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HewDraw Remix's First Public Beta and State of the Game

Welcome

Hello everyone! Thanks for joining us for our first official public beta! It’s a bit sooner than we’d like, but the beans have been boiling for much too long and we’d like to get them off the stove since it’s about time we served them up. On that note, we’d like to offer a few comments regarding the current state of the build.

Changes

There are SOO MANY changes since the last time you all have played, and even more for those who are coming from Ultimate! We are working on a complete changelog, but that might take a few more hours or even days, in the meantime we hope you all can enjoy.

While you all wait for some character-specific changes, here are some global changes that you all should know about!

  • UI overhaul: Most of the game’s UI has been replaced by new, HDR exclusive UI
  • Massive stage changes: Huge thanks to Devory, Ginn, and Angst for assisting us in curating a massive selection of stages which now have legal layouts and pseudo-legal layouts!
  • Major engine overhaul:
    • Airdodges that stall your momentum (not refreshed on hit/once per airtime)
    • Completely linear knockback/hitstun
    • Drift DI
    • Hitstun canceling is gone
    • Grounded movement nearly identical to melee, including dash dancing, moonwalking, stickywalking, and boost running.
  • Salty Runback
  • Digital trigger presses for GameCube controllers function as a full analog press
  • A new tag gamemode!

Reorganization

HewDraw Remix is now officially open source, you can find our source code and repository here. We’ve been working on restructuring our project to make new contributions easier for those who want, and also to allow us to better organize and be transparent with the community.

We are open to contributions from the community that meet our standards, as well as community testing. You can test and fix bugs and issues we post here, help debug and test PRs for features and bugfixes as they have builds attached to them for easy access, and even PR changes and additions yourself to submit for review! If you want to test the latest WIP changes, we have nightlies built every day for access to the latest complete development. We’d love to see your input. If you have expertise in programming, modeling, animating, stage editing, or any other asset creation and are interested in becoming an official developer, feel free to reach out!

Don’t worry, there will always be some surprises in the works, but now you can all see what we are doing and where. We also hope this to be a big educational resource for those who are wanting to get into Smash Ultimate modding and hope to see lots of new faces!

Stay tuned for more information about how to contribute!

State of the Game

Written by Black Calculus

We are a relatively small team working on this as a hobby project, and balancing and reworking a roster of 89 characters and a game engine this massive is no small feat.

Firstly, you may notice upon playing with the build that there’s a bit of disparity as far as how finished every character feels, as well as some gaps in power level among the roster. Some of the cast is in a pretty crazy state right now, and others a bit underwhelming potency-wise. Regardless, we’ve done our best to prioritize making both the engine and every character feel as fun and unique as we can, so you can thoroughly enjoy what you can currently get your hands on while we polish up some of the things that need more attention with coming updates. Rest assured that we will be addressing the problems strewn throughout the cast and the rest of the game in due time.

For those of you that have been with us for a while, since the alpha stages:

Normally we balance characters with regular playtesting both irl and online with you all but this batch of changes hasn’t seen much of that as we haven’t been able to be as active due to irl obligations, so some changes may seem or feel a bit disjointed from how each character plays or needs (aside from specific in-progress reworks). Combined with the new engine things may take a bit to get used to, so we urge you to play with the changes for at least a week to get a feel for your character’s changes in the context of the new game and give critiques of these changes and what you’d like to see altered/reverted/further changed after having had some time with them.

Certain characters are not going to get off scott free and their tuning down of power level will not be changed, but we are not opposed to bringing them down to a more reasonable level in ways that suit the character better from a fun/feel perspective if the targeted changes this patch were misplaced.

Finally…

Please do not hesitate to ask questions about changes, character design, etc. as we’d like a dialogue with those of you who are able to have their hands on the game more consistently than us devs and have an active perspective on the characters you play.

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.
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