onsdag 12 juni 2013

Gameplay all done

Phew!

That's it, finally all of the gameplay in the game is done. The last few weeks really have been good for me inspiration-wise, which has allowed me to get this far in the process in such a short time. As I have mentioned before, only the GUI-parts and everything that takes place in between the levels are left. I made a checklist and a rough estimate which tallied up to a little more than two weeks of work. So far my estimates have been very generous, as I am currently like a month ahead of the initial schedule, but I think this one will be more true to the actual time things will take to complete. And of course that is not counting the music, which really is the only hurdle right now. More updates later when I start sorting out the non-dirty work.

tisdag 11 juni 2013

Megaman confirmed for Smash Bros!

Yo!

E3 is in full steam right now and today Nintendo revealed that Megaman will be one of the new challengers in the next Smash Bros game! Yay! Maybe Megaman isn't dead after all? Although Nintendo are obviously not Capcom and it's their IP so you never now about that.

Regarding my fan game all that is left to be done is the last of the Wily stages' bosses and then that's all done as far as the actual gameplay components are concerned. The boss is planned out and I have done all the sprites for it so it's just the actual programming left which should be done in a day's work. It's very nice to have virtually all of the dirty work done at this point since it really will be easy sailing from here. I'm looking forward to completing the game so people can play it, and so I can begin work on my next project which will A. Not be a fan game and B. Probably be way easier to program and create in general.

Have a good one!

söndag 9 juni 2013

Update

Hello!

The first Wily stages boss is done and like I hoped and predicted it cooperated fairly well, once I figured out that I had switched the x and y coordinates in one place. I don't want to spoil the boss but if you have ever played a Megaman game before you might have an idea what it could be. What's left now are the remaining three Wily stages' bosses and work has begun on one of them. After that is done everything needs to be tied together as far as the game goes, with menues and a password system. This is mostly just stuff that will take x time to do, it's not really tricky at all. Music and sound effects also need to be done, the music could prove to be a bit problematic because I need to either find someone to do the music or learn it myself which could take some time. I've done my fair share of music using a computer, but the chiptune stuff I've never tried.

On the list is also adding Roll as a playable character which has always been the idea for me at least from day one. Which could prove a bit problematic as well since the engine as far as Megaman's sprite goes is the patchiest piece of code in the game. The reason is I programmed it before everything else to see that I could do it which was good for that reason but it certainly has given me a lot of headache throughout the process of creating this game. I've found out that the less built-in functions in Gamemaker that you use, the better the game turns out. And of course I started out by using almost exclusively the stupid GM functions since I didn't know better at the time, as opposed to coding them in GML. That's all for now, more updates later.

fredag 7 juni 2013

Megaman 42

Greetings!

Welcome to the blog for my video game development projects. I was going to hijack my old blog -> servadacsgamingrants.blogspot.com, but sadly Google ate that one up. Or rather, made it impossible for me to access it anymore. So here we are at a new address.

Playing video games has always been a big part of my life, minus some periods where I couldn't afford to buy new consoles or I did other things. One of the game franchises I played the most as a kid and have replayed countless times as an adult are the Megaman games. Sometime around 2001 one of my friends came up with the idea that the two of us and another pal of ours would make our own Megaman game. He also came up with a number of names for the Robot masters in said game. The names were mostly puns like Mad Man etc. I was up for this, but even at the time I kind of knew nothing would come of it because that's usually what ends up happening with this kind of stuff. Anyways, among the three of us I am the 'art' guy since I've always liked drawing. Hence I was going to do the graphics and leave the programming to the second childhood friend of mine who is very good at those things.

So I did some concept drawings, and pixel art for the Robot Masters. But that was basicly it. We had a few discussions about it on icq, but like I had expected in the back of my mind all along, the whole project never materialized. Many years later I got the itch again and drew seven Robot Masters from the initial ideas, colored them and uploaded them to my deviantart account -> http://plageus.deviantart.com/. The game has always been in the back of my mind but I was convinced it would never happen since I just don't know programming well enough to do any of this.

Flashback to about two months ago. I've been browsing 4chan since late 2007 and early this year m00t released a few additional boards, one of them being /vr/ about retro games. The nostalgia rush I got from the discussions on there was unreal and our fan Megaman game came into my mind once again. I had this game sitting on my hard drive that I hadn't played - Megaman x Street Fighter. Someone on a stream I watch mentioned the game which made me finally play it. I kind of enjoyed it for what it was, but when I read that it had been made in GameMaker, that blew my mind. You could do that in GameMaker??? I had tried GM but I could just do horrendously crappy games in which the animations didn't work and the player got stuck everywhere. So I booted up GM and tried making a Mega Man engine. Three long hard days later I had a working engine - made almost completely with the built-in functions in GM 8.1 (minimal coding) which is insane to me now.

The last two months I've spent making graphics and coding the stages, enemies and Robot Masters. Currently all RM stages are done including the RM's themselves. The game is actually like 75% complete at this point, I have the Wily Stage bosses left to go but they shouldn't be too much hassle. The menu stuff is really easy compared to everything else and shouldn't be any problem at all. Note though that I know absolutely nothing about the Megaman fan game community if there is such a thing. If Capcom get their lawyers on my ass for doing this, so be it, I mostly did it for myself anyway and I've learned so much about game development in this short time. I just know that in 2001 we got this idea and it has now become reality thanks to me. That was obviously long before even Megaman 9 or 10 were released.

Here is a video of a now outdated version of the game, most of the graphical glitches in this video have been fixed now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLzmXKJXZBQ

This is already long for a blog post but I wanted to make a mini-FAQ so here goes:

Q: Why didn't you just make a rom-hack?

A: Firstly I have absolutely no idea how to do a rom-hack and I think learning it would just not have been worth it. Also I want this to be its own game as much as it can be, I don't want to build upon another MM game. Extremely few sprites in the game now have been taken straight from another Megaman game, besides good ol' Rocky himself obviously.

Q: Is Rush, the ability to slide or the charge-up megabuster in the game?

A: No. I have based the game on Megaman 1, my favorite game of all time in fact, not just in the franchise of classic MM games. And of course that game has none of those things. Personally I think all of these additions don't add anything to the game play. MM9 and 10 didn't include the slide or the charge-up buster and there is a reason for that. There are no items in this game, be it Magnet Beam or MM2-style items, but you will be able to use one of the weapons as an item...

Q: How come you don't use the palette limitation for the NES?

A: When I started making the graphics I thought the palette limitation was 256 colors for the NES so I just didn't bother to look it up. As I understand now it's something along the line of 56 colors(?), but converting all the sprites would just not be worth it at this point. A rough estimate of the number of sprites in the game currently is 700 plus backgrounds. Also if this would have been a big consideration for me I would've made sure to stay true to the hardware limitations regarding that. Megaman 42 is intended to be a game that pokes fun at the whole Megaman franchise, so this purist stuff is rather besides the point. You can make damn sure that I've used all sorts of mathematical calculations that the NES could never do as well. You just have to draw the line somewhere when it comes to this stuff, and I've intentionally been generous. Also MMxSF obviously didn't use the limitation and I've never read any complaints about that. The fact that I'm color blind doesn't help either. In the future I will make sure to use the correct colors though because I do plan on making at least one more NES-style retro game after this one.

That's it for now I think. I will update the blog when some more progress on the game is made.

Later!