I beat the game in a hilarious and easy fashion by killing the Balrog on level 11. I noticed that you could hit him every so often if he was running, so next time I brought a decapitated head with me. Kicking Umber Hulk severed head right into Balrog's face as he tried to run past.

BALROG KILLED BY SOCCER! GOOOOAAAAAAALLL! 

Heh, I got my first Balrog kill last night zapped him to death when I leveled up near him :D

I have noticed an annoying bug where if you push an arrow key immediately as your closing the menu (I'm presuming while the menu is fading out?), it reopens the menu >.< rather frustrating when your immediate survival depends on getting out of the way as quickly as possible!

Eh? Do you mean that the other way around?

I think the main problem with the rug move (other than the rug magically appearing out of nowhere) is readability. We'd have to make extra falling over animations for all the characters (I'll give you a hint: it's not going to happen), or it will look like the rug just throws them up with no rotation or anything. Well, that's what I think anyway.

Very nice. Just keep in mind that where he's gripping the umbrella should to be more or less directly above his center of gravity.

Just coming back to the recovery move issue, how about his ^S is the cape, as his recovery, and ^A becomes Radnom's rope throw?
So basically, you push ^A to activate the cape and slow your descent (rather than being an upward propellant move, makes it unique), and then ^A again to deactivate it.
If you then combined this with the more powerful second jump (the jetpack), it would balance out somewhat.

Also I really like Radnom's rope throw idea, I think it really captures the spirit of the original, without being too hard to integrate into IB.

My 2c

That looks pretty cool. I think it's a little too large though.

It would certainly give them a feeling of the spelunky experience

That's not a bad idea. Like an item spawn, but booby-trapped.

Hrmm, well I could give it a shot, but I don't think it'd be very good. I'll turn my attentions to one of the other characters instead.

This thread blew my fucking mind

Oh hey guys, been a while since I've been here 

Ok so is there anything that needs to be done on Xoda that's not sprite/animation related? Cause I'd be fairly keen to get back into IB, and I worked on Xoda when I was here last time, so 

Oh god no...
Next thing you know, we'd be giving better items to people who are doing worse, and people who are owning could only get shitty items

That's called a cath-up system. More games than you imagine have them, only that they're more subtle than in mario kart. It's kinda necessary actually, at least if you want people with even so sligthly differing skill levels to play toghter. I defenitly think we should implement something like that :D

As an option. I like playing on an even field.

Dynamic handicap sounds good, but really, we can't do what they did in mario kart because in that the items were randomised, while in Indie Brawl (and SSB) you see what you get. This way the only way to favour one player over another would be to spawn better items closer to him, which is just dumb.

Huh, I remember playing Deadly Shadows ages ago, and reading this has made me want to play it again. I really just remember that I sucked at it, but this looks pretty cool.

Oh god no...
Next thing you know, we'd be giving better items to people who are doing worse, and people who are owning could only get shitty items

You could easily make a day/night cycle just with a few different sky backgrounds as an animation. Or something like that.