More Beta details, more robots, more progress!

Happy Holidays, Mighties!
We hope your holiday season is off to a good start. To help get things rolling, how about we kick off the festivities with a look at at the latest build?

A PRE-FINAL Beta PREVIEW!

With all of the stages, bosses and other Mighty factoids we’ve shown in our development updates some of you out there may think we’re approaching the end of the line. Well… you’d be right, actually! In fact, Inti Creates just recently sent over the pre-final beta Mighty No. 9 ROM, packed with all of the stages we’ll be shipping in the release version!
 We call this the pre-final beta ROM. Some places still need filling in, but it contains everything from the main story stages, to Online Race Battle, Challenge Mode and more! We’ve even got the ending in place, albeit with placeholder images.
Take a look at the Challenge Mode mission select screen. All of the missions are in place, so all that’s left to do now is insert each challenge description. It’s kind of hard to tell here, but maybe you can lift some details on the Challenge mode from the format of the unwritten descriptions? 
 Of course, No.1’s stage is all ready to go, too! 
As we mentioned in a previous update, this snazzy stage ends up engulfed in flames. You’ll also get a chance to take on a few of the enemies designed by our very own Beckers! They’re no slouches, either…
This ROM check went on much longer than usual; Inafune-san went over every detail with a fine-toothed comb, from difficulty balance to the cutscene presentations. The Inti team walked away with plenty to chew on, but as usual everyone had a great time. (Incidentally, the man behind Takuya Aizu is the director from one of our other teams, Masahiro Yasuma. He was curious about how Mighty was coming along and decided to come check it out!)
There’s plenty more we’d love to show you, but anymore would diminish the fun when you get your hands on the game yourself! That’s why we’ll call it here for this update.
We’ve got some adjustments, debugging, visual tweaking and a few other jobs to do between now and the final beta ROM. All of us here on the Mighty team will be burning the midnight oil to bring you the best game we can right out of the gate. We can see the finish line from here; all that’s left is one last spurt! We hope you keep cheering us on until we get there, Mighties!
Next up, let’s hand the reins back to our very own KIMOKIMO to pick up from where he left off last week!

ROBOT DESIGN CONTEST RESULTS 2!

 KIMOKIMO: 10 days already since our last update! My how time flies!
Sorry to have kept you all waiting, but it’s finally time for round 2 of the Kimokimo Cup results!
Amazingly, we already have fan art of last week’s winner… You Mighties work fast!!
Mighty Apple No 4 Pineapple Grenade by hfbn2
Mighty Apple No 4 Pineapple Grenade by hfbn2
In the first round of developer feedback, one piece of advice we stressed was to “try to make your robot more representative of a particular country”. You guys certainly took that advice to heart, and as a result we received plenty of well-balanced submissions. Some of them were so good that they were almost perfect, I barely had anything to add myself!
Now then, on with the show!
●KIMOKIMO CUP PART 2: Water or Wind  
Altogether we had a grand total of 57 entries this time around.
 I’m happy to say we had more excellent entries than we actually had room for! I went ahead and chose a few with particularly interesting proportions and characteristics clearly representing their countries of origin.
Once again, Inafune-san picked a design that just needed one final push to perfection. And the winner iiiis...
Mighty No. 7447 Pontata! Congratulations!! I’m sure this comes as no surprise to some of you, but this lucky Becker’s design got chosen for a special INAFKING makeover.
I actually took a shine to this design before Inafune-san made up his mind, so I thought I’d try my hand at sketching it out!    
 Inafune-san had this to say:
・ These aren’t your run-of-the-mill robots, but machines built to take on the Battle Colosseum. Best to make them look more like boss characters. 
・I really think it could use some arms! 
・No matter how you put it, having the Merlion’s tail in the front would just get in the way. I put the Merlion face on the back of the head so it usually looks like a marlin. The head could even rotate around when it attacks.
From there, Inafune-san drew his own design!
His idea was something else, completely different from the sketch I had previously put together. Once again the INAFKING design sense really jumps out at you. Like before, I took the sketch, brushed it up and gave it the Mighty Numbers treatment.
 Ta-daaah! What do you think?
・ I tried to give the head a sort of lion’s mane pattern. 
・ Since the color scheme skewed towards white, I designed the whole thing to look like knight armor. 
・Since it has no feet, I decided to give it some water jets to move around so it wouldn’t be limited to underwater encounters. Of course they can be used underwater too, and even double as water cannons!
I drew a few characters from this round, but this one is definitely my favorite. Thinking about how it’d take on No. 2 gets me super excited!
 These are the sketches I drew before Inafune-san’s take on the design. The head becomes a lion’s face when it turns! To be fair, it looks pretty plain now....
 It was good to see Beckers collaborate on some really cool entries this time around. It’s so inspiring to see new ideas you’d never think up yourself like this, isn’t it? If I ever have a chance to brush up this design, I’ll be sure to incorporate the ideas from all three of the collaborators!
I want to hold another robot design contest so bad!! Backer or not, send us a message if you’d like to participate! If enough people ask for it I’d love to do it again.
Let's close with Mighty No. 42043 Photon's entry! That lanky No. 3 is pretty cool. I really like the look!
Alright everyone, until next time!
*A note on the designs:
1) These designs aren’t being presented in any particular order, 
2) The designs refined by Inafune-san aren’t the “best designs”, per se, more like designs he thought needed a little extra something to be even better, 
 3) We ended up prioritizing designs that were both easier to refine and best matching contest specifications.
Thank you so much, KIMOKIMO, and to all of our awesome Beckers that contributed to the contest! And speaking of Becker contributions…

FINAL BETA TEST UPDATE

Extra, extra, read all about it: Brave Beckers Beat Back Beta Bugs!
Between the countless bug report emails, glitch videos, and forum discussion, you’ve Mighties have been piling on the beta feedback! The response has been tremendous, and it’s exactly what we’ve been looking for from our community. Now we have a better sense of what you want from the game, as well as an idea of the tweaks and fixes you want us to incorporate. We’ll be releasing a patch of the Steam beta build reflecting as much backer feedback as we could muster, so look out for it soon!
Any thoughts on the pre-final beta build? How about a word of praise for this week’s robot designs? Sound off here in the comments, back on the forums, on Twitter, orour official Facebook page!
And a Mighty Salute to you all, Mighty Beckers!! (`_´)ゞ 
 -Dina (Mighty No. 1046), KIMOKIMO (Mighty No. 299) and the Mighty No. 9 Team

Comments

Mighty No. 27510's picture

Current Beta?

So I just got through the current Beta. When I saw this, I thought it meant the current Beta was updated with all of these things (misinterpretation of the "pre-final" line). Anyways, thanks for making the Water level mini bosses much more tolerable. With the previous build I had so much touble with them that I just threw up my hands when I encountered them the second time. I think part of it was the heavy lag in that level back then compared to the Fortress stage. Also, where there supposed to be transformations in the latest build? Anyways, ありがとう!楽しみにしてる!
Mighty No. 32223 Mesha's picture

Becks New Color...

I dunno, I think old Beck looked better :/

The new color scheme looks too bland and plain IMHO.
Mighty No. 27510's picture

kinda agree

I think the color scheme is fine and is probably to help distinguish from Mega Man. However, I feel like it might be the 3D models need a little improvement and then it'll be okay. I at least think the reasoning is valid for changing it to be a more neutral color.
Mighty No. 42043 Photon's picture

yay!

I'm happy my art was shown off! Thanks guys! I feel special now. I got some more fan art with My earth robot submission. Sent it to you guys on twitter. Hope you like it. And yeah! DO another contest!!