Greetings, Tusslers! I hope everyone’s been enjoying Smash Bros. Ultimate as much as I have! In a completely unrelated note, I haven’t really gotten much done these past two weeks, so I don’t have any progress to report. However, I’ve been getting some questions from people for a while that I’ve been just answering individually over and over, so I’d like to have a blog post I can refer people to in order to more clearly explain things if new people find this project.

First off, a bit of project history. I started this project shortly after I graduated college, which was around the time Smash 4 was released. I had just gotten my degree in Computer Science, but I mainly just wanted to make games. With no real experience doing so, I figured I’d finally try to follow through on a dream of mine and create a Smash Bros MUGEN to recapture the feeling of discovery I had with Brawl modding back in it’s heyday. I started on the project in Python, mainly because I knew Python and I liked it.

This project eventually picked up a bit of steam, and culminated in the PyTussle build you might find on Gamejolt. Working in Python had its positives and negatives. On the one hand, since Python is a scripting language and not a compiled language, loading code and assets from disk was an absolute breeze. Fighters could be scripted up in Python and the file would just run. On the other hand, 3D was well out of my capabilities, and the software rendering of PyGame meant that the game just didn’t run at a reasonable speed unless your machine had a ballin’ processor.

I made the decision to switch engines to one that would allow for 3D, and would handle the rendering better than Python. Unity made the most sense at the time (UE4 would go free only a few months later, but I found UE4 to be even more impenetrable than Unity), but I hadn’t quite gotten over my hangups about controlling all of the internals of my game and there was quite the adjustment period. I had (and still have) a lot of trouble dealing with the black boxes of things like Physics and UI, which aren’t as customizeable as I’d like, but I’ve been making some huge strides in understanding.

This means, though, that a lot of my early Unity TUSSLE work is an absolute mess of spaghetti code and poor design patterns. It got to the point that working within it to make a character was nearly impossible. At that point, I chose to change the way fighters load actions into a different data type that would make the character builder possible, but that meant that I no longer had a working Action File for Hitboxie to actually play the game with. The new method works easier in the builder, but can’t be edited by hand the way the old XML fighters could, meaning I won’t be able to replace the fighter action file until the builder is done.

What this means is, currently, the most recent version of TUSSLE is not actually playable, while a deprecated version from a few years ago is. You can sort of think of PyTussle as a playable proof-of-concept for the real game, that is still in development. If you just want to see the game in action, check out the Python build. If you want to make characters or stages for the game, please be patient and check back on this blog (or follow my Twitter). If you are a developer and would like to help out with the Unity build, please feel free to join our Discord server and message me.

As for the future, this project is currently just a passion project I’m working on in my free time. When I started this, I was a recent college grad doing temp work part-time. Now, I’m working full-time at an actual career-type job with it’s own bag of stresses and deadlines (hey kids, did you know “salary work” just means “work tons of overtime and we won’t pay you any extra”? Because I didn’t!). As of the time of writing, I am the only active developer on this project, so progress has been slow-going. I’m doing my best to work at a moderate pace, but no one can work constantly. If you’ve been following this project for a while, you know I’ve settled into a sort of feast-or-famine dev cycle. I’ve been trying to move to a more consistent pace recently, so I hope this break phase will be over soon, and that next week I won’t be writing another filler update.

Hope that cleared up a bit of the project’s history, status, and future. If you are interested in the project, please feel free to join our Discord server and hang out! And if you’re as consumed by Smash as I am, maybe we’ll run into each other on the fields of battle!

Until next time, Tusslers!