So far, the beta is still on track to be released tomorrow. Sonic is now completely finished and all of the coders are now working on glitch fixing. Remember that this is a public BETA, which means the point is to fix glitches and work on character balancing. We don’t expect to fix all of the glitches before the public beta, but it’s not completely necessary to do so (you guys can help us with all of that).

We have received a lot of feedback about Mario’s balancing from demo 0.8, which is the feedback I personally like to hear the most. His Up B was criticized for being too overpowered and we fixed it in this demo. I didn’t spend much time balancing the damaging power of each attack yet, so a lot of feedback would be appreciated.

Recently, there haven’t been any new spriters or coders joining the project and the current workers are doing less and less work, so we decided that we are going to dramatically cut the demo 0.9 checklist. In other words, we’re not adding any more features or game mechanics to this demo. We’ll add the characters that have strips or are currently being stripped, but we won’t accept new characters for this demo.

The coders will finish up what they are working on and go into error/glitch fixing mode to make sure that everything works the way it is supposed to.

The spriters need to finish up the characters that are missing 1 or 2 attacks so they can be coded in (one character that is already coded in is missing sprites for the Up B and Side B attacks).

Stage Makers (if there are any) can continue working on stages for future demos or resize some of the stages that we already have (since some of them are a little too big, as seen  in demo 0.8).

If we can just push through this final bit, we can have demo 0.9 out in no time, and hopefully get some more helpers for demo 1.

One of my favorite new additions to the game is the new Camera that Gottfried coded. In demo 0.8, the camera followed the player such that the character was always in the middle of the screen. The new camera is much more dynamic. It still follows the player, but it centers between all of the characters that are in the match. To get a good example of what this means, look at the screenshot posted in the previous post. See how the cpu is to the right and the player is to the left while the camera is centered between the two?

The new camera, aside from looking cool, also serves a practical purpose. It allows you to see the enemies around you much more easily. Before, if they were just offscreen, you couldn’t see what they were doing (were they running away or charging in for an attack? BIG difference…) Now, since the camera tries its best to fit all of the players on the screen (without that annoying zooming), you don’t have to wonder about that anymore.

The player’s charatcer will never leave the screen, though, so rest assured. If the cpu is far to the player’s right and the player starts running to the left, the camera will be dragged along with the player. When cpus are really spread out, you can always look on the touch screen to see the stage’s mini-map. The map has little icons that show exactly where every player is at all times (examples of the map are in the Screenshots tab at the top of the blog).

Also, the camera does not teleport immediately to where it wants to go. So, when the player dies, the camera scrolls from the player’s death location to his spawn position. It doesn’t really serve a practical purpose, but it looks awesome and you can see the rest of the battlefield fly by as the camera snaps into position.

Also, along with Gottfried’s new battle camera, the camera code is much more manageable. It is now so much easier to drag the camera to any position at any time. What opportunities does this feature open up? See if you can think of any in the comments ;D