Hello Minus community,
The 12th anniversary of Minus is upon us and it’s been a while since a forum post of any kind came out, much less an official tournament announcement, and we sincerely apologize for the lack of communication. Moving forward, we will convey our plans and updates more frequently, so we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for the continued support.
-Where we’ve been
Ever since the pandemic, our already slow development schedule became even slower. We tried to deal with this by hosting official Minus tournaments and the sporadic tweets for the upcoming new art. Of course in the end, it was decided that the best course of action was to halt the tournaments until the next version came out. Our intentions weren’t to make you wait, however.
-The current development
The good news is that development has drastically sped up in production and since then we’ve been making some great strides, including having some new and old members rejoin in the form of Eon, fudgepop, and Nezha. With their help, alongside the renewed motivation of the rest of the team, the next version of Minus will be one of the greatest to date! Of course, if you have skills with Brawl modding, we're always open for more hands to help. You can apply through our forums over at brawlminus.net or use the Brawl Minus discord and message our leader, Pin Clock.
-What’s coming: Brawl Minus 5.0
Let’s recap a little on what’s to come, as well as talk about some new things. As you know, Ridley and Dr. Mario are our two newcomers for the next version, being worked on by KingJigglypuff and Maye, respectively. Wario-Man and Giga Bowser are also being Minusified for the next version thanks to the works of KingJigglypuff, Sammi Husky, ENB, and more, so stay tuned for those 4. We also plan to add new special modes that will be brand new to Brawl mods, so an additional thanks to Sammi for that. Additionally, starting the next version, we will be using a Project+ based Dolphin build as well as file/coding structure moving forward (while still aiming for 1:1 between Wii and Dolphin in every aspect that we can). This will allow us to do more for Minus that we couldn’t do with our current method. In doing so, we’ll be able to take the QoL changes like making Gecko codes easier to add. This version will be the same Minus you love, but with a much more refined engine allowing for further customization!
-How we’re gonna get there
To better aid us in this revived development period, we’ve made a couple of changes to how development and testing go. The biggest change is that we’re now using GitHub for both development changes as well as playtesting changes. This is so no change goes unseen and so we can always revert changes in case something goes awry, like what happened with 4.1 and our attempts to correct that error for 4.2. The builds will be separate to make sure that no playtest changes go through to the dev build accidentally, meaning what we release will be prim and proper this time around!
-Release date
Our plan for the next version is to release it sometime late Summer 2022, assuming all goes to plan and at the current pace. However should it not, we estimate the latest time of release will be December 2022. So no matter what, we want to release it this year. Version 5.0 won’t be the last update for Brawl Minus as there are plans for following versions that’ll include bug fixes, new artwork, new modes, a new stage system, and maybe a character…. or two.
That about wraps it up for this update. Again, we want to thank you all who have supported us and this mod, we wouldn’t still be here without you. We hope Brawl Minus 5.0 will be worth the wait!
Break the Limits!
~Brawl Minus Dev Team
