SuperBattleBros

Super Battle Bros

Hold Left Shift to raise a bubble. It absorbs hits, costs pips, and breaks if you ask too much of it. On top of that sits an optional Smash-style layer: a percent that climbs as you take hits, knockback that grows with it, directional influence, teching, and a star KO if it gets high enough.

This mod is in active testing. Numbers change between versions. If something feels wrong, it probably is — tell me.

Rules you need to know

• Everyone in the lobby needs the same version. The mod checks over text chat when you join. If anyone is missing it or on a different version, the mod switches itself off for you and says so on screen. Nothing breaks; you just play vanilla until it's sorted.
• Private lobbies only. In a Public lobby the mod does nothing at all, silently. This is not configurable.
• Use at your own risk. Everything happens on your own machine, plus one small network message the mod sends only once everyone has passed the version check. The game ships an anti-cheat assembly; what it inspects beyond activation rate limits is not known. This has been used in private lobbies among friends without issue, but that's the extent of it.

The bubble

Pips. Ten, drawn as five circles under the icon: a 1-pip hit takes half a circle. The bubble glows in your skin colour with a soft halo around it, thins as pips go and flashes hot on each one lost, on everyone's screen, so an attacker can see it weaken. It blinks when it's down to its last circle. No regeneration.

What a hit costs, in half-circles. Stray ball 1, guns 2, homing ball 2, explosions and carts 3, golf swing breaks it outright. A freeze bomb costs nothing: everyone else in range still freezes, you don't. Explosions still go off against everyone else nearby; the bubble only spares its holder. The penalty stroke (your own ball dropped on your head after going out of bounds) ignores the bubble entirely: it can't be absorbed or parried. Costs are editable per hit type in the config.

Nothing bounces off a held bubble. Balls, rockets and bombs pass in and cost pips; gun shots land the same way. The bubble is not a body either: a mine, a blast, a laser or a lightning strike measures its distance to you, not to the bubble's edge. Rooted while it's up by default — no moving, jumping, swinging or items.

Break. A hit that breaks the bubble is cancelled; you pop straight up, tumble, land, and get up. Everyone nearby hears it, and the bubble is gone for 15 seconds. That cooldown is the real cost. Letting go of a healthy bubble costs 1.5 seconds before the next one, unless you parried. A flash camera that blinds you drops it, and it stays down until the flash wears off. The magnet item's shield is the game's own and keeps the game's look, so you can always tell which is which.

Parry. Let go of the bubble with a threat coming — anything that would reach you within about a third of a second, or a golfer winding up next to you — and the next hit from it is parried: no pips, no percent, no knockback, and it stops a swing that would normally break the bubble. Letting go with nothing coming arms nothing, so it cannot be fished for. Someone aiming a gun along a line through your bubble counts too (experimental).

A parry plays as one committed moment, the same on every screen: an impact frame where you freeze and nothing can touch you, then the bubble stays up, lit, while you hold still, then it snaps off and you are free. A homing ball or rocket that was locked on to you goes back to whoever fired it. Anything else is simply absorbed, and the attacker is knocked down for a moment. A parry also gives you the same speed boost as knocking someone out. The bubble flares, a ring of your colour bursts out of it, and nearby cameras kick.

The percent layer

Percent and knockback. Every hit that gets through adds percent, more for a harder hit: a point-blank elephant gun is worth twice a swing, a pistol at range half. Knockback grows with your percent up to 100% and then stops