Hey, I'm TSON with the second dev blog. Dev blogs are essentially developers giving you the inside scoop of what's happening for 0.8! There will be only five, one on each Sunday of this month. The first four being from developers like myself, and the final update, being from Cleod9 himself. Geno really set the bar high last week, so we'll see how I can measure up.

Geno formidably touched base with aesthetics, and I'm here to calm you down after all of that eye-candy and let you know what's going on behind the scenes. Yes, I'm talking about the Engine!
(If you are not familiar with a term that I use, click it and it will take you to a Smash Wiki explanation.)

- Knockback-related Engine Changes -

For this demo, we got a lot of the hard stuff out of the way. You see, back in 0.7, when players were attacked, gravity made a subconscious decision to leave them alone for the most part, and what you got instead was a very awkward, very limited, very hard-to-work-with moon-arc.

Well guess what? I'm pleased to announce that this demo we've given gravity the thumbs up, which should make your combos feel a lot more natural, and a lot more accurate to the series!



Of course, to avoid having extraneous ground-combos, we decided to add the infamous Smash technique, teching, in as well this demo!


Since we're talking about knockback, I'm sure you've noticed that in Brawl and Melee, hardly any moves hit in just one direction - if you hit with the back of, say, Marth's neutral air attack, you'd get a reversed angle of knockback.
Guess what we just added a week ago?


That's most definitely not it, though!
Did you know that we listen to you guys? We've heard your requests, and I'd like to let you know...


We've actually been planning this for a while now, but 0.8's finally given us a chance to add 'em in.

Oh, and we added this cool thing called DI but I'm sure none of you guys care about that.

- Shield-related Engine Changes -

...Remember this old friend?

Yeah, the shield. Back in v0.7, v0.6 and before, the shield felt really... intangible. It didn't feel like it was doing much (and in actuality, it was doing a lot too much.)
Let me let you in on a little secret. Back in pre-v0.8 era, the shield simply took anything thrown at it, swallowed it whole, and gave you the thumbs up. Did you abuse it? You should have.
...Because in anticipation for the biggest demo yet, we sat shield down and gave it a nice long speech about frame advantages. Now, you need fast fingers to hit a foe that dares to go after your shield... and you'll find yourself wanting/needing to give your shield a break lots more often.

Shield also decided it was time to man up to those annoying projectiles that seemed to tear through him last demo.


...Most of them, anyway.


That's all for this Dev Blog! Look forward to many many more interesting engine changes, such as SDI, unique aerial physics, traction, meteor cancelling, and higher hitstun when 0.8 is released!!

Coming to you next week is Tid with some sexy character work to get the hype machine pumping. I hope you're ready!