Ridley's First Appearence

After 2 weeks of camp, and a lot of other pointless stuff, I'm finally back on track!  I wish I could have posted earlier, but there was nothing to say because I barely got anything done.  Now that my scedual is clean, I hope to get more done and finish Ceres.

As you know, Ceres' rooms are all complete, along with the escape timer.  That only leaves one thing left, Ridley.  This guy will not be too hard to program, but may be a challenge to make look good.  With that said, I will announce that I may be changing Ridley's attack cycle.  He may be more mobile, and use different breath and body attacks.  Some of these would include a spread of flames and dropping from the celing to "smash" Samus.  None of this is clear yet, so please give your opinions in the comments area below.  Here is a glimpse of what ridly will look like in ceres:

Thanks for reading, I hope to release a demo of Ceres in the near future!

Moving Slowly

Well, sorry I haven't posted in a while, school picked up, finals are coming, not much time to work on FSMR.  I've done some more on Ceres, but not as much as I would have liked.  We now have a good looking countdown for the end of Ceres and started working on Ridly.  His movement is complete (except for the tail) and Kenji Imatake has given him an awesome recolor so he looks like he's in a misty colony instead of a lava pit.  So I have this screenie to show ya:

I'm nearly out...  ....with over 30 sec. left!

We still need to make the place a bit more challenging as you can see from the time I've made in the screenshot above.  I'm hoping it will be done soon and then we can release it as a demo for y'all to play.

Ceres Space Colony

Sorry for the period of dormancy, readers, but you can now expect me to be more active on the forums I participate in and to make more daily progress on FSMR.  Well, with that out of the way, on to the topic of today's post:

I was up last night and this morning working on editing the Ceres rooms that Kenji gave me over on MFM.  They needed to be resized and changed slightly so that the fit the map template and so that Samus could jump over certain obstacles.  I also put some work into making an appropriate map screen and added the boss icons to the map and mini-map.  After adding gradients and so forth to the areas, while aligning the backgrounds, I got a pretty pleasing "spooky" effect.  Here are a few screenshots demonstrating what I have done:

running down the first hallway on the station

oooh, Ridly really was messy with those researchers' guts

the completed mapscreen for ceres

I hope to get more done soon so keep checking the blog for more info and screenshots!

Music and More

I'll start by adressing the "music" part of the title, so here it goes.  We recently aquired a new composer named BlackSword on Kenji's Deviant-Art profile.  He agreed to help as composer for FSMR, so I asked if he would make some custom music for FSMR's upcoming tech-demo.  A week or so later he came back with 4 epic pieces for our demo (no hints on what for you yet...).  Also, at about the same time' one of our old composers returned and with Zyborggian came some of the pieces he remixed for use in FSMR.  They also were awesome and will be used throughout the remake.

Still on the topic of music, I've been working with external files and the like.  This way when one downloads FSMR the game does not take eons to load.  I made a breakthrough with external music files.  I decided to make a sound called "sndAnymusic".  Then in the create event of an object I told it to replace the new sound with my chosen .mp3 file.  Then I played the game and there it was: external music files.

On the topic of "more", I released another test area to my team members.  This contained all of the beam combinations to be used in FSMR.  More helpful advice was given by our numerous testers (which reminds me of how popular this remake has grown on metroid forums across the net) and I have proceded to make some corrections and additions, including the implimentation of map screens (yay).  Expect some screenshots in the next post!

New Stuff

I've been doing a LOT of work on FSMR lately due to some unexpected circumstances.  Our engine programmer, AlexR, gave me his updated MZM engine.  At first I tried to combine it with my older engine but failed, so then I had to start working with that engine and change all the sprites and edit the programming.  Since it did not have the charge beam implimented yet, I had to spend a week trying to make one and failing, redoing it ,failing, and finally doing it right.  Also, we recived a new set of graphics for the beams and subscreen from a contributor on MHQ known as BPac21.  I still haven't finished putting those in the engine yet.

I've also released a test room to a couple of my cohorts on the M:FM forums.  They gave me some very good advice on things to change, plus one found a glitch (ouch).  I have fixed most of these things (if I can) and added some new things to the engine for another test in the near future.  If you are interested in beta testing, E-mail me a request at inferno343@gmail.com.

Moving On

The grunt work is done!  Now we are on to making FSMR awesome.  The next steps we will be taking will be to make the game as Zero Mission-ish as possible.  This will require me to change all of the beam sprites and and modify the HUD.  After that, it will be on to level design. 

We also are planning a demo for FSMR which I hope to release sometime next month.  The demo will take place on a set of chozo ruins.  Much like in AM2R's tech demo you will not need all of the powerups to complete it.  There will be terms of winning like defeating a boss.  That is enough for now.

See you next post!

Grunt Work

Hello Readers, well, there are always downsides to making a game and now we are expiriencing one of them.  Our engine needs fine tuning and we are animating sprites instead of working on programming and level design as we would like be.  Unfortunately these road blocks are unavoidable because the game wuold not look good or function properly without them.  The end is in sight though we are 1/4 of the way through the bare minimum of spriting.  Also, we've changed the original FSMR suits to the MZM suits with a little editing as shown here:

That's all for now, see you next post.