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 growing; only a death launch goes higher, so anyone flying off the top of the map is dead. Explosions lift, bullets shove you along the ground, clubs and carts sit in between. At 250% a knockout is a star KO, seen on every screen. Percent resets each hole.

The flight is the stun. When you land you get up a quarter second later, whatever the game's timer says. From 65% launches start to hang at the top of the arc, fully by 150%: that is how the stun grows with percent. The comeback shield after a get-up lasts one second instead of three; the gold one for repeated knockouts is the game's own.

DI. As you're launched, push toward where on the screen you want to drift and the launch bends that way, up to 20°. Where you land, not how far.

Teching. Press the bubble key just before your tumbling body hits the ground and you're up instantly, no lie-down. One press is one attempt, a missed one locks the key out briefly, and a tech roots you for a moment before you can act. Only a launch big enough to smoke can be teched: a small shove is a stun you sit through. A launch you caused yourself, or a break, can't be teched either.

Invulnerability look. While the game's comeback shield is up, the body flickers washed-out white, Smash-style, on every client. Past 100% embers rise off you, redder toward the kill line.

Kill feed. A star KO shows in the game's own kill feed, crediting whoever landed the launch that killed.

Stock mode

Off by default. Set Stocks.StocksPerHole on the host and every player starts each hole with that many lives. Each star KO costs one; lose the last and you are out of the hole, eliminated on the scoreboard, while everyone else plays on. Your lives show as small bubbles above your percent. The host's number is the rule for the whole lobby.

Turning things off

Three master switches, each layer coming off cleanly on its own (com.sbg.shields.cfg, or in game with ModConfig):

[Shield]  ShieldAbsorbsHits = false   -> vanilla bubble: blocks everything, never breaks
[Percent] PercentEnabled    = false   -> no percent, no scaling, vanilla knockback, no death
[Percent] KillZoneEnabled   = false   -> percent climbs, nobody dies

RootWhileShielded = false lets you move with the bubble up. Bubble.BubbleReflects = true restores the game's wall that bounces things back, and must then match for everyone in the lobby. DI, teching, hang time, the flicker and the embers each have their own switch.

Recommended

ModConfig, so you can change settings in game rather than editing the file.

Report a bug

Open an issue at https://github.com/elihamster/SuperBattleBros/issues and include:

• which version you and everyone else in the lobby were on,
• whether you were the host,
• the lines from BepInEx\LogOutput.log that contain SBG Shields (in r2modman: Settings > Browse profile folder). The mod logs what it did and why; those lines are usually the whole answer.

Building from source

Needs the .NET SDK, the game installed through Steam, and BepInEx in an r2modman profile. dotnet build produces the developer build; dotnet build -c Release the one that ships. If your Steam or profile paths differ from the defaults, copy SbgShields.csproj.local.example to SbgShields.csproj.local and set them there. .\package.ps1 builds and zips a Thunderstore package into dist\.