RedShell

Yet another great "out of nowhere" update. Man, there is nothing else quite like Vampire Survivors when it comes to utterly warping the flow of time! I'm back at 100% completion though, which is currently 211 achievements.

Oh I'm pretty sure none of this stuff is intentional, just stage builder specific glitches that can be consistently utilised by following the right methods. Nintendo would probably be patching this stuff out if they were still updating the game. In fact, some of my earlier stages did get changed/stop working as intended back when they were.

Ok, for anyone that might be interested, let me explain (or try to explain ) the Captain Toad stage... Not sure how familiar you guys are with the more enigmatic features of stage builder, but basically there's a certain way of drawing and then scaling shapes to produce various different effects. They're often just visual, but sometimes they can modify terrain properties in a way which will then have an impact on gameplay, for example: if you draw a thin shape that covers the entire length and height of a stage, and then completely reduce its scale vertically, it becomes so thin that it deactivates collision! I use this one a lot when making the surface of "water", as the terrain remains visible but players, items and regular terrain can freely pass through it. You'll have seen this on the Nintendogs bath and Mii swimming pool stages. Other drawing/resizing techniques can cause the face of a 3D shape to disappear, with only the sides visible from specific angles, good for creating "invisible walls". Others can allow characters to pass through in one direction, but not the opposite, etc. There are seemingly many of these types of tricks within stage builder, I learnt the majority of them from this fantastic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Thoreon/videos But yeah, when creating the PaRappa stage, I unexpectedly discovered a brand new one (again by resizing a larger shape) that somehow prevented characters from being able to jump! That was when I decided to instead use it for a new stage, and the first theme that popped into my head for it was Captain Toad. At this point I had no idea about the other aspects of that gimmick though, so when testing it outside of the editor I was very surprised to see that this piece of terrain also made picking up items impossible (unless using Villager's pocket) and would cause all players to instantly fall through it on a Sudden Death! Three quirks for the price of one! Actually though, there are 4... Yep, you see when creating stages I also do some test battles with only CPU fighters, just to focus more on the stage and therefore spot anything that might need to be tweaked. Well, when I set the CPU on this particular stage, let's just say it made for some revealing insights into their AI. Unfortunately, I no longer have my capture device, otherwise I'd record some footage of it, but this collection of a post-match results screen will also paint quite a good picture of what happens: That's right, alongside not being able to jump, pick up items, and getting instantly KO'd upon Sudden Deaths, the CPU can't even attack while on this stage! They literally just walk about (mainly into the corners) occasionally dashing from side to side in the centre, for the entire match! So yeah, I was really happy with this discovery, until I started to test attacking the CPU myself and realised that once a character gets launched (or initiates a Final Smash) they regain the ability to jump and can once again interact with items. Hence the ruleset I suggested yesterday. Having said that, I reckon the stage will be OK for regular time/stock/stamina battles, because as you'll have probably noticed last night, when your character is in the no jump phase they're much more difficult to launch, plus you can use certain attacks a lot faster than normal. Once respawned you get back the ability to jump plus the advantage of items, but you'll also be easier to launch than anyone who's still grounded. It might actually be weirdly kind of balanced in a way. Anyway, that's enough rambling from me. I'm glad everyone enjoyed the stage, it's unlikely that I'll be topping that gimmick in any other creations before I hit the inevitable 100 stage limit, but I'll certainly try my best!

Thanks for the games everyone! That was a lot of fun. I shall do my best to explain how I created that custom stage tomorrow, but right now I need to keep my eyes closed! 2 hours of chaotic Smash Bros. is the limit for my old eyeballs.

That's perfect, cheers! Loving the name you gave it! I see. That could potentially mess things up. Ok, let's add Steve to the list of characters not to pick as well, just in case. But I'll keep the same stage selected for the second battle then (once we're back on the usual rule set) and someone can choose Steve, Villager, etc. if they like. See what happens.

Any chance you could set up a temporary ruleset (just for the very first match of the evening) to complement my latest custom stage? Yeah... that new stage gimmick I mentioned last week, turns out it's actually multi-purpose when it comes to wackiness. However, it also appears to stop functioning as intended under certain conditions, still not sure exactly what's going on though, or how it will behave online. So if it's not too much trouble, can we go with: 1 stock 1:00 min time limit FS Meter set to OFF Smash Ball set to OFF (fake one is ok) And can everyone please refrain from choosing Villager, Isabelle or random select. Oh, and if there's another character that has a move similar to Villager's pocket in FP2, avoid them as well. Again, this would only apply for the opening match.

So it seems there could potentially be issues with playing second-hand Switch games online now, if the information in this video is correct: Pretty messed up if true. Anyone heard about this before?

It's really great that they're putting so much effort into optimisation. Seems to have become an increasingly neglected area of game development in recent years. I have very high hopes for this game.

I have actually tried that in the past and yeah, it really isn't. Luckily, these days I use one of those small wireless keyboards that has a built-in touchpad, which works great. Admittedly, I don't really play those more traditional PC genres, like strategy or simulation type games, but for the few titles I've got that require mouse/keyboard I'll just map mouse movement to my controller's gyroscope with Steam Input.

Hehehe, cheers! Yeah, it's just missing a few aspects due to hitting the weight limit (and to keep performance decent) I also had to make the onion on the back wall a Smash logo, again for technical reasons. Stage builder really does not like it when you draw objects with too many colours/terrain parts. At least I was able to include the wood panelling on the walls though, a detail that they seemingly forgot in the Battle Royale version of Fruites Dojo.

I've been using a PC exclusively on TV for about 4 years now and can safely say that is no longer the case. The only issue I've encountered there is with much older titles that run at lower/unusual resolutions, but even then there's always a relatively simple solution to get it working. I consider it the modern-day equivalent of blowing on a cartridge. Couldn't agree more. I've not looked back since dropping Playstation and shifting all my 3rd party stuff over to PC. Cheaper games, better performance, no cost for online play, more customisation options, mods, and backwards compatibility that's truly future-proof. Sure, the initial costs with PC is very high compared to console, but in the long run I think it's well worth the extra investment. I don't expect the combo of PC + Nintendo console will change for me any time soon.

Indeed I do. You almost did an amazing comeback against Glen-i on my Epic Flail stage though (Ryu vs Ken) I was on the edge of my seat spectating that battle. Anyway, cheers for the games everyone!

Got a heads-up on the theme from Glen-i, enabling me to create an appropriate custom stage for tonight. It's a pretty simple one, yet I somehow managed to crash stage builder while making it! However, this also led to an incredible new gimmick discovery (I'm talking cannon graveyard level silliness ) but I'm going to hold it back for another build and to do some more tweaking, so you won't be seeing that tonight. If all goes to plan though... Mwahahahaaaa!!!! Anyway, see you later for some "all-star" battles.

This looks utterly bonkers. *adds to wishlist*

Cheers for the heads-up. How strange though. DR1, 3 and 4 all have full controller support. On the pcgaming wiki page it has a green check mark next to XInput compatible controllers, pretty sure the controller I use can be switched to that. Anyway, even if it doesn't work, I could always use the custom controller mapping feature in Steam, right?