So yeah, to those who want to get to the point, I will not be posting any new fighter news. As I said on Twitter, I was gonna impulse-reveal a fighter who was not even in the game at all, just to please those fans who are getting understandably impatient with me and the lack of content news. I've said this many times, but I should have waited much longer before making development updates, and the existence itself of this project, public at all, but that's in hindsight now.

However, are there actual updates to talk about? Absolutely!!

I forget if I mentioned this off-hand, but the shield is mostly complete: it's coloured now according to what player number you are, AND now it shrinks. And yes, the shield break works too! I've also implemented the formula for stun time after a shield break, so Mario (and anyone else) will exit shield stun at the right timing. All I need to do now is allow it to take damage from attacks (when I finally get off my fat butt and work on implementing hitboxes lol) and be able to shift it around using your left analog stick.

Next up? ITEM GET. I've started working on adding items to gameplay. Right now, it's very rudimentary, but you can touch a Super Mushroom and grow, and after the correct amount of time, reverting back to normal form? WORKS! I had a few glitches I fixed while Giant, such as wall collisions no longer working and turning shrinking you back (the latter was due to my TurnRun and Turn being coded wrong, resetting your scale to 1 rather than current scale. This is because symmetric fighters like Mario use negative Trans scaling for mirroring their animations, otherwise I've no damn clue how to flip the actual clip data...). My next two items will be Metal Box and Poison Mushroom!

Next, I finished importing Mario's Ultimate animation bank into the game. Only his item use animations remained, so I did those. Right now, only a few animations didn't make the cut because I'm remaking entirely new ones from scratch.

Wait3, AttackDash, AttackAirF, LandingAirF, SpecialS/AirS, Final Smash and Win2/Win2Wait are going to be entirely new animations. You've seen AttackDash though, but I want to add finger animations during the dive.

Wait3 is going to become two giddy hops (like Mario is happy and a good jumper lol). AttackAirF (forward air attack) and landing animation will be a new move based on Mario's 64 forward air. SpecialS is usually Cape, right? Not now. It's now his DOWN special, aligning better with moves like Counter, and other moves that reflect projectiles like Mario's Cape. The new Side Special will be a new move called Cappy Throw. I may make it a very simple attack, a multi-hit one, or even a command grab, I'm not 100% sure yet. Maybe a command grab would work best, due to how Cappy works in Odyssey? His Final Smash is a new cinematic one called Mega Mario, based on the New Super Mario Bros. game! Finally, Mario's fire hand in Wait2 will now be a jump, followed by a double, spinning jump and finishes with him twirling his cap!

I reworked the entire fighters' collider system, now being a generic object that Fighters can inherit from, in doing so, I fixed a small bug in my wall collisions, where sometimes Mario would go in his wall hit state while facing a wall in the opposite direction. Yeah, hitting a non-existent wall lol, and a similar one with ceilings where after hitting a ceiling and immediately jumping again, the controller would jump, but force Mario in his ceiling hit animation instead of the jump one. All around good things lol.

Next up in my gameplay updates list, I want to implement landing lag properly. Right now, you can't act out of any landing animation at all, light, heavy OR aerial. This is because lag endings aren't programmed yet. lol. Also I want to fix that bloody annoying downward slope jump "skip" I keep getting, where the fighter will fall briefly and then land when going steeper/into downward slopes. Almost like that little "peak" is bugged. Sometimes it works, other times it won't. It's not consistent at all.

Oh, I almost forgot. I added most Downed options as well. Right now when laying on the ground, you can Stand, roll left and right, wait or even attack! I didn't implement downdamage or downeat yet, for obvious reasons. I temporarily disabled shieldstun to implement this, then added it back afterward. lol.

So yeah, I still have a lot of work to do, it's obvious. But I'm amazed I was able to get this far at all. With a virtually-glitchless fighter system that's global, portable to any fighter concept, etc. I keep being asked "why is it taking so long to make Mario / just one single fighter??" Well, as I mentioned, I'm planning ahead to the rest of my cast. Mario is just laying down the foundation, and it's gonna be pretty much plug'n'play for the other fighters, with some tweaks of course!

That's all for today, sorry for the long post, but I hope to have more soon!

~TF