This patch allows players to earn rewards while enjoying their preferred game mode(s), with or without the pressure of human competition. It also aims to promote quickplay usage to increase the likelihood of finding player opponents.

NPC Collecting

• Added optional NPCs (CPUs) to quickplay (explained further below). NPCs vary in playstyle, difficulty, rarity, and appearance. NPC opponents are indicated with "(npc)" next to their name.
• (This means that players can now earn peanuts and progress on daily and weekly tasks even if there aren't any other players to match with).
• There are currently 9 playstyle traits that NPCs can have. Some only appear at higher difficulty levels.
• The difficulty level of NPCs that you match against will increase/decrease as you win/lose matches.
• Higher rarity NPCs start the match with upgrades. Defeating these NPCs will earn you extra peanuts. (Note that rarity is separate from difficulty level).
• NPCs have unique names and appearances. Added several hairstyles and face accessories that NPCs can wear.
• If you like playing against a specific NPC, you can save them and spar against them whenever you want.

Quickplay Matchmaking

• There are now 3 matchmaking modes: Standard, Player-only, and CPU-only.
• Standard is the recommended mode. It will prioritize matching you with other players, but will fall back to CPUs when a quality match cannot be found. (The other two modes are self-explanatory).
• You can now queue for any/all of the 3 game modes (Classic, Arena, and Hybrid), and earn rewards for all 3. You can queue for multiple modes simultaneously, and you will match against opponents who have at least one mode in common with you.
• You can now "snooze" player opponents to avoid matching against them for the remainder of your session.
• Scaled peanut values by 10x. All accounts have had their peanut balance increased by 10x, all prices are 10x, and rewards have been increased 10x, except for the following:
• The peanut reward for match completion is now based on time played, rather than a fixed amount per match. Kudos are now worth 5 peanuts. These tweaks should reduce pressure to only queue for the most "optimal" (i.e. the quickest) mode, and should discourage certain behaviors such as win trading.
• Note that NPC matches will reward slightly fewer peanuts than similar-length PvP matches, to make up for the consistency and speed of the CPU-only queue (and to encourage PvP!).

CPU AI

• There are now 10 difficulty levels, 0 through 9. (Previously there were 7).
• Improved CPU AI's ability to traverse gaps in non-standard stage layouts.
• Made various other minor improvements to CPU AI.

Gameplay

• Removed hidden exploit that allowed players to perform dash attacks directly out of shield and out of jab.

UI/UX

• On/off toggle menu items are now represented with filled/empty boxes.

Bugs

• Fixed bug causing occasional replay descyncs on stages with bumpers.

This patch significantly improves the CPUs. They should now challenge the majority of players and should legitimately help dedicated players improve at the game. Given how difficult it can be to find real people to play against I think this is pretty important! The new AI will also allow me to add some new features I'm pretty excited about... more on that soon. Please leave feedback on the new CPUs via any of the usual channels. Thanks!

CPU AI

• There are now 7 CPU difficulty levels, up from 4. The new difficulty levels are Dummy, Very Easy, Easy, Medium, Hard, Very Hard, and Extreme.
• Significantly improved all aspects of CPU AI. Note that some of these improvements are only relevant at higher difficulty levels.
  • Offense: Improved attack selection, timing, combo routes, and edgeguarding.
  • Defense: Improved ability to defend against opponent attacks and projectiles. Added the ability to escape aerial juggles, use directional influence, and floor tech.
  • Neutral: Higher level bots can bait out attacks, whiff punish, and mix up their approaches.
  • Improved awareness of gear piece-specific strategies and abilities.
  • Advanced techniques: Higher level bots now incorporate dash dancing, wavedashing, wavelanding, shield dropping, fastfalling, and more.
  • Improved awareness of common scenarios such as shield pressure and jab mixups.
  • Improved stage positioning and awareness.
  • Higher level CPUs are generally more resistant to "cheese" strategies, encouraging honest gameplay that will help players improve.

Tutorial / Story Missions

• Life Lessons mission: Tweaked the star requirements and the number of opponent lives (due to the improved CPU AI). Also tweaked the stage's platform placement.
• In platformer missions, players now have 3/1 lives on veteran/expert difficulties (up from 5/3 lives). This is a reversion of the increase from patch 0.20.5.
• Expert difficulty story missions are now locked until the mission is completed on any other difficulty.
• Added shortcuts from the pause menu to restart the current mission at a different difficulty level.
• Targets that require a specific attack type are now red + yellow, to differentiate them from "regular" targets.
• Added other minor QoL changes to the Intro Tutorial and Jim's Message mission.

Bugs

• Fixed rare bug where matchmaker could continue searching for a match while already in a quickplay match.
• Fixed issue where equipping Television would cause the Life Lessons cutscene to play out incorrectly.

Art

• Added shading to the majority of character sprites. This includes gear pieces, respawn platforms, and avatar faces.
• Redrew and added depth to stage tiles to give them a 3-dimensional appearance.
• Tweaked a few animations, including some Flame Cannon animations and Chakram back aerial attack.
• Re-drew Oleg. His eyes and mouth are now subtley animated during certain actions to give him a more lively feel.

Cosmetics

• Added shield skins. Currently there are two: Beach Ball and Smiley, each with their own set of unlockable color palettes.

Flame Cannon

• Neutral Air: Added 5 frames of aerial endlag. (Its abnormally low aerial endlag was something of an oversight).
• Neutral Air: Increased size of strong hitbox relative to the weak hitbox.

Bugs

• Fixed bug where shield break hitstun was reduced when a player's shield was broken immediately after performing a self-detonate with warp mine.

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Wrecking Ball

• Added a new primary weapon, "Wrecking Ball". The wrecking ball is a mechanized flail attachment propelled by advanced magnet tech. It excels at mid-range combat and can be thrown to finish off opponents from afar.
• Wrecking ball is automatically unlocked online for Gear Pack owners, otherwise it can be unlocked for online use for 250 peanuts.

Cosmetics

• Added 3 wrecking ball skins: Basketball, Tomato, and Eyeball.
• Default wrecking ball skin palettes: Iron (default), Poison-tipped, Bloodied, Gold-coated.
• Basketball palettes: Classic (default), Red, Teal, Lights Out, Showboat, Up-tempo, Intangibles, Inner Dog, World Champs, MVP.
• Tomato palettes: Tomato (default), Tomatillo, Rotten, Sunkissed, Heirloom, Caspain Pink, Blueberry, Grape.
• Eyeball palettes: Blue (default), Brown, Green, Grey, Lavender, Red, Sickly, Alien, Golden.

Arena Mode

• Added Wrecking Ball arena upgrade: "Big Ball" (Your wrecking ball projectile is larger and deals more damage).
• Lightning Grease: there is now has a minimum delay between applications of jolt. This prevents multi-hit moves from applying multiple stacks of jolt.

UX/UI

• Added "Stronger Opponents" setting. Turning this setting on will remove the skill cap for quickplay matchmaking for your account, allowing you to match with stronger opponents.
• The "Find New Opponent" option after a quickplay match now allows you to change your loadout before queueing for your next match.

Bugs

• Fixed an issue where players could be locked out from grabbing the ledge for too long after being hit by a weak attack.
• Fixed bug where a thrown Warp Mine could permanently freeze mid-air if the mine's owner was hit or KO'd mid-teleport.
• Fixed visual glitch where quad staff skin layers were misaligned.
• Fixed bug where pressing the platform drop button while not on a platform mid-turn could cause your character to temporarily get stuck in place.
• Fixed issue where the Advanced Tutorial demonstration of floor teching wasn't working.

This patch aims to increase game speed and pacing by increasing aerial mobility, increasing attack speed, and reducing knockback scaling on many attacks to make them more usable as setup tools for combos and knockouts. Shoutouts to the folks in the Discord who helped test these changes.

General Gameplay

• Significantly increased fast fall speeds.
• Increased max air speed and acceleration.
• Suits now gain more speed from dash attacking.
• Buffering an air dodge with no direction input will now cause you to wavedash down instead of airdodging in place.

UX/UI:

• Increased volume of "match found" sound effect.
• Escape now must be held for 2 seconds to exit fullscreen. This allows keyboard users to use esc as back button without accidentally exiting full screen.
• You can now bind 3 buttons/keys to a single input, up from 2.
• Keyboard users can now bind a key to use as a dedicated start button, as an alternative to the default keys.

Gear Pieces

Quad Staff

• Slightly reduced length of bladed section of staff. This means most attacks had their range slightly reduced (unless otherwise specified).
• Jab: -1f start lag.
• Up tilt: -1f active frames, -1f end lag. Reduced knockback scaling on strong hitbox.
• Forward tilt: -1f start lag, -1f end lag.
• Down tilt: -1f end lag. Increased size of inner hitbox.
• Dash attack: -1f start lag, -3f end lag. Range unaffected.
• Up strong: -1f start lag, -1f end lag.
• Forward strong: -4f end lag.
• Down strong: -1f start lag, -1f end lag.
• Neutral air: -1f end lag, -1f landing lag. Range unaffected.
• Up air: -2f active frames, -2f end lag.
• Forward air: -1f start lag. Range minimally affected.
• Down air: -1f start lag, -1f end lag. Reduced knockback scaling.
• Back air: -1f active frames, -2f end lag. Reduced knockback scaling on tip hitbox.

Flame Cannon

• Up tilt: -1f start lag, -1f active frames, -1f end lag. Reduced knockback scaling.
• Forward tilt: -1f start lag, -2f end lag.
• Down tilt: -1f start lag, -1f active frames, -2f end lag.
• Dash attack: -1f start lag, -1f end lag.
• Up strong: -2f start lag, -1f end lag. Slightly reduced hitbox size.
• Forward strong: -2f start lag, -2f end lag. Slightly reduced hitbox size.
• Down strong: -1f start lag, -2f between active frames.
• Neutral air: -2f start lag.
• Up air: -1f start lag.
• Forward air: -1f start lag, -1f end lag. Reduced knockback scaling of final hit.
• Down air: -1f start lag, -1f landing lag.
• Back air: -1f start lag.

Chakram

• Up tilt: -1f start lag, -1f active frames, -1f end lag. Reduced knockback scaling.
• Forward tilt: -2f start lag, -3f end lag.
• Down tilt: -2f active frames, -2f end lag. Reduced knockback scaling and increased knockback angle.
• Dash attack: -1f start lag, -3f end lag.
• Up strong: -3f active frames, -4f end lag.
• Forward strong: -3f active frames, -3f end lag.
• Down strong: -2f between active frames. Reduced damage from 13 to 12.
• Neutral air: -2f start lag, -1f active frames, -2f end lag. Slightly reduced range.
• Up air: -1f start lag, -1f landing lag.
• Forward air: -2f start lag, -1f end lag.
• Down air: -1f start lag, -1f end lag, -1f landing lag. Reduced range.
• Back air: -1f active frames, -1f end lag, -1f landing lag. Reduced range.

Pincers

• Up tilt: -1f start lag, -1f active frames, -2f end lag. Reduced knockback scaling.
• Forward tilt: -1f start lag, -2f active frames, -2f end lag.
• Down tilt: -1f start lag, -1f end lag. Reduced knockback scaling.
• Dash attack: -1f start lag, -1f end lag.
• Up strong: -2f start lag, -1f end lag.
• Forward strong: -2f start lag, -3f end lag.
• Down strong: -1f start lag, -1f end lag
• Neutral air: -1f active frames, -2f end lag.
• Up air: -1f start lag, -1f landing lag.
• Forward air: -1f start lag, -1f landing lag.
• Down air: -1f start lag, -1f landing lag. Reduced knockback scaling.
• Back air: -1f start lag, -1f landing lag.

Warp mine

• Slightly reduced base knockback of explosion and reduced damage from 12 -> 10.
• Endlag of self detonate now scales with percent.
• Reduced start lag of placing mine (neutral special) by 1f. Reduced end lag of strong mine toss by 1f.
• Your mine now freezes in place when you initiate a teleport, making it more consistent to use tosses (especially strong tosses) for recovery.

Parasol

• Reduced dive damage from 10 -> 8.

Jet boots

• Reduced spin attack start lag by 2f, reduced end lag by 1f.

Suits

• Oleg, Skelebob, Television: Slightly increased ground speed.
• Oleg: Slightly decreased weight (knockback resistance).
• Space suit: Slightly increased gravity and reduced jump height. Decreased shield size.
• TV: Increased shield size.
• Skelebob: Decreased instakill threshold by ~5%.
• Cloak: Added +2f end lag on whiffed counters, reduced length of active counter hitbox by 1f.

Secondaries

• Reduced start lag of all secondaries by 1f.
• Plunger: Reduced knockback scaling on up throw and forward throw.
• Spiked fist: reduced end lag by 1f. Reduced knockback scaling.
• Harpoon: Reduced end lag on whiff by 5f. Increased knockback scaling and decreased angles of down throw and back throw (this makes them more powerful kill throws). Reduced knockback scaling of up throw.

Controls

• Added support for playing with a mouse.
• Added a brief controls onboarding questionnaire to help set up new players with a default control layout that fits their playstyle.
• Changed the default keyboard controls based on player feedback. Note that this may mess up your existing keyboard binds and profiles. Please ensure they are correct and re-save any profiles. for the inconvenience!

UI/UX

• Redesigned loadout menus to be less overwhelming.
• Altered UI to be easier to navigate with mouse.
• Secondary menu selection (used to change color palettes) is now bound to [e]/grab instead of [j]/jump.
• To reduce new player confusion, Enter (in addition to Space) can now be used to select menu items. Control now acts as a "start" button for keyboard users.
• Replaced various floating UI prompts with new menu items to reduce clutter.

Gameplay

• When tap jump is on it is now possible to perform upward light and strong attacks out of jump squat.
• Added a 2-frame leniency window for directional light and strong attacks in cases where the direction is pressed after the attack input.
• It is now possible to wall jump with tap jump.
• Tap-jumped air jumps are now delayed by 3 frames to allow players to perform upward aerial attacks without jumping.

Tutorial

• Tweaked tutorial to better accommodate tap jump users.

Bugs

• Fixed bug where game would crash when joining a quickplay match directly from watching a replay.
• Fixed bug where progress could not be made in the Directional Influence tutorial.

Steam Early Access

• Counterpick Labs is now out (for free) on Steam Early Access! The web and Steam versions of the game remain equivalent, with cross-play, cross-progression, and account linking.
• The banana stand is now open on Steam and has been re-opened on web. Thanks for your support!

Story Missions

• Added a new single player mode: Story Missions. Learn about Jim and his fellow interns in the first three missions of Season 1: Intern Drama. New Story Missions will be released periodically.
• As with all offline modes, you can play Story Missions while queueing for quickplay.

Dash Attacks

• Added dash attacks for all primary weapons.
• With auto dash attack turned on, input a dash attack by pressing light attack while running. You can disable auto dash attacks in the controls menu.
• You can also dash attack by pressing any two attack buttons (light attack, strong attack, grab) simultaneously.

UI/UX

• Added a Roadmap under Main Menu > Extras.
• Reorganized menu structure to hopefully be less overwhelming for new players.
• In modes where players have infinite lives, added a new infinite hearts icon (previously 3 hearts were shown).
• Added a "quit" button to main menu for Steam version.

General Gameplay

• Slightly increased overall knockback. Knockback from most attacks is now slightly higher at the start of the knockback trajectory. This is intended to give hits more impact and make knockback feel less floaty.
• Slightly to moderately increased base knockback of most tilt attacks (directional light attacks).

Balance

Televisioin

• Instant transmission (teleport) no longer inflicts self damage.

Space Suit

• Slightly increased fall speed.

Skelebob

• Slightly increased fall speed and ground speed.
• (Visual only) Made Skelebob shorter.
• Slightly reduced jump height.

Oleg

• Slightly increased fall speed.

Warp mine

• Self-detonate no longer sends you into knockdown/tumble and has set endlag regardless of percent. Distance knocked back still scales with percent.

Chakram

• Increased base knockback of down light, forward light (close hitbox only) and forward air (close hitbox only).
• Forward light: Reduced endlag by 3f.
• Up air: slightly decreased knockback scaling.

Cannon

• Increased base knockback of forward light.
• Forward and up strong: Reduced start and end lag by 1f, and slightly decreased size of uncharged hurtbox.
• Down strong: Reduced start lag by 1f.
• Up air: Reduced start lag by 1f.
• Forward air: First and second hitboxes are lower. This is intended to reduce instances of whiffing slightly over your opponent's head.

Pincers

• Increased base knock back of forward light, down light, up light, and forward air.
• Forward strong: Reduced end lag by 2f.

Quad Staff

• Increased base knockback of up light, forward light, down light.
• Up light: Slightly reduced range and reduced end lag by 3 frames.
• Forward strong: Increased endlag by 2 frames.

Performance

• Optimized rendering of various graphical elements. This should hopefully address rare crashes experienced by a few individuals.

Arena Upgrades

• Removed "Shield Dmg Up", "Reaper" (heal on KO), and "Regenerate" (heal while shielding) from the upgrade pool.
• These upgrades consistently felt unimpactful.

Bugs

• Fixed bug where it was impossible to interrupt Jet Boot hover with aerial Spiked Fist.
• Fixed glitch where attempting to input a shield drop with a gadget input while not on a platform would cause you to momentarily drop your shield.
• Freezing Grease: fixed glitch where oleg wouldn't get unfrozen properly if frozen while charging a strong attack with super armor.
• Fixed UI bug where arrows were sometimes difficult to click on horizontal value selector menu items.

Counterpick Labs is an upcoming free platform fighter where you mix and match quirky weapons and gadgets to build your character. Come chat with the developer in Discord :) https://discord.com/invite/z9jGz6f77H

Counterpick Labs is an upcoming FREE platform fighter where you mix and match quirky weapons and gadgets to build your character. Come chat with the developer in Discord :) https://discord.com/invite/z9jGz6f77H

Hi folks! I forgot to post these one-by-one but here some highlights from updates to the demo I've made over the past ~week. Please note that I'll now be focusing on content + final Steam integration work for the upcoming Early Access launch on July 12th, so there won't be any significant updates to the demo until then. Account Linking

• Account linking between Steam and web is now available! Navigate to the Settings menu in-game to get started.
• If it wasn't clear to anyone, Steam demo progress (and web progress, if you link your accounts) will carry over to the Early Access launch.

• Added pausing to offline modes (bot matches and local multiplayer matches). From the pause menu you can resume, exit, and restart your match.
• When a player exits a private lobby match, the lobby will no longer automatically disband. Instead, both players will be sent back to the loadout screen.
• Simplified the post-quickplay menu. This is intended to reduce incidences of players accidentally searching for a new opponent when they intended to rematch.
• The color swatches in the loadout menu are now clickable, and will take you directly to the corresponding color palette menu.

• The shield section of the tutorial is now easier.
• Added back the "Quick Start" tutorial module.

• Added support for PowerA Switch Pro-style wired controllers. (If you have a third-party controller that doesn't work properly, please reach out!)
• Increased the default deadzone value for the right control stick to accommodate controllers with high default resting values.

Hi folks! The demo for Counterpick Labs is now available! Grab a friend to play online in a private lobby, or try sparring against a bot :) Note that the full game will be also be free-to-play. The goal of this demo is to gather feedback and give players a taste of what's to come. Also - remember to add Counterpick Labs to your wishlist to be notified on the game's full release!