Hey all you Mega Fans! We're back again with another V6C Newsletter!

Before we get into the subject of today's newsletter, I just wanted to thank you all for your input on the community poll. The poll is closed now but it will be some time before we announce our plan going forward. When we do, it will be back in that topic and will not follow the newsletter schedule. We just ask for your patience as even with the poll closed, it certainly won't be something we'll be ready to talk about immediately.

But enough of that. Let's actually show something new and exciting! I only have one subject to show you all today, but it'll be unique as far as these newsletters are concerned. So please take a look at this.



That's right! Chest, Plum, and Ripot are being added as brand new skins in V6C!

For those who don't know, this trio of news reporting robots originate from Mega Man Battle & Chase, more specifically Rockman Battle & Chase as they were more or less completely cut outside of the Japanese release of the game. But in our quest to try to encompass bits and pieces from the entire Classic Mega Man series, we felt that these three would make great additions to the skin roster.

Unlike map edits and weapon reworks, we very rarely get a chance to do anything new and exciting with skins outside of fixing up some older ones or adding a new roster when a new game is represented. So being able to add these three is certainly a very welcome addition to the many, many things being added in V6C!





I hope you all enjoy seeing this trio in action when V6C releases!

That's all for today's newsletter! While I have nothing I wanted to pair with these skins, we're not out of content to show you guys yet! So we'll see you next time with some more exciting updates!

Hey all you Mega Fans! We're here at a very different time for a very different kind of MM8BDM V6C update.

One of our (many, many) goals with V6C has been to update and refine our weapon view sprites all across the board. V6A updated the buster sprites, but we wanted to go back and edit all the other sprites to be up to the same modern standard, as much work as that is. This update is happening in V6C no matter what, so buckle up and get ready for it.

However, we on the development team have reached a little bit of a dilemma. While we were working on these updates, we ended up reaching a very real talking point regarding the amount of details these weapon view sprites should have, namely in terms of the coloring, and how detailed we want them to be. We have the very real opportunity to add what is essentially a 3rd color to our sprites. Instead of just having the view sprites be blue and cyan, it would be blue, cyan, and another darker blue, allowing for more detail, and making the style match both official artwork for the Mega Man series, but also the more detailed weapon get screens from the games.

Before I continue, let me show you all a preview of 25 weapons that use the new sprites, both in the current two color style, and a new three color style. Please note that none of the sprites or colors that you will see below are finalized and they are still subject to change. We normally would prefer to have everything finalized before showing them off, but I believe the community's input here is important enough that I want to post these early. Just remember they are subject to change.



As you can see, even with the updated sprites, the decision to stick with two colors VS three colors is a very large one, and it's one the development team wishes to poll the community at a large about. We're not fully sure as a whole which path to take going forward, as there are a number of pros and cons that I would like to list out.

Pros of Three Colors:

- Matching the style of the official artwork and Weapon Get screens can be considered to be overall prettier to look at and more visually appealing.

- This gives us a unique opportunity to better differentiate weapons that would otherwise share the same colors between them (such as Dust Crusher and Bubble Lead as seen in the above images.)

- With more detailed artwork and sprites being found in many of the game's mods found in the community, this brings the fidelity of the base game up to the same level.


Cons of Three Colors:

- While some might find three colors to be a prettier style to look at, others might find it more out of style.

- There's something of a learning curve with a change like that, and there's a whole lot of muscle memory associated with the current weapon colors, both in terms of those who have played MM8BDM for years, and for those very familiar with the weapon colors in the main Mega Man games.

- Mod creators of weapon packs will have a good deal of extra work on their hand having to update all of their weapons to account for the extra darker color in the sprites.


It is worth noting that modders will have some work required with this update regardless of decision made with the colors, namely with the sprite offsets being changed to account for the new sprites. That said, we will have a fallback in play so you will not be forced to immediately update your custom weapons.

For the reasons listed above, we want to extend this decision with the colors to the community as a whole. Below is a simple poll to vote on which color option you would prefer, and an optional space to write your reasoning if you choose to. It is worth noting that this decision is most likely not one we will come back to later. If we decide on sticking with two colors here, I imagine we will not change our line and change it again in a later version.

Vote for the poll HERE

The poll will stay open until the date of the next V6C Newsletter: Monday, November 24th. The results will probably not actually be released on that day and the Newsletter will instead be about something completely unrelated but hopefully still exciting.

Thank you all for reading, and voting on the poll! Your input is very important to us so please participate!

Hey all you Mega Fans! We're back again with another V6C Newsletter!

I've got another pretty simple newsletter lined up for you all today with another round of some map changes! I do think the next few newsletters will be very different than just map changes though, so feel free to keep that in mind...

That said, let's focus on the map changes of today! Firstly, this is one where the changes are on the smaller side of things, but that doesn't make it no less important.




Spark Man's map has always been a decisive one in the game, mostly and totally just due to it remaining one of the smaller arena maps in the game. Now I'm firmly on the side that this identity for the map is very important and I wouldn't want to replace the map with just a bigger box or something like that. But that doesn't mean we couldn't make some little changes to it. Outside of some nice texture touchups and some new background elements, we added little pillars to the corner to allow easier jumping to the edges of the map. We also added two smaller wings to two sides of the map, mostly to allow just a little extra cover and a place to duck out of a fight in a small map.

As for our other two maps of the day, let's take a look at two more Mega Man 8 touchups!





Tengu Man's stage has joined the ranks of getting a fresh coat of paint! The changes are a lot less openly obvious than the likes of Clown Man and Duo, but they are certainly appreciated nonetheless. As you can see in the last screenshot, we also added little balconies to the wings on both sides of the map. This makes the floating platforms WAY less of a commitment and offers more ways to move around a pretty rigid part of the map!






Aqua Man has also gotten a complete makeover! These tiles were definitely suffering a good deal out of Mega Man 8's lineup, so I'm really glad we were able to spice this one up. If you looked at how the stage looks in Mega Man 8 proper compared to Rockman 8 FC, you'd be shocked at the amount of details that were missing outright.

But as you can probably tell from the screenshots, Aqua Man got far more than just a coat of paint. Much of the entire back half of the map has been completely remade, both to compliment the new texture set, and to help open up what was otherwise a really bland and difficult to navigate half of the map.

Anyhow, that's all for today's newsletter! As I said before, expect some different content other than just maps next time! Until then!

Hey all you Mega Fans! We're back again with another V6C Newsletter!

We're getting back to our usual bread and butter for this newsletter and showing off a few more map changes we have in the wings! I don't have much of a preamble going on here, but truth be told, I like to ramble a little bit in my opening paragraph so any forum previews don't just say what the update is.

Do you think that's enough typing or do I need more? I think we're good to post some screenshots, but if I'm wrong this whole opening will be very funny for all the wrong reasons.






Cold Man is joining the ranks of robot master stages that have gotten touched up! I wouldn't call this map a full blown remake like some others, but it's definitely more than just some minor tweaks here and there. I'd say the basic skeleton of MMBCOL has remained intact, but it's been tightened up into a much more solid map overall. You'll definitely recognize the DNA it had before when playing on it, but I think you all will enjoy the changes.

Now, for a quick look of another map that kept some of its skeleton intact, but saw more drastic changes in other places...






Guts Man's stage has always been an interesting map. I think the courtyard and parts of the caves has always been solid, but then half the map are just thing cliffs you have to jump up without much else going on. So our solution was to keep the courtyard and bits and pieces of the original map, and expand the rest of the map into something you could actually properly fight in. You'll definitely recognize some set pieces in here, but others will be completely new. As I've said before, that's been a large part of most of V6C's map changes, where we keep the spirit of the older map alive while swapping out what wasn't working.

I've got one more map to look at today, and while nothing about the layout is changing, it is one of our Mega Man 8 maps that got a visual makeover, so take a look!





Duo's Stage has received a full visual sweep! As I said, absolutely nothing about the actual layout of this map has changed, but we figured it was one of the choices to get a fresh coat of paint. For several versions now this stage has consisted of both Duo's intermission stage and the opening beach level from Mega Man 8, so of course this just uses better tiles than before, but we also tried to include more details found in those two stages that were missing before now. I hope you enjoy it all!

Well, that's all for today's newsletter! We'll see you all next time!

Hey all you Mega Fans! We're back again with another V6C Newsletter!

In case it wasn't obvious by me not being Freems, today's update is going to be a little different. Normally we'd show off some content hot off the presses to gladly feed your ever-hungering desire for shiny new playthings, but this time around we're going to zoom out a bit and talk about the bigger picture of the game's design and balance. I hope you like text, because I don't have very many pictures for you. I'll intersperse some big green text here and there to help ease your eyes and give you the gist of my ramblings. Let's begin!

To start things off, I'm here to announce to you that we have removed the Energy Balancer pickup and made it an innate passive that is always active. This is a change that's been pretty heavily requested over the years, and we felt like it was finally time to implement it into the core game. There was always an amount of skill required to manually fill the weapons you wanted to regain the ammo for, but when looking the game over we decided this wasn't an area we felt strongly about as an exciting expression of skill in our game.

Plenty of our players are familiar with how this feels given it's been in quite a few mods for years, but if you're not I can most certainly tell you that after playtesting V6C it's quite difficult to go back to an Energy Balancer-less state when playing on servers running older versions!

On the subject of ammo, however, this is as good a time as any to mention a global nerf we've been testing internally and are pretty positive on. Since we changed how our ammo pickups function 9 years ago in V5A, they've restored pretty arbitrary amounts of ammo based roughly on what percentage of ammo the individual pickups previously restored on a weapon with the typical 28 max ammo. Unifying ammo gains like this was ultimately healthy for the game, but the values we've had them set at for nearly a decade are frankly too high.

As it currently stands, ammo is a non-issue in most cases and you can shovel two pickups into your gun to restore a whopping 60% of your clip. Because of how common ammo pickups are on maps, ammo may as well not be a mechanic in the game as it stands.



To make ammo matter, we've made the percentage an individual pickup match the same numbers as our health pickups. Specifically, a small Weapon Energy used to restore 30% of your ammo, and a large one used to restore 72%. They now restore 20% and 55% respectively. We chose this path for a couple reasons - primarily, not having to remember how much percentage each of the four different energy pickups used in core maps restores reduces mindshare.

In addition, tackling ammo rates on a global level like this is going to be considerably easier than reducing the amount of pickups on every single map in the game - not to mention the effect that would have on custom map balance.

To really hammer the point regarding ammo home, it's worth mentioning as well that we'll be reducing the maximum ammo on a small handful of weapons. This isn't a global thing and we're not trying to starve everyone of ammo, we just feel that some weapons have a higher magazine than they really should. For example, we've halved Search Snake's ammo capacity. It has had it too good for too long. These changes are part of a shift in balance philosophy the core game has been pushing since V6A and further refined in V6B.



For most of the game's life, damage was the primary lever used to balance the game. There were changes here and there targeting other things, but mostly we saw a gradual decrease in damage across the entire weapon set all the way up until V6A where everything got cranked back up to get our Time to Kill to a place where we were happy with. V6B toned some of those changes back down and instead focused on buffing other aspects of weapons to further help accentuate what makes each weapon in our game special.

The weapons in our game should feel powerful and fun to use, but most importantly they should feel meaningfully different. When you lower a weapon's strengths and shore up its weaknesses, the choice between weapons becomes less meaningful and our arsenal becomes homogenized.

In general, we would greatly prefer when a weapon's highs are high as long as it pays for it with adequate lows. In practice, this means taking power from areas that aren't exciting for a given weapon and letting it exist elsewhere. As the amount of weapons in our game grows, it becomes more and more important to ensure these differences can be felt.

Balance is an ongoing process and we haven't always hit the mark. For example, power weapons as a class are always going to be tricky to keep sane; their core defining characteristic is that they hit like trucks and reducing that too much is going to feel bad no matter how you slice it. However, power weapons have been in a pretty unacceptable state for a long while now. Where we can, we'll be looking to lower the general effectiveness of the more egregious of these weapons, push their unique traits, or "buy" power for them by taking it from elsewhere.

I do also want to thank our players who've been discussing the balance of the game in the MM8BDM Discord. Keeping an ear to the wall for balance problems in the game is fairly difficult with how many different locations there are for discussion nowadays, and it's very easy to miss with the impermanence of in-game chat and Discord messages being buried under mountains of stream-of-consciousness live chat. In V6C, you'll see some changes to the game directly inspired or contributed by members of our community, including one to Pharaoh Shot by Pr. Fly!



If you have issues with a weapon, item, or the game's balance, please consider posting about it in the MM8BDM Discord or right here on the forums so we can keep track of it! We want to make our game the best that it can be, and knowing what our players have problems with is an important part of that goal.

And as always, thank you so much for playing our game!














Oh, you're still here?
Well, I suppose I can announce one new thing. I wasn't telling the whole truth when I said we removed Energy Balancer's pickup from the game. It's more accurate to say we just changed what it is.



I'm sure at least one person saw this coming, but we're adding Energy Balancer Neo to Megaman 8-Bit Deathmatch!

In addition to the ammo normally restored when picking up a capsule, this powerup additionally restores a reduced amount of ammo to ALL of your other held weapons!

This item comes from Megaman 11 and we were always going to add it when we got around to making the content for that expansion. We elected to add it early because we were committed to giving players an innate Energy Balancer in V6C! Rather than an acquirable quality-of-life change, Energy Balancer Neo is indisputably a strong upgrade that conveniently helps to offset the global ammo nerf!

And that's all for today's newsletter! We'll see you next time, back to your regularly scheduled programming. See you then!