Starflight

I've been making some progress on my Starflight project. I had some old art and text material which I copy-pasted together and made a page out of. It is haphazard and not as finished as my other unfinished stuff.

Starflight project page

To the right: I'm dabbling with programming again (BlitzMax). I'm doing a so called "Immediate Mode GUI". The technique has both advantages and drawbacks, but overall I like it. Coming up with the crew was the most fun part of Starflight, and I couldn't resist feature creeping it. Each crew person actually has the same stats and stuff as in the original game, but I'm just showing a short form here to fit the entire crew roster on one page. The officers (red) gets a bonus from having a well versed captain and good subordinates. The 'Grey Shirts' will die first on missions, and can be used as meat shields. Yeah, that might sound familiar.

Oh yes, I almost forgot, I've also updated the Master of Orion 1 project.

Megaman Legends

It may be no big surprise that I prefer the first two NES Megaman games over the later incarnations. However, there is another game in the franchise which I'm fond of: Megaman Legends. This game was so unlike the original Megaman that I could accept it for what it was. In fact, I bought all three MML games for the PS1 back when they came out, and I think I like the first one the best... (surprise).

Megaman Legends Project

Rebelstar Raiders

Here's some research I did on Rebelstar Raiders . One thing which I really like about the Rebelstar games is that the moonbases and other installation appears functional. It's not just random mazes and rooms with crates. The first game had 8*8 px characters, and if the maps use tiles it doesn't show at all. The later games (Rebelstar 1 & 2) moved to 16*16 px characters, and then Laser Squad introduced character rotation and an angled perspective (not isometric though). X-Com inherited a lot of combat mechanics fom these older games, an in some ways it was inferior in that department. I think the machinegun fire and aim control works better in Laser Squad. You can spray X number of bullets between two arbitrary points. It feels really Rambo.

Roughs

Here are a few sheets with unfinished redesigns. The character proportions and head scale are about the same as in the Xexyz stuff.

X-Com
Rygar
Metroid

As for X-Com, I think I'm going to have to revisit my Rebel Squad project and revise the designs. I think these kind of proportions with more curves is more dynamic, and I've changed my mind about real time vs turn based. One of X-Com's biggest strengths is character development, and in a turn based game you can maximize the player's exposure to the characters. I think, even if you design a real time system with multiple monitoring windows (for scattered characters), the player will have a constant nagging feeling of having to be everywhere at the same time with his eyes. It's not enjoyable to constantly be reminded that you might be missing important action pertaining to your characters. Being able to effectively deliver tasty little bits for the player to build his game spanning macro story with takes priority.

As for the cute cartoon style, I don't believe it would make the game less scary or involving. Horror is mostly music and build-up. Benny Hill music will make almost anything funny, and if you just walk into a grimdark scary movie it's not scary at all because you missed the build-up.

4X

Master of Orion 1 is a nice little game which I never had the chance to play until recently. I started on a redesign project a while ago, but decided to go my own way halfway in. I sketched up my own aliens and game mechanics to avoid infringement.

I got distracted as usual and went off to work on something else, so I'm not sure in which state I left this.

MoO1 / Space Conquest

Xexyz / 亀の恩返し ウラシマ伝説

The X-Com genre is terribly neglected, is it not? I was working on this Xexyz (a side view jump and shoot game) redesign project when I totally derailed and turned it into a topdown X-Com game instead. My universe design approach is getting kind of worn. I'm always using the "giant spacewar - defend a base" setup. So, yeah, well, here's another game which will never see the light of day. I'm not sure who sits on the Xexyz licence. It's probably Hudson Soft or Atlus.

Turtle game (Edit: Made another 'screenshot'.)

Remember Robo Warrior?

Robo Warrior was one of those games which had a fun first level, but it just got monotous after that. Kind of like the first slices of blood pudding. I always wished there was something more to the game each time I returned to it. I never knew that Robo Warrior actually was titled Bomber King and took place in the Bomberman universe somehow. I also didn't know that there was an interesting sequel for the Gameboy. Too bad, I might have enjoyed that one.

Anyways, here's another of them pages: Bomber Queen