The Thrill of the Fight News

Note: For those looking to try out the beta, you can do so by right clicking the game in Steam, going to "Properties", clicking the "Betas" tab, and choosing the "beta" option from the dropdown.

February 20 hotfix: Made impact effect even less "sticky" and made reduced the opponent's blocking power (and fixed some bugs related to the opponent blocking).

February 19 hotfix: Made impact effect less "sticky" and made glove travel back to your controller when it releases from an impact instead of teleporting there.

Hello, everyone! I've got a massive update headed out to the beta branch now.

New crowd sounds have been added. These are positional ambisonic sound fields instead of just being stereo sounds fixed to your head or mono positional sounds that come from a single point. The crowd will also now react to impressive hits (from either you or your opponent).

The punch physics have been extensively reworked. The game should be able to read punch direction more accurately, making hitting weak points far more consistent. Weak points now require more precision to hit to make up for this. The new physics makes the opponent's guard a little more powerful than before. If your glove stays in contact with the opponent for too long and is at risk of getting stuck, it will be teleported straight to the location of your controller.

Punch impact feel should be improved a bit as well. Your glove will lock in place when it collides with the opponent instead of sliding or tumbling around. A dust particle effect will play when you impact the opponent with intensity relative to how hard you hit. The hit impact sound effects now scale upward more quickly in volume with the force of your hits. Blocks now play a different, louder sound for high force impacts.

Please read through the full list of changes below and let me know your thoughts in the feedback thread here or by emailing me at [email protected].

If you run into a game breaking issue, please report it to me and then switch over to the rollback branch to go to the previous beta update.

Thanks!

Update Notes:

• February 20: Glove no longer locks in its rotation when frozen.
  
• February 20: Glove no longer gets counted as blocked if it grazes the opponents guard.
  
• February 20: Fixed some bugs with block impact detection.
  
• February 20: The glove block impact check is now the same regardless of which glove size you pick.
  
• February 19: Made glove release from impact freeze more easily.
  
• February 19: Glove now travels back to your controller when it releases from an impact freeze instead of teleporting there.
  
• February 19: Changed "Distance" back to "Endurance" and added short descriptions to each difficulty level.
  
• February 19: Slightly reduced the max volume of the lighter block hit sound effect.
  
• Replaced all crowd sounds and added reactive cheering.
  
• Made a bunch of physics system customizations that may cause all kinds of bugs.
  
• Major improvements to impact direction accuracy for weak areas and punch type read-out.
  
• Weak areas now require more precision to hit to compensate for the increased impact direction accuracy.
  
• Your gloves will now be much more stable when you impact an opponent and will be much less likely to roll off the opponent or around the back of their head. This also provides a sort of hit-stop impact effect.
  
• Added a dust/air particle effect when your gloves collide with the opponent.
  
• Your glove will teleport to the location of its controller if the game thinks it may be stuck or about to be stuck.
  
• Improved hit detection and collision handling.
  
• The ref will now motion for you to resume fighting before you are teleported to the center of the ring.
  
• Improved velocity calculations for punches slower than 10m/s and hopefully reduced some of the high spikes that could occur with punches faster than 10m/s.
  
• Changed the camera shake effect to play even when you take very light hits and added a minimum volume level for the sound that plays when you take a hit.
  
• Boxing dummy and heavy bag mass stat is now called "Mass Credit" and shows what percentage of the maximum potential mass you achieved for the type of punch you threw.
  
• The night gym venue no longer uses the timer tones but now has bell sounds again.
  
• Fixed a bug that could allow the corner "continue" and "quit" triggers to continue to be activated if you activated them and step out of the corner circle.
  
• Opening a cut or punching where an open cut is on an opponent will cause a blood particle effect instead of a sweat particle effect.
  
• Reduced scroll speed of menus.
  
• Added a scroll note to the slider on the side of scrolling menus.
  
• Removed automatic glove size scaling and replaced with predefined glove size options.
  
• Added a new section to the configuration info display panel with information about the glove and controller setup.
  
• Fixed some visual issues that occurred when the opponent was teleported to the center of the ring.
  
• Added some new animations to the trainer.
  
• Replaced the X marks on the boxing dummy with lights that play a noise and change colors when you hit their corresponding weak points.
  
• Changed the volume curves of hit sound effects to get louder faster as impact force increases.
  
• Added two levels of block impact sound effects based on force.
  
• Drastically slowed down the opponent's punch speed in Easy mode but increased their dodge and block speed to be the same as in Normal mode.
  
• Reduced the opacity of the controller outlines.
  
• Increase damage of body hits, but lowered body weak point damage to compensate.
  
• Renamed "Endurance" to "Distance" and "Extreme" to "Outclassed". I didn't mean to push this change, so these might change again soon. ːsteamhappyː
  

Hello everyone! Time for another main branch update!

A quick note before the good stuff. The method for scrolling menus has changed in this update. Instead of having to bother with the scrollbar, you now poke and drag the menus as if they were a touch screen. This means you'll move your hand in the opposite direction that you have been in order to scroll, which may take some getting used to.

As always, I'd love to hear your feedback, either over on the Steam forums, on Reddit (where I'm u/fyian), or directly at my email address at [email protected]. The game is still in Early Access so anything and everything on the main branch is still subject to change based on your feedback. If you want to receive frequent (but less tested) updates with cutting-edge changes that I'm testing out, please opt into the game's beta branch through Steam.


Jump in the ring with two new boxers. Alexei Petrov, or "Melky" as he's more affectionately known, is a young blood from Russia here to train in Hazegood's Gym. New players will take him on as their first fight in front of a crowd. On the other end of the roster, the slippery Mateo Vega (or "Matty") is the new champion of the roster.


Instead of unlocking a difficulty level for a specific opponent by defeating the previous opponent on that difficulty, you now unlock difficulties for a specific opponent by defeating that opponent on an easier difficulty. For example, beating Joe on "Normal" will allow you to fight him on the "Endurance" difficulty level. "Challenger" has been renamed to "Endurance" and "Champion" has been renamed to "Extreme" to better suggest what to expect from those difficulties. Progress indicators have been added to show what difficulty levels you haven't beat yet. "Normal" and "Easy" are always available for unlocked opponents.


The AI will now throw punches at the player's body. The player has fuller arm blockboxes in order to better cover themselves up.


The third person camera now dynamically follows the action like a TV camera.


The opponent's fists no longer glide past your block once you've successfully blocked or parried them, but instead will stop at the point of impact.


The gym crowd has been updated with more varied visuals. (Note that there are more gray and white haired crowd members than intended. The hair color ratio will be tweaked with future updates.)


If you pin your opponent into a corner and clinch him for several seconds, the ref will end the match. This both prevents a clinching exploit and allows you to exit a match mid-round.


There are many other combat tweaks and bug fixes included in this update. Check out the previous beta news updates for the full list.


For those of you on the beta branch, here's what's different from the last beta update:

• The player now suffers a small damage penalty from being rocked.
  
• The desaturation/grayscale effect from being rocked is now much stronger than before.
  
• The visual and audio effects from being rocked reach full intensity sooner than before.
  
• The camera shake effect is now used for head hits that don't hit hard enough to cause the full white flash.
  
• The red flash for the body hit is now darker.
  
• Added blondes back to the crowd. (There are more gray and white haired crowd members than I intended. I'll fix that in a future update.)
  
• Fixed a bug causing contact with the opponents to constantly trigger the blocked hit sound and vibration.
  
• Fixed a bug allowing the opponent's hits to be blocked too early in their punch and without playing the vibration or audio trigger.
  
• Reverted the body damage changes. Body hits again have slightly reduced damage compared to head hits.
  
• Fixed some issues with Hojo's animations.
  

Note: For those looking to try out the beta, you can do so by right clicking the game in Steam, going to "Properties", clicking the "Betas" tab, and choosing the "beta" option from the dropdown.

Hello, everyone! I've got a new beta update headed out now.

First off, a quick warning: I changed the way menu scrolling works to function more like a big mobile phone. You now poke and drag the menu opposite of the direction you want to scroll. The old method required you to grab the scrollbar handle and drag in the direction you want to scroll, so now you have to move your hand the opposite way. This may take some getting used to, but it's as hard to use as the old system was.

The big change is that the difficulty level unlock system has been reworked to encourage players to start on Normal and work their way up. Instead of beating the previous opponent on a difficulty level to unlock that difficulty on the next opponent, you will now need to beat lower difficulty levels to unlock higher difficulty levels on the current opponent. Progress indicators have been added so you can see which difficulty levels you have already defeated and which are remaining. You still need to defeat an opponent to unlock the next one, but Easy and Normal difficulties will always be available for all unlocked opponents. The old Challenger and Champion modes have been renamed to Endurance and Extreme, but still function the same as they did previously.

If you had previously skipped Easy and Normal and played through the game on Challenger or Champion then you will have all of the same opponents unlocked, but you won't see the new Endurance or Extreme options until you beat the earlier difficulties. Once you unlock one of the higher difficulties you had already defeated, you should see that the progress indicator is already filled in.

I have added in a camera shake effect when you land a high force hit that scales with how hard your hit landed. I'm undecided if I like this effect, so please let me know how you feel about it. Removed on Jan 15

Please read through the full list of changes below and let me know your thoughts in the feedback thread here or by emailing me at [email protected].

If you run into a game breaking issue, please report it to me and then switch over to the rollback branch to go to the previous beta update.

Thanks!


Update Notes:

• The method for unlocking difficulty levels has been reworked. Instead of defeating the previous opponent at a certain difficulty to unlock the next at that difficulty, you now unlock the next difficulty by beating the current opponent on an easier difficulty. This requires you to beat an opponent on Normal to be able to choose Endurance mode, for example. Existing players may see some weird results if they had skipped difficulty levels.
  
• Renamed "Challenger" difficulty to "Endurance" and "Champion" difficulty to "Extreme" to better convey what to expect from those difficulty levels.
  
• Menu scrolling now works like a touch screen would instead of by trying to drag a scroll bar handle. This may take some getting used to if you're accustomed to the old method.
  
• Players will get a camera shake effect when they land a hard hit, depending on how hard their hit was. I'm undecided if I like this or not, so please let me know how you feel about this. Removed on Jan 15
• Further improvements to the crowd visuals. Female audience members are back!
  
• Removed the damage reduction applied to body shots and reduced the damage from the body weak points to compensate.
  
• Maximum mass bonus reduced to 5%.
  
• Fixed a bug that was causing the Zombie to always be defeated in one punch.
  
• Added customization slider to set max knockdowns allowed per round.
  
• Added a customization slider to choose the opponent's tendency to throw head or body punches.
  
• Made some changes that will hopefully reduce the chance that your glove gets stuck between the opponent's head and body.
  
• Opponents are now more willing to throw uppercuts, but they suck at hitting your head and will probably hit your body instead.
  
• Reduced and repositioned the player's body hurtboxes to remove some situations where the opponent was able to hit you even though you were guarding your body.
  
• Slightly improved the AI's ability to tell if a target they want to swing at is blocked.
  
• Removed some extra shoulder blockboxes that I didn't mean to leave in from the last patch. This may make blocking your head slightly harder as compared to the last patch.
  
• The info panel to the right of the main menu now shows you your current play area size, compared to the required size. It also shows you what multiplier the auto-adjustment system currently has you set to.
  
• Fixed a bug where the play space rectangle would draw on top of the menu from certain viewing angles.
  

Note: For those looking to try out the beta, you can do so by right clicking the game in Steam, going to "Properties", clicking the "Betas" tab, and choosing the "beta" option from the dropdown.

Hello, everyone!

I've got a new beta update headed out now, with a big addition that players have been requesting for a very long time: body shots from opponents!

Along with that, I've updated the way the players arms are calculated for blocking to add in a full upper arm with a bit of shoulder position control. This should make blocking easier and more reliable, but this is counteracted by the opponent's ability to swing for your body.

I've also made some configuration changes to the build going out with this update to try to eliminate a crash some users are experiencing. This may affect performance, so please let me know if you notice any problems with that (and if you were having crashes that are now gone!).

Please read through the release notes below. Keep in mind that this is a beta branch, and many of these things are meant to be further tested and refined.

Please let me know your thoughts in the feedback thread here or by emailing me at [email protected].

If you run into a game breaking issue, please report it to me and then switch over to the rollback branch to go to the previous beta update.

Thanks!


Update Notes:

• The AI will now swing at the player's body
  
• The player now has upper arms (full arms from hand to shoulder). The old method I was using for handling shoulder blocking is now gone, and the game now attempts to determine when you're raising your shoulder based on your hand position.
  
• The AI's swings will now stop at the point of impact when blocked instead of relying on the physics system to prevent their movement. This should prevent cases where you had a valid block, but the opponent appeared to hit you anyway.
  
• Smoothed out punch retrieval animation transitions to be less jarring.
  
• Updated the appearance of the crowd to provide more variety and avoid the requirement of all the audience members that looked identical also needing to play their animations at the same time. This is still a work in progress. Female crowd models have been removed for now, but will also get their own appearance revisions and be added again in the future.
  
• Changed build properties to try to eliminate a common cause of crashes people are experiencing. This may negatively impact performance.
  
• Made a change in the way direction is determined for weak point hits to try to have hooks to the chin read out better. This won't make much of a difference, but I hope to find a better solution soon.
  
• Improved the look of Matty's hair
  
• Lowered dynamic camera's centering point to show more of the boxers' bodies