This wasn't supposed to be a themed update, but there is a dive move and a seaport stage, so it is now. :)

Dive and crawl

While I was testing the game lately I felt like it was missing something. I tried some ideas, a dodge, a shield (still working on it) and now a dive. In the end I think it was the limited movements mechanics in the context of a platform fighter, a genre heavy on movement tech. So here are movement techs that I added.

The dive launches the player horizontally in the direction they're holding. Players don't need any specific item to perform this move, they just have to press down while holding left or right. They can also dive in midair and jump out of a dive. This allows players to extend the reach of theirjumps.

After a dive ends if the player is still holding down they remain flat on the ground and will be able to crawl. Lying down allows players to have a more compact hurtbox (the collision polygon that detects damage) at the cost of having fewer moves available. Players can also crawl and attack by pressing left or right.

While laying down the player character and their attacks will remain aligned to the slope of the floor. This allows players to angle their attacks and so to develop stage-specific techniques by using ground slopes and angled walls to their advantage.

For now diving and crawling are both hidden mechanics. I'm still thinking how to present them to the player and also how to balance them. At the end it is really challenging to implement techniques that work with only 4 buttons per player and also make sense.

Work-in-progress new map

The new map is called Port Town and is currently only available in Practice mode at it is still unfinished. This stage is much wider than the other stages and is intended for a game mode I want to implement later on. Along with Port Town I also added a work-in-progress new track, Port Town Tune.