Mario’s Madness - March 10th 2026 devlog
Written by @lemonaid24 & @marcojurez19
Happy Mario day to you all, and welcome to the very first Mario’s Madness devlog! It’s been quite a while since we’ve had some transparency about the mod’s development. With it being over 2 years since V2 released and almost 20 months since our last official trailer. But why choose this format to get information across as opposed to something like a trailer you may ask? We personally don't like talking about the mod publicly so much, mainly because a lot of people like to spread misinformation about things or just read whatever we say with a shitty TTS voice and put that out, Plus we believe that keeping you in the dark will make the surprise hit even more than if we were to make a lot of teasers and stuff like we did with v2 (and it also helps us with not setting high standards for ourselves while we work on the mod) BUT… we will make an exception this time, just because it is MARIO DAY!
Have a merry late Christmas
But first let's talk about the Christmas update before getting into the future stuff because surprisingly there is a little bit to talk about here.
This update has been a very VERY long time coming. Since near the start of V2’s development in 2022 this is something the dev team has been wanting to do. It's been something planned for so long it's almost surreal to see it fully realized
Old ass marco art jumpscare
The original idea was related to MX and Lucas, but eventually the concept pivoted into a retelling of A Christmas Carol, with us eventually realizing M works as a perfect parallel to Scrooge after V2’s ending. Meaning it could not only be a fun little side thing while working on future updates and other non-madness projects, but also allows it to serve as a bridge between different updates, and act as a transition for the character out of the role he had before
While we still worked ourselves to the bone to get this out in time, the update was VERY close to releasing in 2024, with a lot of the art being nearly done, and wahoo-hoo-hoo being fully in game by christmas time of that year. Yet unfortunately due to circumstances fully out of our control we needed to redo the song, which sadly killed any chance of it releasing that year
BUT WE DID NOT QUIT! If there is one thing I can say I love about this team it's that we never quit no matter what. And thanks to the assistance of our AMAZING artists, musicians, and coders we were able to get the update out just in time for Christmas, we hope you enjoyed it as a small little surprise :) and if you haven’t seen it and have no clue what im talking about feel free to check it out here!
The future of Mario’s Madness
Let's talk about why all of you are here, we have decided to make a very drastic change to the planned future of this mod
In the past we have talked about our plan for the future of Mario’s Madness, this is a rough outline of the updates we were planning on doing, it went essentially like this:
After V2’s release the plan was to release deluxe, a small update with a few songs redone done as “retakes” (taking the original idea of the songs and changing it drastically), with a few bonus songs that we wanted to include in v2 but didn’t quite have the time, or just generally songs that didn’t fully fit in the mod. Packaged into a little bonus update, while also porting V2 to a not old ass version of psych engine so the mod could generally run better.
However as time progressed the update slowly got larger and larger, due to some unfortunate circumstance we kept needing to redo or add more and more to the update to the point where eventually we decided to split the update up, which leads us to what we have planned today with the Resauce. Which was going to be all of the redone V2 stuff from deluxe.
However…
Today I’d like to announce that the Resauce update is being expanded into a complete restructuring of the mod, overhauling the story and pacing of the mod!
While V2 has its strong points, it's very much a byproduct of the time and era it was made in, and as time passes, the worse some aspects of the mod (like the story and pacing, as well as the quality of some art and music) age. And while Resauce and Deluxe would have helped fix some problems of the mod, at the end of the day they both just felt like a bandaid fix for a much larger problem. The sisyphean task of going back and changing songs from V2 does not fix the core flaws of the mod. These problems were strong enough to where it would’ve been difficult to continue within the epilogue. So a few weeks ago we made the difficult decision to completely reststructure the mod and remake the story.
“M” has been rewritten to be a totally different character with more powerful and meaningful motives, stripping away all of that “Daddy Dearest revenge” thing (to be completely honest, this plot was written back when this was the norm for FNF mods, so it didn't age the best given the current standards)
This has been a thing we've had in the works for quite a bit, Christmas Surprise was a nice little send-off to the old story, that way we can NOW focus on this new Mario.
Some of the art for the mod will be heavily improved, our vision for Madness was to always have a sort of “consistent” artstyle, that being like a fucked up inbred between old PhantomArcade 2021 drawings and my own old artstyle. We WILL keep some of this in the mod so as to not strip it away from its own charm, we will only improve over what we built on.
To those concerned that your favorite song is going to get changed for the worse fret not! The overhaul will essentially act as raising up the weaker aspects of the mod while also adding extra songs to allow the story to work better in a new context! And if the song is getting a full remake for example, then the V2 version will more then likely be playable in the freeplay. And all of the assets already being made for resauce are just being moved into this remake, so basically… at the end of the day wouldn’t this just be a New Super Mario’s Madness?
While most of the Retakes from deluxe are being promoted (no pun intended) into being the main versions of the song as opposed to a retake, there are 2 exceptions to this rule where the context around the song is so different from the original that replacing it didn’t fully make sense (one of these being Golden Land Retake, with the original Golden Land instead getting a V4 by Antinarious and RedTV53)
And as this devlog releases I'm sure a few concerned fans are screaming from the rooftops, “Another billion years to Madness’ development! We never gonna get to play this” so, to that I say:
- We are not starting from scratch! Some songs (like MSAGR9, or Unbeatable for example) aren’t being changed AT ALL which means “remaking the mod” isn’t a true statement.
Some songs will only have visual changes, such as Its-a-me, Powerdown, Day Out, and many others I can't list right now.
- The remake isn’t coming in one single update, but instead in patches!
By moving to patches as opposed to 1 large update this means YOU get to play updates more frequently and we don’t have the daunting task of overhauling the entire mod all at once. Instead of us silently grinding away over the course of years for one update we get to focus on a few select songs while also working on other projects. Making the mod less straining and stressful to work on for the devs too! So it's a win-win
You may be questioning “why not do deluxe first though? It’s the update you announced first so wouldn’t it make more sense to do that first as opposed to this ‘remake’?” And while that does make sense in a vacuum, deluxe at its core was an addition to v2. And as it exists right now we have 1 of 2 options with the path we take development, we either:
- Release deluxe’s content on its own first, essentially leaving half a mod without being able to access the rest of V2
or…
- Release the remake first and ignore deluxe for the time being, leaving the update we promised years ago to be “delayed” (can something be delayed if it never had a release date?)
It was a difficult decision, and ignoring deluxe further isn’t something we wanted to do. But in the end we decided it would be best to focus on the remake first and foremost, while also sprinkling in some of deluxe’s new songs throughout the patches.
The thing that's been really difficult about Madness development is finding the time to actually work on it, it is no surprise that a lot of pillar members during v2’s development are a lot older now, they have now a lot more important things to attend to in real life and will obviously not have the time to work on the mod like how they did over 3 years ago, that combined with the fact that some of our team members have entered college it has made development a lot more difficult.
It is also no surprise to everyone that we don't work solely on Madness, some of our team members are also behind another mods, such as D-Sides REDUX, Sonic Legacy, Hypnos Lullaby & Funkin at Freddy’s Night 2, this last one being our main priority for the past 2 months, as we really need for this project to release this year, literally nothing can get progress until Night 2 is done (yet another reason why we decided to split Resauce into patches)
TLDR: Resauce is getting expanded into a full remake to fix the foundational issues with the mod, with a smaller “patch” update format so you get updates more frequently and sooner
We believe that in the long run this will be the best thing for the mod, and we hope you look forward to the remake.
IT’S ALL GONE FUUUUUCK ITS ALL GONE WE LOST ALL OF IT FUUUUUUUUCK