Mega Knockdown News

Our next patch has a full overhaul of Paul with color sprites and several system and balance tweaks. Why not try it out and give us some feedback?



Patch notes: https://pastebin.com/1ksjnNhj

To access the public beta branch:

• Right-click Mega Knockdown in your library and click Properties
  
• Navigate to the Betas tab. Select the Marv Beta.
  
• Launch the game. You are now playing the beta!
  

If you have comments or encounter any issues, please press F8 to notify the dev. Your feedback will ensure that this patch will launch as smoothly as possible. You can also hop on the discord ( https://discord.com/invite/bGVftKK ) to find matches and discuss the new update.

As we indicated in our earlier Dev Goals post (below), one thing we're working on is our final transition into full-color character sprites with shading and color swapping.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1492750/view/3888359911119183911?l=english



The first character to get this upgrade will be Paul. We are making steady progress on his art and hope for full-color Paul to be playable in-game later this month. The next will be Billy, then either Noel, Lewis or Nick. The last to get upgraded will be Marv since his animations are the most complex.



In our finished sprites we will actually use two layered images per frame of animation. One has only lineart and shadows with a standard sprite shader (written for us by TooMuchAbstraction, the developer of Waves of Steel--check his game out when you get a chance!), then a second sprite contains only flat shades of gray which is run through the swap shader.

Before rendering a sprite set up for color swapping, this shader reads the intensity (lightness/darkness) of its pixels. Each shade of gray maps to different color within a palette texture, and the shader assigns that color. Then to change character color palettes we just switch palette textures. Each of those is just an 8x1 pixel image, so they're easy to make and, in theory, anyone could do it.



Thanks for your continued support. Hand drawn art is very labor intensive and time consuming, but we're really excited to be entering this stage of development.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a really obscure bug with timed variants like BLITZ or BULLET where if a player locked in their move exactly one frame after running out of time, they would sometimes start peforming their chosen action and then enter the timed out state, and the time indicator would be stuck glowing red. This led to some very rare and high-execution softlocks.
  
• Corrected damage calculation in training mode when a player is hit out of a back jump, or if the player resets training mode in the middle of a combo.
  

This is a quick fix to a couple Steam Leaderboard issues. You can view your position on the leaderboards in the Steam Community Hub.

Bug Fixes

• When the game submits a score to the leaderboard, it should no longer overwrite your high score if you submit a lower one.
  
• The Normal Survival leaderboard is now based on your Normal Survival high score, not your Normal Paul Zone high score.
  

Bug Fixes

• In Survival, enemy HP now goes up by 200 every 4 wins, instead of every 2. Originally it was supposed to be 100 every 2 wins, but then I made the HP boost upgrade stronger, which unintentionally also helped the AI.
  
• Billy's new jumping C now works correctly for both players.
  

Leaderboards

• Added a new leaderboard that keeps track of your online level ("bravery") and how it stacks up with other players. Bravery, measured in "kiloSagans," levels up in increments of 10 as you win (or to a lesser extent, lose or spectate) online matches. It can never go down, but it takes increasingly more points to increase your Bravery as you go up in levels.