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Sicari 2 - The Brink of Time (released!!!)

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Posted this out and about, but here's Around the Clock



This is a level in world 5, so you gotta watch out for some tricky setups here! An ever-ascending clock tower. Hopefully ya like it.
I like the aesthetic and the design of the level, taking full advantage of the vertical scrolling with pretty good traps.

Also, the music fits tremendously well with the stage's aesthetics.

LINKS -> YouTube - Discord - Twitter

Another new level, Change of Space.

It looks a lot like a level you'd see in Mega Man. Hot pipes were a neat touch.
GANYMEDE

Chapter Two: Land of No Shame
Wonderful level, Eevee...

The level backgorund reminds me Death Egg Mk. II from Sonic 4 (Episode II) and somehow, Egg Utopia from Sonic Advance 2.
It was his inspiration?

By the way, do you know the Layer 2 and Layer 3 areas from the Level Background? (Spaceship, Stars and Earth)
Interesting level with some really nice visuals as per usual.

I feel on the fence about the usage of the ladders though seeing as Sicari can wall-jump. Can all characters in the game wall jump?
Just feels like they slow down the level a tad but its nothing terrible as they are used in some creative set-ups.

Nice work. #smrpg{y}
Heyyy, been a while since I updated this thread, though I have still been working on the hack! Here are some of the things I've failed to post here lol

first off, here are the vids I posted at C3 but just didn't bother to post here lol
Trailer
Level: The Beach Girls

Anyway, to start, here some enemy sprite updates I've been working on:


I redrew some of them, and I'm making the animations smoother to go better with Sicari and K-16's running animations!


Sneak peek of Event Horizon, the first of TS-94's mysterious and trippy levels. These levels take place outside of the space-time continuum, inside TS-94's own plane of reality.


The second Anna level, Life's a Witch in which Anna must navigate with her broom through a deadly airship.


The fourth boss level, Prisma, an alternate dystopian cyberpunk future!


Here's a rework of the ship level I think I showed off in ages past. I remade the tileset so as to work better with actual level design. The ship also sinks, so watch the water. It's cold...

Finally, I wanna properly announce that Sicari 2 will have Bonus Levels. These are a small selection of levels in which the player will have an opportunity to collect coins and lives. They are accessible upon collecting all five diamonds within a level. After beating the level, you'll be sent to a random bonus level, though if you can't be arsed with it, you can just exit immediately.

That's all, unless I'm forgetting more. Regardless, hope ya liked!
These stages look so cool (and that ship sinking one is scary). The colors work so well together, the animations are so freaking smooth

The tileset in Anna's stage reminds me a lot of Mega Man 3.

LINKS -> YouTube - Discord - Twitter

These are fun levels for real! #smrpg{y}



List Soundtrack - List Hacks

Mega Man X3 OSTs
that sinking ship segment is so tense o_o
did I ever say I love your sprite art? I love your sprite art :)
These tilesets are top-tier. I love the steel textures and that everything is so colorful and soft on the eyes, easy to see and identify, though serious things are going on in them that are more dangerous than they appear. I fell in love with your futuristic 1984 city and the smoothness of all the tileset animations - the airship propellers are notably great. I drew a parallel between "Paradia" and "Paradise" and it added a subtle layer of dark irony IMO that that's the name of the sinking ship: if that was intentional, great thinking, and if not, definitely keep it! I had to stop and take a closer look at TS-94's level, observe the movement of light, and it took me a long time to think of the right words for it - it's like a planar shift from Sicari's eye level, though there are some tiles along the bottom of the set that look almost like they could scramble your matter at the atomic bonding level (don't get turned into a carbon cube or garbled glitch in there, Sicari,) so it's also a sort of threatening dimensional abyss, and the large, noisy quality of it makes also it seem like the edge of the reality it takes place in. I feel pretty fascinated, and curious about this level.

The new sprite animations also look really smooth, except the 4th guy. His wings are awfully stiff compared to the rest of his movement. I can't believe the doggie is a bad guy - are there no good boys in Sicari 2? #ab{:(} Anna flying looks really cool and her stage looks like a cross between Orange Ocean and the Halberd in the Kirby series. Aside from the obvious quality of animations in the sprite, I am impressed by the detail put into the limbs and clothing of the playable characters, including the footwear (one of the most neglected things probably ever in spriting.)

It's clear there is an immense amount of passion and care going into this. It also evokes my imagination quite a bit more than I had expected.

Just look above you...
If it's something that can be stopped, then just try to stop it!
Thank you for the kind words!

Originally posted by Counterfeit
except the 4th guy. His wings are awfully stiff compared to the rest of his movement
I should note that this was captured from the display in LM, since it's being done through ex-animation, but their wings do animate in-game! They basically act as the galoomba analogues here.

Anyway, I'd like to show off two of those bonus levels which I've got in the works

First one you might come across is this one:

A maze-like level where you've gotta collect as many coins as you can under a timer, think DKC basically lol


This second one is a freefall challenge. There are branching paths to take - if you hit a spike, the bonus game ends!
You seem to love using a purple-yellow hue / gradient, and it looks incredibly cool on your levels. For the bonus stages, they seem amazing! I'm interested in seeing how they're handled in the final game.

LINKS -> YouTube - Discord - Twitter

Originally posted by Eevee


Such a nice concept here.
The bonus level have a big Kirby energy and the gradient blends very well with the yellow foreground. Looks like that you're having fun with the power of Tall Levels.

Maybe just maybe the player's position could be higher in the second gif? The reaction's time is kinda low here (at least for me). Keep up!
Exclusive content and nostalgia!
Thanks for the clarification on the wings - your hack has such dramatic changes that it didn't even occur to me that was a Paragoomba reskin.

I can see still more Crash Bandicoot inspiration in spelling out BONUS across the screen, and the design for the first room is like vintage Donkey Kong Country with token spam and a big bold time limit before you are released. Does it also happen to have any hidden rooms with BIG coins or 1ups? Freefall is also such a fun and underrated concept. I am a big fan of bonus rooms in games, especially those two games, and I really think I am going to love the ones you come up with.

It could just be me... I like the gradient but there's something about the background that seems, while cute and eye-poppingly colorful, somewhat off. No vertical scroll is definitely a part of that but I can see the challenge HDMA presents in making the colors move. There may be a coding solution with calculating level height and screen position check to write new colors to each scanline to simulate vertical scrolling, but I don't have that kind of knowledge to create such a thing personally. I do feel like the stars are oddly lifeless and uniform (there appears to be a vertical "stripe" pattern in the arrangement.) ExAnimation for twinkling would fix the lifelessness, and maybe the presence of dense clusters and parts where stars are spread further apart would make it easier on the eyes.

Starry backgrounds are particularly hard and not fun to arrange in an organic (swirls, trails, nebulas, spacious gaps with a few loners) way, because as simple as they look, there is a lot of hard-to-notice variance in tiles that make a big difference, and the matter of filling the sky in a soft-looking way, especially with the color depth of your twilight gradient, is very challenging. Tiles with more small star density, large stars off-center to allow X- and Y-flipping of them to give easier variance in position and distance in Map16 or stripe images, as well as setting some small stars within the tile space of copies of big stars, might just help round out the set.

Edit: vvv YES, this is what I mean. Perfect solution. I need to lurk the UberASM repository way more.

Just look above you...
If it's something that can be stopped, then just try to stop it!
Originally posted by Counterfeit
No vertical scroll is definitely a part of that but I can see the challenge HDMA presents in making the colors move. There may be a coding solution with calculating level height and screen position check to write new colors to each scanline to simulate vertical scrolling, but I don't have that kind of knowledge to create such a thing personally.

Uh... Ehm... *cough*

I also agree that a static background looks a bit jarring, especially if it's so full. If not the gradient, at least the stars.
Here are a few lil things I've been working on lately!
First off here are some changes I've done to the intro sequence.


Redraw of the photograph of K-16, Sicari and Anna. I also drew it in colour and then changed it to sepia so that it looks more natural. Hopefully it looks better!


Establishing shot of Xyria's home, because why not!


Reworked the level select in a few subtle ways, by adding scanlines and drop shadows to the text. There is also a skull icon next to boss levels!



Some pictures of what I've done to Mysteria's level. The latter half of the level is now snowy, and I've also reworked the bricks so that they're a bit more weathered-looking.


Pic of what I've done to the level previously known as "Showtime". I've changed it so it's now kind of a seedy back alley area. Not sure what to call the level now, but I'll think of something.

That's all for now, but lemme know what you think :3
Sicari's smile give me life.
The art here have such an improvement, the sepia is more evident, have more energy. I like it.
For some reason, the art remind me of some Mickey games.

Originally posted by Eevee


Nice! The scanline effect was made by hand (tileset) or is just Layer 3? I can't wait to play the final version, your game seems fun!
Exclusive content and nostalgia!
Originally posted by Eevee

Redraw of the photograph of K-16, Sicari and Anna. I also drew it in colour and then changed it to sepia so that it looks more natural. Hopefully it looks better


I love how the style used for this artwork matches so well with the game, and the sepia color palette gives it more life, I feel.

Originally posted by Eevee

Reworked the level select in a few subtle ways, by adding scanlines and drop shadows to the text. There is also a skull icon next to boss levels!


This looks super cool, though I kinda do have one suggestion. Since there are multiple worlds, I think each one could actually use a different screen palette.

i.e.: World 1 uses the green screen palette that's currently on, and World 2 uses a "blue screen of death" palette.

LINKS -> YouTube - Discord - Twitter

So here's a new level video finally, this time of High Roll Havoc, a casino previously known as "Casino Fight"!



Kids shouldn't gamble, but you're still free to try your luck with the roulette blocks that can be found around the level. If you're lucky you might get some lives from them - or just a single coin!

You may also notice in this vid that Sicari has a new idle animation, just to give her a bit of extra life.

Anyway, hopefully you like!

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