Forums

What the hell was he doing?   Shawn Michaels looks so young there. Quite beefy as well compared to when he was HBK.

Warrior was insane lol

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!

Anyone watching this year?

New AC Lego coming August 1st. Resident Services with K.K. Slider and the Airport with Dodos.