Another update, bringing a whole bunch of additions and fixes.
This one took longer than I would have liked, as I've been dealing with a terrible flu for almost a week. In fact, after this update I'll be taking a few days off, because I still haven't fully recovered.
But the interesting thing is that I think the game is now in a pretty stable and polished state, which means I can finally start focusing on adding new content. Great! I suppose I'll start bringing in the remaining characters one by one while I finish up the missing music.
For now, let's see what's coming in this update:
For technical reasons, Thumps & Blows uses different character versions for each language. Keeping all of them identical and up to date can be quite a headache.
I noticed that some improvements and changes to certain characters had slipped through the cracks, so I decided to synchronize all the versions just to be safe. There shouldn't be any differences between them now.
The enemy AI in Thumps & Blows uses the "Random" variable to decide whether or not to perform a move.
The thing is, when I switched from the old engine, MUGEN, to the current one, IKEMEN Go, for some reason the AI became more passive and stupid. I spent a long time wondering why, but I couldn't find an answer.
Well, as with everything in programming, it turned out to be something stupid. Apparently, IKEMEN Go, at least in the version I'm using, can sometimes mistake "Random" with a custom variable when it's capitalized. So after changing all the variable entries to "random", the AI suddenly got much better. This might explain why some characters were more challenging than others.
You should notice improvements in the AI now, but I'll keep tweaking and testing it.
It turns out that when I gave Bruno a new standing heavy kick and turned his old one into his crouching light kick, I didn't properly update the parameters, so the move couldn't actually be used.
It turns out I hadn't properly linked Jack's sound file, so his sounds and voice lines weren't playing in most languages. You'll be able to hear him properly now.
Due to a few typos, certain cutscenes couldn't be seen in the stories for Weirdo, Cronchman, and Egguy. Just typical programming stuff: make one tiny mistake with a dot or a letter and the whole system goes to hell.
If you set a match to require more than 2 rounds to win, a numerical counter will appear once you have at least 3 wins. I had it positioned really badly and it looked ugly before, but at least now it's functional.
Nobody would probably ever notice this, but hey, now I can sleep with my mind calmed.
In Widijou's command list, the "Whip Dash" command wasn't displayed correctly, but only in Spanish.
Jack's portrait was displayed with Japanese text on the character selection screen when it shouldn't. This is because the command lists use static images rather than boxes with dynamic text, so they have to be created manually for each language.
For certain languages, a textless image is being used until the corresponding version is ready, but in Jack's case I got confused and used the Japanese image. You won't have any scary Japanese words staring back at you now.
I made it possible to select things in the menus using the Enter key, but I only updated it in the Windows version. It should now be available in all versions.
I received several reports from keyboard players who found it difficult or even impossible to navigate the menus and start the game. Some of them mentioned that they could only use the movement keys.
I'm not sure how well IKEMEN Go, the game engine, is able to adapt to every possible keyboard setup, so someone who isn't used to playing these kinds of games might have trouble figuring out how to navigate the menus.
That's why I made it possible to select things in the menus with Enter, but from now on you'll also be able to select with 4 buttons corresponding to the punch and kick attacks.
Previously, you could only do this with the light kick button, which corresponds to the select button on a controller.
I've also created a Steam guide with the default controls.
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Thank you so much for reading this!
As I said at the beginning, I now need to take a few days off to recover from this damn flu, so the next update will take longer to arrive than I would like.
But anyway, I think the game is now stable enough for me to start working on new content to add.
I'll leave the previous updates here so you can see everything that has been accomplished since launch: