November Update: THE RUSH

Nick Beardguy - New Moves and Rebalance

• Nick's Faith Smasher is now a command throw with a unique animation. It does 350 damage, pushes 1 square, and can't be teched except by another Faith Smasher. It will still lose to the Big Billy Buster.
• Nick already had a good back throw, but this will give him an option to open up opponents up close, which is where he wants to be. There's now a little interesting tension here between options, where he might have to make a choice between screen position and an untechable throw attempt.
• Nick's forward throw now pushes one space.
• In general I have been trying to get rid of the oki situation where a player can repeatedly threaten N+Throw. Nick was the last character to have this option, but I think the change to Faith Smasher was good compensation.
• Nick has a new passive ability called Dew Rush. Dew Rush moves him forward during his A and B combos.
• Dew Rush helps Nick keep up the pressure after landing a hit and stay in the opponent's face. Near the corner, it helps him set up his Cheesy Dust Loops more often. (Previously, only his A combo did this.) This will also give him more chances to threaten his new command grab.
• Nick's HP reduced (1550->1500)
• Nick's Counter Hit damage bonus reduced (50->25)
• Nick's Counter Hit damage bonus can now trigger on an air to ground hit.
• Nick's Cheesy Dust Loop damage bonus reduced (250->225)
• Because Nick previously had so few options in neutral or pressure, he relied on these passive perks to hang with the other characters, and even then he was considered low tier. He may not need that much of a handicap now, so we're dialing some of his stats back toward the baseline.

Chinese Localization

• We have officially marked the game as supporting Simplified Chinese. Thanks to Warlocs for their help with translation so far (they also did our Japanese localization).

New Animations and Visual Improvements

• Billy's stage has a new version with more color and detail. We're still working on it, but this is the next iteration.
• Marv and Jayne now have idle animations.
• Marv now has more animation while Jayne is attacking.
• Nick's back throw has a new animation and enhanced hit effects.
• Nils now has an idle animation, but when he has full charge, he will still appear crouching as before.
• Billy's stomp has new VFX and hair animations. It now has a little less hitstop.
• Nick's air throw now has a new grab sprite.
• Paul's B attack has a little smearing effect now.
• Touched up Marv sprites to remove artifacting and layer misalignment
• The camera in Strife Mode should now be more consistently capturing the action.

New Default Keyboard Layout

• First of all, this change has reset your custom controller and keyboard bindings. You will have to redo those (sorry).
• The new layout adds new default key bindings: U,I,O for light, medium and salty attacks, J for block, K for throw. This should be familiar to anybody who has played a modern fighter like Street Fighter 6 on keyboard. The old bindings to 1,2,3,Q,E haven't moved, so if you're used to those you won't have to change anything.
• "F" is now a select button on player 1 side. You can still press any attack button to select an option in menus.
• This change does create a trade-off: the default keyboard bindings for player 2 have moved to the numpad. If you are playing local versus on a shared keyboard and want to use the old layout, just go to Options and set that up in the rebinding menu.
• From my conversations with people, there are a lot of different opinions on what feels like a "natural" keyboard layout. In the future I would like to set up a couple pre-set keyboard layouts you can switch from, so you can save some setting your keys.

System Changes

• There is now an option "autoplay" your replays in the replays viewer (when one replay finishes, the next one in the list plays automatically). This is mostly a debug feature, but you may find it fun to use!
• Adjusted many anti air timings, especially for Billy
• Billy armor can no longer reduce incoming damage below 25.
• Adjusted hit timings of far range Maria spin. It should now do full damage consistently.
• Marv and Jayne are now on fully different sprites most of the time. This should not affect anything visually, but it may improve performance/reduce RAM usage.
• Adjusted the sorting order of Jayne and other "summon" type effects for consistency

Soundtrack Update

• The recently added winner/loser themes ('THE RUSH' and 'ON THE EDGE') have been added to the Official Soundtrack on Steam.

Bug Fixes

• When Noel gets a combo after a whiffed jA into vine hit, she now correctly does 600 total damage instead of 700. (Yes, you can combo off a whiffed jA in the corner with vine up)
• Maria jC is now correctly -10 and max range instead of -20
• Nick's Counter Hit damage bonus will no longer trigger against a back jump or whiffed throw.
• Fixed an issue causing Jayne's colors to flicker sometimes
• Fixed the logic of when the AI player selects a Jerma or Abstract palette (they should now correctly just pick whichever art style you're using)
• Noel now properly turns green when her Plant Armor is active.