Update on the Mugen Project - Good News and Bad News

 Hi, Tommy here! been a few days and I've continued building my own Mugen build for the purpose of both entertaining myself and maybe making a YouTube series out of it. Well some things have changed. quite a bit.

Remember that "Queen of  Fighters" roster screenshot I made a few days ago that got posted here? well I got good and bad news about that project plan.

Bad news is I scrapped that roster and build entirely because I didn't like where I was headed with it. so at least for now am not working on a AI tournament video (at least the one I had before)

Good news is am still playing around with Mugen. I've finished the bare minimal roster for a NEW Mugen build. One designed not to host Watch Mode AI battles but to instead enable me to ACTUALLY PLAY THE VIDEO GAME!

What I mean by that is simple, I took a basic character like beterpan's Ken Masters and tested many different characters and curated the roster to be a controlled and debatable balanced Mugen roster. Here is the screenshot of my current Roster.

 

  

 

The Screenpack am using is a premade pack called MUGEN Plus 1.1, Screenpack basically means User Interface or UI. I Didn't make this, I considered making a pack of my own but sadly Old Gamer's YouTube channel got nuked for some reason and I forgot how that tutorial went. plus I've had a problem with palettes for sprites. I'll consider trying again at a later date but without those tutorials I have doubts of getting far. The creator of this premade pack is a author called SLAYER who made some pretty good looking Lifebars. I think I got one of their lifebars installed in this build. LVL2Lifebars I think it's called.

 

 

 

Looks plain right now, but that's because I have it set to the Custom Portraits mode. basically this lifebar addon is made to allow for custom images for each character to appear. but honestly I quite like the simplistic look for this set. plus the voice announcer sounds like the Decade Driver voice from Kamen Rider Decade so I consider that a plus for me.

 

The exact process of building/collecting for this roster took several days of downloads, testing and tweaking the game to get a good setup here. The big reason I wanted to make this kind of Mugen build were I actually play the game is simple, for Christmas a few months ago I got a fightstick along with other stuff. It was the one from this image below.

 

This is the Mayflash F300, it's a budget arcadestick, while it's technically able to play any arcade style games the main reason I ever wanted one was to play fighting games. Mostly Mugen. I've been looking to get a good reason to play fighting games on this stick so I decided to finally build my Arcade Mode build of Mugen 1.1.

The Stick is nice and I enjoy playing fighters with it. I know this is technically the worst performing controller in fighters but I got it for fun rather then performance anyways. before I got into Mugen recently I've actually played both Melty Blood Actress Again and Touhou 12.3 Soku.

 

I've planned on playing online but I just didn't really like the feel of searching through a discord (or even Fightcade's matchmaking for older games) and while the few matches with real humans were fun I just didn't really like it that much. Plus while these polished official games are good and balanced I just couldn't shake the feeling that I would be happier playing Mugen with the chaotic crossovers and literally any character I wanted.

 

So I had to find a good way to use this controller thus I got on Mugen Archive.com and started building a Mugen roster designed to be playable in Arcade mode. I thought this would be difficult because of my past grievances with the AI Patch community "Watch Mode first" designed AI patches for characters. but honestly I think I've had a much easier time finding Human beatable AI that felt fun AND fair to play against.

 

Don't get me wrong, Watch Mode AI Patches are great for AI tournaments, I never wanted those Patches gone. I just wished my favorite Touhou Waifus got AI that made them fun to play against. For the longest time I thought that dream was impossible...until I got stricter with my roster and accepted that some characters just don't vibe in a balanced roster.

 

Not that I mean to say I didn't have some Touhou characters in my roster. I found an AI author named "DaMarioMemer" on Youtube, they quickly became my favorite author thanks to their configurable AI difficulty levels. Plus they made patches for several RicePideon (another author who sadly quit but not before making several Touhou characters that actually fit the fighting game balance I was going for this build) characters. namely Komachi, Yukari, and Marisa.

 

I even managed to save a couple of my favorite characters like MEGAX's two undertale fighters Torial and Undyne (I love those two because their fully custom voice AND sprites, could easily be official characters in a real game.) I also included Foxy by MEGAX from that Five Nights at Freddies game because I liked his work that much. plus that character had a "DaMarioMemer" AI Patch so I figured why the hell not?

 

As for the testing I did it mainly involved grabbing my Xbox One gamepad (because when your testing multiple characters/stages and are expected to use a keyboard and mouse between tests you want a smaller size controller) and used Ken Masters by beterpan (Who quickly became my favorite main for this process) and fought against every character I downloaded. some characters like DaMarioMemer's AI Patches had configs that let you lower the difficulty level of patched characters. other characters like beterpan's Ryu and Ken and Chun Li actually scale with the Mugen game's default difficult settings.

 

Why is that important? because before 1.0+1.1 the default AI was just a random toddler mashing buttons and thus no serious character would use it. Thus many AI authors would make their own custom AI code in the characters. While 1.1 has features to scale said code with the game's difficulty setting it was a rare feature. thankfully I remembered it as I think my Dragon Ball Team Z characters like the beterpan Street Fighter characters seem to scale with this setting.

 

When I was testing/fighting the characters in my growing roster I kept looking for two major things. 1. How fun that character was to fight. 2. How high powered is said character.

 

While I would definitently want easy characters for the early levels of the game's Arcade mode (which can be controlled somewhat in Mugen 1.1) I also wanted to have decently tough characters. Mainly this is so I can feel challeaged during gameplay as I hated the default AI of the RP Touhou characters in the past for being block only dummies. I looked for characters who were tough enough to be fun in a casual setting but for those that were harder but still fair enough to keep in the roster (Like Jotaro and Dio with their M-ism AI Patches) would be promoted to Boss level characters.

 

What does that mean? Simple, In arcade fighting games it was common for super tough Final Bosses to exist. some of these bosses were designed to be unfair and eat your quarters. I think it was called the "SNK Boss" effect. While I would hate for a Arcade run in Mugen to be stopped in the middle due to a high level boss I DID enjoy when the final stage had this super powered OP SNK Boss instead. at least then I would feel like I still got the full experience then. I actually really like broken AI so long as it's treated as a ceremonial rather then a got you event.

 

This actually reminds me of the Touhou Project Shoot em Up games having an extra stage and boss that's way harder then the main normal mode of those games. their optional extras for those looking to challenge themselves.

 

 Am getting a bit rambly here so am going to cut this short with one more statement. I do still plan on making an AI tournament video for Mugen but maybe before I do so I would try and make a video essay on Mugen and my time spent with it. believe it or not I kind of grew up with this game. am just now remembering my love for it. So maybe expect a video essay in the near future or at least a arcade mode run or something in this current build am using. Hope you enjoy the evening!