Smash The "Pretty Spooky" Update

It's that particularly spooky time of the year!

Normally our seasonal updates don't bring much to the table, besides a new lobby, map, or something of the sort; however this time around I'm excited to announce all the new changes and additions that made their way into this one!

Spooky Stuff!

Now it wouldn't be a true update if the lobby didn't change; this time around we opted to rework the original lobby to fit the Halloween theme rather than using last years' or crafting up a new one. This lobby has also been added to the map rotation in its entire glory throughout the course of Halloween, and for a short period after.

Map Changes

Speaking of maps, we also reintroduced these seasonal favorites to the map selection:

• Graveyard
• Haunted Mansion

That's not all though, like with the 4th of July celebration, maps such as Temple and Beatbox received small tweaks to fit the season. Many maps also will be locked in eternal darkness, in response to feedback from a few years back, this will not apply to all maps. Arena also received a new seasonal map variant: "Arena: Spooked".

As always, if you have any maps you'd like to see in-game, feel free to submit them on the forums!

Peek-A-Boom!

This year we also reintroduced the "Peek-a-Boom" item. For those who have forgotten, this item will split into 2 separate bombs a short period after it is thrown, and upon ignition will inflict targets with blindness and destroy a large area!

Item Changes

Not everything can be spooky and scary this time around though, we've got some big changes that'll be sticking around past the fall season!

New Items

We're introducing 3 brand new items to the mix this time around; each of which has a very different use than the majority of other items currently. What are they you may ask? Well;

• First Aid Kit - Restores 15% of overall HP every 2 seconds. Effects will stop upon moving
• Gilded Apple - Instantly recovers Stamina/XP Bar, allowing for another jump or Smash attack right after being used
• Elytra - Allows the user to glide for 2 seconds, the timer begins once it is used, regardless of flight time

We're very excited to see how players use these new items, and will be watchful of feedback in-game and on the Discord regarding balancing.

Weight Distribution Changes

For all of SMASH's runtime, once an item was introduced, its spawnrate was unchanged; today that changes. As players, we've noticed that particular items tend to spawn disproportionately more often. The biggest offenders of this were food and lower tier swords. In general, the spawn rates of those items has been reduced and slight increases have been made to lower tier explosives and recovery items. The full weight changes can be seen within the full patch notes for those who are interested.

Miscellaneous Updates

These changes don't mesh together in any one section very well, however they are worth mentioning in the announcement.

Party Changes

When the Arena Update first dropped, I noticed 30+ people on, but no games were running. Games were obviously being played, but they weren't visible. Now, party games will be visible in the matchmaking screen to all players, regardless of party status, however they obviously won't be joinable.
We are also looking into additional party features to allow for those who have purchased the Party Pass, if you have any suggestions, please shoot us a message on Discord or the Forums!

Tips!

Another dated feature of SMASH is the tips; gone are the gross green and sometimes yellow messages! Tips have been reworked to function and look similar to MineZ.

Bugs

Fixed the following:

• Players can no longer be damaged by cacti in order to mitigate knockback
• Removed "Change Me!" message upon entering/leaving matches
• Hearts now properly display according to lives remaining
• Quick Menu selector updated, now opens cosmetics

Closing

First off, a tremendous shoutout to the newest member of the SMASH Dev team: BrendanLeeT; this update would not have been nearly as large without his added help. His work just within the last week has been wonderful, and I'm personally very excited to work with him on future updates (nrkade).

As always, we have our eyes glued to our screens, including the Discord channel for any feedback or ideas! We'd like to host another large community event such as a tournament or map building contest this upcoming winter as well, so let us know what you guys would rather participate in!

~ As always, thanks so much for flying Shotbow ~
-The Smash Team

Good Job!

hype!

spooky!