History

Mushroom Kingdom Fusion is a Mario crossover fangame originally created by JudgeSpear and developed by Fusion Fangaming. It uses a heavily modified Hello Engine 3 with simplified Mario gameplay, and features several different playable characters, over 150 playable levels that cover a large variety of video game franchises, and an overarching story that ties up the existence of the game's world. Originally known for its crossover levels with elements from Halo, Mega Man, and Doom, the game quickly evolved after JudgeSpear showcased the game in its earliest state to YouTube. At the time, the game was known only as Super Mario Fusion: Mushroom Kingdom Hearts, and would primarily focus on Mario gameplay in different worlds and locales. Once Obreck joined the development team, however, the game shifted its focus to crossover gameplay thanks to the introduction of different playable characters such as Luigi, Sonic, Tails, Wario, Roll, Arthur, and Simon Belmont. During its initial development period from 2007-2013, many ideas for the game came and went, including plot elements, levels, and playable characters that were planned but never implemented. In 2013, the game was officially cancelled and the game's source was released to the public. The game remained dormant until 2018, where development was picked up by D-Turbokiller until the end of the year. From 2019 onward, I've been the game's lead developer. 

What was wrong with the game? Why was it cancelled after such a lengthy development period?

MKFusion was cancelled for many reasons after its initial development period. Spaghetti code, a bloated source, lack of manpower, lack of motivation, and lack of time. The game in its entirety was, simply put, a mess. Bringing content from a developer source and into the master source was a lengthy process and quite often there were complications with game objects being different between versions. Much of the game's programming was hard to understand due to the lack of comments within most of the code, and it was difficult to find out what code did without endless trial and error in Game Maker 8. In addition to this, many of the game's ideas were simply too ambitious, and many ideas that were planned to be implemented in the game were never worked on despite being held onto. 

So where does that leave us today?

As of recently, I've taken it upon myself to improve the game in any way possible. Firstly, the game's source was moved to use Game Maker 8.1, which has many improvements over the previous version. Many unnecessary or redundant features have been removed or revamped to work better, and much of the game's bloat was removed since resources and code could be searched for directly using GMKSplitter. Though in some levels the game looks dated, the gameplay is still rather solid, but it's not perfect. Of the bugs that have been fixed so far, slope physics and collision with brick blocks have been improved, and many gameplay elements have been modified to make the game easier overall. The game has been updated to v0.7, and a full list of changes from the previous versions can be found here. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts over the past year, MKFusion has many technical issues that keep it from being improved upon further in a better engine.

Technical issues?

MKFusion is currently stuck in Game Maker 8.1, and there are many reasons as to why the game hasn't being ported to Game Maker Studio yet. The most glaring issue with the game is an obsolete game option known as "Treat uninitialized variables as value 0". Although this was originally used because of the limitations with code execution order at the time, the Fusion team got very comfortable with this option being on, unfortunately, and as a result, several of the game's objects do not have properly initialized variables. Up until recently, the game also used many obsolete commands, although this has largely been mitigated. The game could technically continue to run in Game Maker 8.1, but there are two more issues that have come up that simply can't be solved without some sort of extraordinary solution. The first is that certain PCs can't open the game due to an "Unexpected error" occurring while the game loads. The error has been identified to be caused by over-sized 32-bit programs not properly loading on some 64-bit machines, and a workaround has been found: the use of the Large Address Aware patch. The other issue, however, is that due to the game's size, the sound engine will always break after playing the game for an extended period of time (anywhere from 45 minutes to a few hours of gameplay are enough for this to happen). This results in input lag, strange game behavior, and broken sound in general. The only way to fix this issue would be to have all sound-effects be handled by an external source, but this would essentially force the game to stay in the otherwise out-of-date Game Maker 8.1.

What are the plans for the game? Will it ever get a v1.0 release?

Yes. The game WILL be receiving a v1.0 release, but this may not happen for a long, long time. My current plans for the game are to scrap the old, overly ambitious plans for the game and double down on what already exists and bring everything together in a way that leaves fans satisfied. The original story for the game, as well as a few characters (Ryu Hayabusa, Meta Knight, Kirby, Samus), have all been cut. Currently, I'm in the painstaking process of optimizing a lot of the game's code and initializing variables for whichever objects need that. On top of all this, I'm trying to make the game look nicer and a little less out of date. Of course, I can't do all of this alone. I'm looking for programmers to help fix up the game's objects, sprite artists to design sprites for a few player characters and other important objects, and level designers to create levels for the ever-elusive world 0. Basically, I'm looking for people that would like to help out with the game. Of course, I don't expect anyone to help me out with initializing variables, as this is a very tedious process that can only be done object-by-object in some cases. Luckily, tools such as GMKSplitter and Notepad++ can make the process much faster as they've allowed me to severely cut down on the amount of time I need for each enemy object, for instance. If worse comes to worse, then I'll simply cobble together what exists of the game and have it be showcased in a "what could have been" way.