We've been putting a lot of effot into improving the game this year as Early Access rolls on. We released about 20 patches this year! We'll recap some highlights, then share some of our plans for 2024. 2023 Recap All year long, we have been revamping the game's visuals. We still have a ways to go on this front, but every character now has work in progress sprites hand-drawn by our illustrator Alan McMillian, and they're at a higher level of detail and quality than our first art update in January.
We also implemented a new HUD and conversation UI, clickable mouse controls, a new main menu, and a few new stages (Marv's, Lewis's, and the training stage). Attacks now have hitstop and hitspark effects. Side switches and chip damage look a lot more natural than they did at launch, too. On the audio front, we have 3 new music tracks (Lewis theme by DankPasta2099, options menu and character select themes by Nabil Anthony) and a new set of announcer lines recorded by Joe Dawson. We also made some adjustments to the game balance. Paul was taken down a peg by reducing the chip on his Firepaul, and Billy was made competitively viable by a series of buffs. Noel got Vine Armor to make her vine set safer, Nick's Cheesy Dust Loop was made more consistent and given an actual animation. The online has gotten a lot of improvements and new features. You can play timed variants or select a random character online now. The lobbies have more quality of life options now, and matches are now listed on the Steam's more robust lobby system instead of our matchmaking VPS. Training mode got some new functionality like "reset to corner," and you can now watch saved replays of your multiplayer matches. We've made some efforts to improve the new player experience by making a more forgiving AI on Easy and Normal and laying the ground work for a hint system. We've also started setting up text for localization, but there's not much to show there yet. Load times got a little faster thanks to the game now packing everything into atlases, and you can now carry your progress across different devices (and your Steam Deck!) because the game now supports the Steam Cloud. Finally, the game is now compatible with a wider selection of controllers thanks in part to some extensive testing by community member Sente. 2024 Goals If all goes well we hope to continue development in 2024 at the same pace as 2023. In no particular order, here are some of the goals we're going to work on: Continue developing character animations toward full color finished sprites and swappable palettes:
Begin testing one or two of these new characters, perhaps with placeholder art at first:
Revamp the menus. Here's a preview of our upcoming tutorial menu redesign:
Introduce new character stages:
Implement new ending animatics (which are partially done, just not implemented:
Start prototyping an enhanced survival mode with roguelike elements:
Localize more game text into more languages:
As a disclaimer, we have a very small team with one programmer, one artist and no publisher money, so we may or may not make as much progress as we'd like toward these goals. Still, we expect to be on track to leave Early Access by 2025 or so. If you want to support our continued work on the game, one great way to do that is to join our Patreon. * * * Finally, we're announcing that the price of Mega Knockdown will go down to $9.99 USD or regional equivalent after the Steam Winter sale is over. Our goal with this price reduction is to lower the barrier of entry to playing the game in order to grow our community of players. It's also to give players from certain South American/Middle Eastern countries a little bit of a break, as they have been seeing huge price increases all over Steam thanks to changes in Valve's regional pricing policies. Thanks for your continued support!