Have you ever wanted to make your own fighting game but didn't have the time or the knowledge to do so? Well MUGEN is the first step for any fighting game fan with these dreams to start. With MUGEN, you can build your own fighting game with all the characters you wish, just look at mine for example. Building a MUGEN is very simple and will only take about one day to learn! Perfect for anyone with a weekend appetite for gaming! So sit back and let's explore the world of MUGEN!

Step 1: Download MUGEN

First step is to download MUGEN. The site is here. Once you download it, unzip it using whatever program you wish, I use 7Zip. This is the basic MUGEN that most people start out with. Very bland, gray and has two characters with 12 slots for more characters.

Step 2: Find a Screenpack

This boring screenpack will not do for us. A screenpack is MUGEN term for the whole system. All the menus, the character select and more. The characters and stages are their own separate files, so we will get to those later. You can find other screenpacks here.
The screenpack that I am using and will use for this instructable is IMT (Blue) by user Acey. It can be downloaded here

I recommend this one as it can hold as little as 70 characters, a good start for anyone. Mine hold's 336, which also comes with the pack.

Some MUGEN screenpacks do not include the program and require you to copy all of the contents of the screenpack into the default MUGEN you downloaded last step. This one, the author was nice enough to give us MUGEN with it, as well as a very helpful program called VSelect, but we will get back to that later. Special thanks to the creators!

Step 3: Get Characters

After extracting IMT from it's compressed format, the next step is to get some characters to populate your game! For this step, we will yet again visit Mugen Free For All. Here, everyone is so nice they ordered everything into neat categories, with COLLECTIONS being the place I head to the most, for convince. Let's start with these. Six characters from MARVEL Vs. Capcom 2. Fair enough. Download the file.

After extracting the files, your folder should look like this (I renamed the IMT (Blue) folder to MUGEN Instructable. )

Step 4: Adding the Characters

To add the characters to the game, copy the folders and paste them inside the 'chars' folder, which is located inside the IMT (Blue) folder. Next up, we need to add them to the actual code! This may sound difficult, but if you can type in the characters name, you can code them into the game. To code MUGEN, go to the 'data' folder. This is enough to make some of you panic most likely, but don't worry, you won't touch most of these components! Instead, go to the IMT04 folder. Here will be an image file, and two .def files. 'Select' controls your characters and stages and 'system' is, well, the system. Open the select.def. You may be wondering how, as you most likely have never heard of a .def file before. But simply open the file with Notepad. Yes, Notepad. Now everything is in clear English.

Under [Characters], simply type the name of the character. Your first few lines should now look like this.

;---------------------------------------------------------------------
[Characters]

;Row1
storm
Blackheart
Cyclops
JinSaotome
Magneto

;Row2
Psylocke
CharName[002]
CharName[003]
CharName[004]
CharName[005]

And Ta Da! Open MUGEN and there they are!

Step 5: Adding Stages

Now what good is a fighting game without a good venue?? To get a stage, we are heading back to the wonderful people at MUGEN Free For All! Let's take a basic stage from Street Fighter II, Guile's Stage. Extract the folder and place it's contents into the 'stage' folder. Open up your select.def again, and scroll to the bottom, where you'll find [ExtraStages]. It should look like this.

;-----------------------
[ExtraStages]
;Put extra stages here. They will be available in VS and Watch modes.
;For example, you can insert "stages/mybg.def".

stages/Stage0.def

Below stages/Stage0.def (the training stage included with MUGEN), add stages/guilestageDG.def

What this does is tell the game to simply look in the stages folder, and pull out that specific file for use as a stage. Boot up MUGEN's VS Mode, select two characters and pick the stage. Congrats!

Step 6: Finishing Touches

This is most of what you need to set up and start building your own personal MUGEN roster. But there are a few things that I should note. Below the [ExtraStages] in the select.def is [Options]. [Options] controls the order of who appears in Arcade Mode. To make a character appear later in Arcade Mode, simply add ",order = x" with x being a 1-9 number, 1 appearing first, then 2, etc. Say I want to fight a few level 1 characters then fight a level 2 as a boss. Everyone is level 1 automatically, so just add ,order = 2 to your boss, for this example, I will use Magneto. Make sure you change your values under [Options] to this

arcade.maxmatches = 3,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0

This simply means that you fight 3 level 1 characters, then one level 2 car. It should look like this.

;---------------------------------------------------------------------
[Characters]

;Row1
storm
Blackheart
Cyclops
JinSaotome
Magneto, order = 2

;Row2
Psylocke
CharName[002]
CharName[003]
CharName[004]
CharName[005]

And with your [Options], Magneto should now appear after you beat 3 randomly selected characters.

And that's about it! Congratulations! Now go amaze your friends with your fighting game skill!