for the old menus. This was also causing unwanted behaviour like causing highlighted buttons to trigger if empty parts of the screen are clicked, or clicking a button causing it to fire twice. Note that you can still click buttons as normal. This just fixes "bad stuff."
  • Removed some unused textures. Thanks to this the game's filesize has gone DOWN by about 15mb compared to the last patch.


Bug Fixes
  • Fixed an issue related to starting a match when the matchmaking queue connects you to an opponent while you're in another mode.
  • Fixed a visual glitch with Marv Vapor Strike on player 2 side.
  • Fixed Marv reacting too slowly to Jayne's extended limb getting hit by PileDebunker
  • Fixed the tracking of time spent in Training Mode for the achievement (it used to tick too slowly sometimes)
  • Fixed some strange behaviour in the tutorial where the displayed input choice was sometimes not correct if you changed your inputs, or the opponent's displayed "next move" was incorrect.
  • Fixed normal mode arcade clear not tracking correctly for some characters
  • Fixed Nils not tracking Survival Mode/Paul Zone high scores.
  • Cleaned up some code causing Null Reference Exceptions in rare situations

Version 0.968b Update (Hotfix)

  • Fixed a bug where blocking a projectile would sometimes cause the "being hit" animation to play, which could destabilize the gameplay state and create other issues.
  • When blocking minus attacks, block animations tend to end early to speed up the flow of gameplay. As part of the above fix, this behaviour no longer applies to projectiles. At least for now.
  • Thanks to YouTuber ShinLad for inadvertently finding this bug in his recent Mega Knockdown video.
  • Found a bug, or have feedback to share? You can press F8 at any time during gameplay to send the developers a direct message. We read everything we receive.