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| Posts by arotenbe |
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For a late Memorial Day announcement...
  
You might remember me (but you almost certainly don't) as the guy who showed up one day, submitted a one-world-long level design exercise called The Secret of the Switches, and promptly vanished to wallow in schoolwork for a year. But I'm back!
The tongue-in-cheek name notwithstanding, there are a few interesting things to look at in this hack-to-be.
 
First of all, this is a Metroidvania-type hack. Single huge level, multiple areas, powerups, save points, the whole nine yards. (Side note: RealLink's Toad Jump FG rip is awesome.)
The story is a little more in-depth than the typical Mario platformer, but I don't want to spoil it yet. Suffice it to say that the above image is not representive of the rest of the plot.
  
If you're trying to figure out what Toad is talking about there: using my AWESOME HACKING SKILLS (i.e. x86 assembly knowledge and a list of 65c816 instructions) I Frankensteined the SMW points system onto the Metroid HP patch, so that killing enemies restores Mario's health. Not the most original idea ever, but it's kind of amusing.
Here's the first area after the intro level. The "icy wasteland" aspect is part of the story.
I'm still short on GFX in many places. I'll post more screenshots when I remedy this. (Also, all of the non-SFX music is custom.)
Here's a couple of the custom sprites. The icicles hurt when you touch them, and some of them fall. The Buzzy Beetle acts a little differently than the normal version...
I wonder what these blocks are? They certainly look important. Why do they have a number on them? What's the weird logo?
The wavyness of this HDMA background is really just a big table of 16-bit X-offsets that's rotated one position every few frames. Simple, but nice visually.
AAAAAAAAGGGHH RUN AWAY RUN AWAY! These are Super Bloopers. They move faster than Mario and behave far more erratically than regular Bloopers. Just getting through this one hallway alive - let alone without taking a hit - is a serious challenge, especially since you can only get down here once you have the Mushroom powerup.
Hmm... now where are we?
I have a bad feeling about this...
GAAH! I call this the Blink Turret. Every couple seconds, it pops up and fires twice straight to the left (an obvious Venus Fire Trap hack). Until it pops up, it looks exactly like the blinking lights on the ground, except that its sprite lacks the little one-pixel specular highlight. Sneaky, huh?
You can't tell from the screenshot, but these glowing green pipes are ExAnimated and look really cool.
So yeah. It's really hard to show off Metroidvanias because half the fun is wandering in circles trying to figure out where to go next. Besides the stuff not in the screenshots, I also have at least three more themed areas planned that I haven't begun constructing yet, plus a partially-finished overworld that's used as part of the save block system. No bosses are finished yet, but I plan on having roughly eight in the final version.
What do you think? Comments? Suggestions?
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Originally posted by ZMannThe only issue I have is with the icy wasteland palette (10th screenshot); the foreground is a bit too bright for my tastes.
Gah... I played with that one palette over and over, trying to get something that conveyed the right effect without being completely eye-searing. I guess I'll have to turn it down a little.
Here's some concept images I made while I was working on this project:
Here's 16x16 and 32x32 versions of the mysterious logo from before. It's... a bird with a fork for a leg? Although, if you look at it backwards, it looks more like a chicken. Whatever it is, it was on the obviously important blocks, so it must be something interesting.
The full-size title screen logo, straight out of MS Paint. Let me tell you, importing this thing was a real pain... manually mapping each pixel down to 2bpp because YY-CHR was too dumb to do it for me, then copying it in and lining it up to minimize the number of 8x8 tiles used, then copying each tile into GFX29 without accidentally overwriting any of the other graphics in that file. I just know that, as soon as I post this, someone's going to give me step-by-step instructions for how I could have done this in a much easier way.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go to sleep.
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Originally posted by UMAIs the logo Lugia or something?
No.
OK, making a silhouette that looks like an animal was a bad idea. No matter what you pick, it's going to look like a Pokemon.
And just to repeat, no. It's an original... thing. Which I'm not going to reveal yet.
Partially because I only have half the plot worked out.
You want to know the truth? I was drawing pixel art for something else, noticed that part of it looked like a bird, turned it into a 16x16 logo, expanded it into a 32x32 logo, and started coming up with a plot for the hack from that. That was, like, six months ago.
Why am I still awake?
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Thanks to everyone for all the positive feedback!
Originally posted by GoldenSonic15Those have better not start appearing until later in the game. 
They do only show up a ways into the game, as there are some other requirements besides just the Mushroom to get to that area. Furthermore, the first (and so far only) time they show up, there's a starman and a couple enemy shooters in the room right before that you can farm HP off of; a save point two rooms before; and they're the only enemy in that one corridor (which leads to another save point after a couple more enemy-less rooms).
Later in the game, you don't even have to deal with them, since they can be taken out in one hit with fireballs.
(Ooh... bad Chozo Ghost memories.)
Originally posted by GoldenSonic15Also, awesome idea with the HP system. It seems like it might make the game a bit too easy, but I like it nonetheless. 
Trust me - it does not make the game too easy. Since the HP system replaces the points system, jumping on a single enemy earns a measly 3 HP (out of 20 taken by damage), while killing a bunch of enemies in a row earns you more and more HP per hit. I guess the aloe lotion is rubbing off on Mario's shoes or something.
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Originally posted by GoldenSonic15... Wait, mushroom powerup? What?
(This doesn't seem very generic...)
Do you plan on releasing a demo, or are you just going to wait to release the entire thing at once?
Ninjaedit:
Originally posted by MetalstrikerThe easy games sometimes is funny,but if it is too easy...look boring,but this game look funny!
Wait, what?
OK, I'm lost.
1. The powerup system will be a combination of SMW's regular powerups - as permanent expansions - with new powerups and items. (As noted, I hacked up the Metroid HP patch to the point of near-unrecognizability.) Plus, I've got the SRAM Expand patch set up with a bunch of unused space so that I can make things like one-time only bosses, doors, and setpieces.
2. I plan on releasing a demo, but not for a while yet.
3. I have no idea what Metalstriker is talking about.
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Originally posted by GoldenSonic15When do you think it will be released, or do you not want to announce that quite yet?
I'm going to hold off on giving a demo release date at the moment. There are too many bugs, broken pipes, and generally missing things at the moment for me to estimate reasonably. I'm also still in "scope creep" mode, trying to figure out just how big I want this hack to be. I'm finding that it's a lot harder to think about than with a traditional design.
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I've got a submap-sized image that I want to import for my OW. It has enough repeating tiles that it fits in 4 ExGFX files, but placing all the 8x8s manually would be a massive pain. Last time I checked, the BG ripper spits out Map16 pages and level backgrounds pre-built, but not overworlds.
I've seen hacks with big images for their OWs, so I know it can be done somehow. Does anyone know how?
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Originally posted by piegoesmooCan't you just select all of the tiles and drag them to the overworld?
The tiles aren't in order for that to work. There's 672 or so tiles in a submap but < 512 tiles in the available GFX space, so some of them are duplicated. Furthermore, the BG ripper doesn't put them in any obvious order.
Originally posted by piegoesmooAssuming when you say OW, you refer to Donut plains, just do that.
Not sure what difference it makes, but I'm using submaps, not the main overworld.
Actually, I have four different images that I want to put on four submaps, which is why I'm hesitant to just buckle down and sort through all the tiles by hand.
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The BG ripper can import 16 color PNGs. I just ran the images I want to use through a posterize filter in Paint.NET and they came out fine. (Trust me, this is a rather unusual overworld I'm making...)
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Seriously? ...
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Just a quick demo of some character-replacement concepts I've been working on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znDiDCteUQU
I wasn't sure whether to put this on the graphics showoff thread or the ASM showoff thread, since it's really a combination of both. The player character uses prerendered 3D graphics a la Donkey Kong Country, with some post-processing and a bit of manual pixel editing to make it look more like a hand-drawn sprite. Why? Because I can't draw. =/
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Originally posted by Sonikku@arotenbe - The only way I could tell that is still SMW is the fact that you used sound #$01 of $1DF9, otherwise I was completely fooled. Glad you liked it. I was actually considering putting in some coins or a Goomba or something so I didn't have to distribute a patch to prove that it's real. 
Basically, there's two parts: LevelASM as the controller, and a custom dynamic sprite as the view. Each climbable ledge is a custom block which, when touched from the side while moving down, plays a sound, sets a flag, and stores the location of the block. That's about it. Everything else is done with LevelASM. All of the animation frames are handled by the custom sprite (think the co-op Luigi sprites). LevelASM is constantly pinning $78 so that you never see Mario underneath.
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| Last edited on 2012-03-13 10:16:25 PM by arotenbe. |
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I'm trying to write an automatic build script that I can run every time I make a change to my hack, so that I don't have to "permanently" apply any tools/patches directly to my ROM (other than LM). So far, I've managed to automate:
* Applying all patches
* Custom sprite insertion
* Custom block insertion (via the manual custom blocks patch, which is totally way better than BTSD and really everyone should just use that)
* Fixing the ROM checksum (with the Checksum Fixer tool)
The only thing that's missing is custom music.
* I can run Addmusic 4.05 from the command line, but then I don't get custom samples. I'd have to use SampleTool to do that, and there's no command line version of the program. (I suppose I could use AutoHotkey or something to control the buttons and drop-down lists in SampleTool, but... eww.)
* Alternatively, I could run AddmusicM. AddmusicM has an interactive command line interface, but that can be automated by piping the ROM name and "yes" answer into it. However, its INIT.asm patch steals some of Lunar Magic's default patch locations, resulting in the "swimming on land" glitch if you apply it after saving to the ROM in LM.
Is there some way to get samples into the ROM that I can call from a command line?
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First I tried diffing the disassembler output on the ROM before and after SampleTool to figure out what it was doing. Then I tried overwriting an unused subroutine in bank 0 with code that JSRs to the address you mentioned.
Then I decided maybe I'll just stick with SampleTool...
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Originally posted by RednGreen
The choir in this is awesome. I've never listened to much of the Golden Sun soundtrack but what I've heard of it is great.
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So here's my first publicly-posted music port. (I've done a bunch before that I never finished or thought weren't good enough. Also, the sheer number of warnings you're supposed to keep in mind kind of scared me off.)
Shadow of the Colossus - Silence
Comments?
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