Most of my time was spent working at my video store (My last day is on Sunday!), packing up meat and having my going-away party. Therefore, not as much got done as I wanted, but there is still a lot to share.
The main attraction of this post is probably going to be the new Morph Balls. This was a subject of debate amongst myself and others as well as one of my longest-standing criticisms. For the longest time, I had it in my mind that the Morph Ball should always be less than half of Samus' size in any aspect - 3D, top-down and side-view. My reasoning was based heavily on my method of level design; how all of my tilesets are set to a 16x16 or 8x8 grid. In general, Samus is meant to fit in gaps no smaller than 13 pixels wide. As a result, I ended up making the Morph Ball insanely tiny, rather than making it the proper size and then using a 7x7 collision mask. I fought and fought for this to the point where I now feel silly about having fought it in the first place. Increasing the size of the sprite catered to three major things that I had in mind from the start when it came to the player sprites:
1: Simplifying the level design by making Morph Ball tunnels 8 pixels wide.
2: Upping the size of the player sprites allows room for more detail on the sprite itself.
3: Showing a sense of depth by having parts of the scenery overlap the player.
To explain better, look at the following sample:
The purple circles are Samus' actual collision masks. This gives you a sense of depth when you are brushing against walls by making parts of the walls overlap the player - particularly in exterior environments, like in these screenshots:
http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o24/Arclese/screenshot100-6.pnghttp://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o24/Arclese/screenshot101-7.pngAll this explanation is just postponing what you are all probably wanting to see, so here are the new sprites:
They look excellent, but I might do some more palette tweaking with the Gravity, Phazon and Corruption variations to help give a little more contrast to the edges, in particular. I also used some of Rundas45's side-view Morph Ball sprites for the HUD element. The Corruption one is a placeholder edit and will definitely change. Palettes are slightly different from the actual in-game Morph Balls, but not far. Also, realistically, the Morph Balls in the HUD element don't reflect the top-down sprites, which is something I will fix down the road. For now, these are very adequate placeholders.
Moving on, I have been experimenting a bit with a new tileset. I aptly named it, "Shrubbery" and its purpose is to further attempt to detail the environments with plants and the like. The only trouble is that basically all of the tiles are supposed to be placed on walls. Thankfully, I am in the process of having them converted into original top-down works. Here are a couple screenshots for you to look at so please leave a little feedback:
http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o24/Arclese/screenshot100-5.pnghttp://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o24/Arclese/screenshot101-6.pnghttp://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o24/Arclese/screenshot102-6.pngYou can see that I also made the lighting system a lot darker so the lights themselves serve a much better purpose and actually make a difference when you play. I am still tweaking it a little. Other than that, the main things you should be eyeing are the fern-looking plants on the walls and the vines on the walls inside caves.
Veni Mortem has made some nice animations for the ice barriers. One is a shattering animation and one is a melting animation. I have not fully implemented them in-game yet, but the animations are pretty much done. Here they are:
The above are crappy .GIF files, so the transparency is a little messed up and the animation speed is off, but there they are.
Finally, as of late I have been making some new destructible block sprites, such as the Bomb Blocks, Missile Blocks, etc. I will put those up when everything is done. I should have even more stuff to show since I will be re-doing the 8x8 blocks and then making new 16x16 ones.
Some other changes I have made lately include making secrets break more traditionally like in the original games (Breaking one tile to reveal an item under it), adding a different block-break animation and many other things. Other than that, almost all of the sprites for the beams have been redone once again. Here are a couple screenshots from some of the beams that underwent drastic changes:
http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o24/Arclese/screenshot103-3.pnghttp://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o24/Arclese/screenshot107-2.pnghttp://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o24/Arclese/screenshot109-1.pngFrom left to right: Regular Plasma Beam, charged Nova Beam and charged Dark Beam.
In this next week, I intend to add the ability to draw in pickups by using the Charge Beam and perhaps adding some new mechanic to the Morph Balls to give the player more of a reason to use it outside of going through tunnels. I have tossed around the idea of removing the Screw Bomb and putting the Boost Ball in. Please send me your thoughts on this.
On the topic of sending things, I am no longer using the "metroidcoven.com" email. Please use
echojerichox@gmail.com from now on.
That will be all for now... and wow, this update is probably up there with some of the longest I have done!
- Echo
