In 2025, our small team continued to put a bunch of time and effort into improving Mega Knockdown. Let's recap a few of last year's updates, and our goals for 2026.
2025 Recap
First of all, in 2025 we expanded the game's roster for the first time ever, adding Nils, our first 'charge' archetype character, and Maria, who has been carving out her own niche as an oppressive rushdown character. For a long time we stuck with the game's original 6 characters while we focused on art and system improvements, but with those goals getting to a more "stable" state, we can finally add more characters--and we're not done yet!
As of this year, all characters now have a full set of "finished" quality sprites. That doesn't mean we're not still polishing sprites and improving animations, but we've been able to replace all the sketch-like "draft" sprites. One new element of polish from last year is that most characters now have idle animations instead of a static idle sprite, and I think that's really helped breathe some life into the in-between parts of gameplay. Many characters also have unique back throw animations now too. My favorites are Billy's new suplex and Nick's RKO-inspired Faith Smasher.
Hit effects and attack animation pacing were overhauled across the board to give hits more of a feeling of impact. We did another pass on hitsparks and hitstop, and put in screenshake to enhance the biggest hits. We also added a few subtle touches like "dust" VFX and improved the look of air juggle hits, which used to look somewhat more awkward.
Lots of small balance changes took place to keep characters viable and fun to play, and to make sure one character or strategy didn't get too dominant in competitive play. To name a couple of the more impactful changes, the oki situation off midscreen throws was toned down, and sweeps were made faster to make them useful in more situations. Fireball wars are now more dynamic. Nick in particular benefited from this year's changes, as he was given new tools to bring him more in line with other characters' power levels. Faith Smasher is now a true untechable command throw, and he gets better screen position on hit with Dew Rush.
We made several improvements to the menus to make them better looking and easier to navigate. We did a pass on fonts and glyphs, and to make it easier to find games, the Main Menu now shows you at a glance if any public lobbies are open (or if other players are online who may be looking for games). Characters have new key art in character select, and fully overhauled the end-of-match screen to include win/lose poses, and even a "salty" quote from the loser. Our main music guy Nabil Anthony made two new music tracks for these screens, on top of a new boss theme.
Some progress was made on stages, although these were somewhat on the back burner compared to other areas. Billy has a new in-progress stage, and Maria has a new stage inspired based in part on Billy's old bridge stage.
Competitive play has also gotten a little faster thanks to the new Rapid time setting (6 seconds), which strikes a comfortable balance between the 15 second Standard timer and the especially fast-paced Blitz (3 second) setting. In our online leagues, Rapid has become the default, and players only actually take the full 6 seconds on very rare occasions. In League play, Stealph has continued her dominance, winning 6 leagues. Hypergrav and new challenger MegaS have won one league each, and the latter two may be in position to pick up a second win during the current month's league (which is ongoing). Think you can step up to the challenge and join the Hall of Fame? Join our Discord!
The game now has mostly-complete translations into Brazillian Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese, and the associated menu infrastructure needed to switch languages on the fly. The former two translations were done by community members Stealph and LeapyLad, respectively, and the latter two were done by contractors from the professional translation service Warlocs. We hope that this will expand the reach and playerbase of the game over time. On a similar vein, we also added support for MacOS, which had been requested for awhile.
The replay system was expanded to allow replays of your Arcade Mode matches, and you can even do a crude form of replay takeover by opening up the mouse menu while in 'stepped' replay playback. Another new feature lets you autoplay through your replays in reverse chronological order. We also improved our integration with Steam Timeline, Steam's built-in video recording system.
Under the hood, we updated our Unity 2021 LTS version and our Facepunch plugin, the latter of which helped us integrate with these new Steam features. We did several passes on performance to improve load times and make frame rates more consistent, cleaned up several textures and scripts, and added a proper preloader. The community helped us find and fix a few bugs here and there as well. We also updated the default key bindings to (hopefully) help onboard players more easily.
Lastly, we were at EVO! We had a booth in the Indie Dev area. Lots of people came by to play and enjoy the game, and we held a small side tournament as well. Overall that was a great opportunity and we hope to show up to more events (more on that in a bit..)
Goals for 2026
We hoped to be out of early access by the end of 2025, but that ended up being a little bit too ambitious. Our new release target is Summer 2026, and the game is getting pretty close to our goals for 1.0. Here are a few of the things we're planning to add this year, in no particular order.
Character #9
The next new character will launch alongside the 1.0 version of the game! I am planning to add more characters post-launch, although their number and release schedule is fully TBD. Character #9 is quite far along, so you can definitely expect to see them in 2026. Testers are telling me that they are really fun, so I can't wait until I'm able to announce them.
Better Stages
Our stages have tended to lag behind the character sprites because a) we have only one artist and b) the placeholder stages haven't looked too bad (they are mostly stock images or Schwarzerblitz developer Andrea Demetrio's vacation photos--not kidding). Still, we hope to have the final versions of our stages ready in 2026.
Improved Endings
Our artist Alan has made significant progress on the ending art, none of which is in game yet. I plan to implement these in-game alongside the 1.0 update.
Odds and Ends
In addition to general animation cleanup and filling in missing pieces like idle animations for some characters, we have some miscellaneous goals like end-of-round win poses, updates to the online lobby UI, and more.
IRL Events
I have made plans to attend Mega Knockdown at Combo Breaker (May 22-24 in the Chicago area) and run a side bracket for Mega Knockdown (possibly something unofficial at the BYOC). I will also be bringing Mega Knockdown to Feats of Strength at Wonderville Arcade in Brooklyn NY, which is happening in just a week or so (Jan 10-11). I might be able to bring the game elsewhere, but that's what I have planned at the moment.
As a disclaimer, we have a very small team with one programmer, one artist and no publisher money, so we may or may not make as much progress as we'd like toward these goals. If you want to support our continued work on the game, one great way to do that is to join our Patreon.
If you want to see last year's Year In Review, check it out here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1492750/view/532085430055602345?l=english
