How to Make a Bonus Stage on MUGEN

Plan your stage before you begin the process. You will want a stage that is visually appealing and complex enough to keep the attention of the player, while being simple enough to tackle as a first project.

Draw or download the graphics for your stage's foreground and background and save the files with the extension PCX. You can find useful resources on MUGEN community websites.

Resize the height of your foreground and background images to at least 240 pixels, the minimum requirement for MUGEN. If your graphics are too small, simply stretching them in your image editor will produce a low quality picture. Instead, consider taking part of the image and duplicating it to cover the extra space.

Create a new SFF file in Fighter Factory and add your foreground and background images. Make sure the SFF and image files are all located in the same directory. Alternatively, you can start by copying one of the default stages and simply replacing the graphics files with your own.

Set "Group" field for both images to 0. Set the "Image" field to 0 for the background and 1 for the foreground.

Fill in the "X" and "Y" values for each image. These values indicate the offset for the image, or the number of pixels you want each image to move from the edge of the screen. Play with these numbers until your background and foreground are in a comfortable position with no empty spaces.

Copy a DEF file from an existing stage and open it in Notepad. You can use one of the files from the default stages if you wish.

Change the "boundleft" and "boundright" values to match your project. You can find boundright by subtracting 320 pixels from your foreground image file's width and dividing by two. Boundleft will be equal to the negative of boundright. For example, if your image is 400 pixels wide, your boundright value is 40 and your boundleft value is -40.

Add your "boundhigh" value by subtracting 240 from your foreground image height and multiplying by -1. For example, if your image is 300 pixels tall, your boundhigh value is -60.

Edit the "zoffset" value if the characters in-game appear to hover over the stage or sink into it. You will need to try different values until it feels right. For the first test, try a value of 200.

Set the "tile" value under "BG back" to "1.0" and the "mask" value to "0." This causes your background to loop repeatedly as the player moves back and forth.

Set the "mask" value under "BG ground" to 1. This properly establishes the transparency between the foreground and background.

Open MUGEN and load your new stage.