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.

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.

Pastel Horrors

Alien Syndrome is an Arcade game born in 1987. It's a top-down run and gun game based on the Alien movie. The game itself isn't much to hang in the Yule-tree, but it does have one thing going for it. The art style clashes with the scary alien theme in a humorous way. All the aliens are drawn with happy pastel colors and don't look very scary at all. Unfortunately all the sequels and ports have completely ignored this defining aspect of the game and went for a more serious gritty look instead. What a pity.

Edit: It's possible that the game was darker on a real arcade machine and didn't have a happy pastel look.

The gameplay consists of searching for comrades (other humans) who have been stranded on various space ships. Each spaceship is like a little maze, and you have to find a number of comrades and reach the exit. When you pick up a comrade (by touching) they will just disappear. Maybe they're beamed off the ship. They're also immune to the mean aliens while the player is not. The player can not leave the ship until a number of comrades have been saved. There's a time limit which stresses the player to move along. The aliens just teleport in, and although only a certain number of them can appear on screen at once, there's no shortage of supply.

Certainly, the game is not meant to be realistic. The use of abstractions can be handy when trying to deliver an arcade experience. However when devising an simplified rules of something that is realistic, it's easy to start accumulating exception rules to patch things up. In the case of Alien Syndrome you have infinitely respawning aliens, and the player has infinite ammo. This creates a scoring problem. The player could just stand and accumulate easy points all day (and hog the arcade machine). To patch this problem a timer was introduced (a self-destruct, time bomb or whatever).

Robotron aside, I don't really care for highscores, and a timer not only stresses me, it kills immersion too. It's like something outside of the game is counting and checking up on me. It's a bit like not being able to put on high level boots in an RPG because I'm low level and using the boots too early would break the (poorly devised) game.

If Alien Syndrome had been for a modern PC, a lot of fun stuff could be made. Finite ammo, health and pickups could keep the player moving about looking for loot. If the alien reproduction is integrated into the gameplay then various tactical situations could emerge, such as destroying the queen, food supplies, blocking off paths, etc. The larvae could develop into different things depending on what food they find. Maybe the aliens use smell trails like ants do, and the player could manipulate those. The Comrades could barricade themselves in, engaging in firefights with the aliens, holding until the player arrives. The missions could vary in nature and the solutions could be improvised.

Yeah, well, enough feature creep and brain farts for today. I might post some other stuff soon...

Megaman

I never liked the covers of the Megaman games, so I made an attempt myself. I think it failed at the composition stage and it totally lacks an idea. It started out as a cover idea which looked interesting as a thumbnail, but as I worked on it I realized more and more that it didn't work. Maybe I approached it wrong too. Realizing that, I turned it into a white background pinup instead. Now it does nothing more than present a few drawings without any finesse.

Head-scale feels a bit on the fence. It's not like the sprite (2 heads) and not comic scale (5-7 heads) either. I think mine is 2.8 heads or something. On the sprite, his head is between his shoulders, so I lose similarity points there too.

I don't like the cone-feet which became so pronounced in the SNES games, so I put the masses more towards the center of the legs. Not sure how that worked out though. I do like how MMZ tackled the legs and costume designs. Actually I think he has cone-like limbs in a few of the intro/equip screens from the NES games too, but in MM2 he mostly look tubby/trunky.

Megaman's face is actually close to white in the first game. This was because they used a bright yellow skin tone, and large white eyes. I think this works better with the idea that he's a robot. Borg, and all that. They actually changed his skintone to flesh in MM3. In MM4 we learn that Rock was a household robot which was converted into a fighting robot. He does have a flesh colored face in the MM2 equip screens though.

Megaman has always been a silent lethal assassin to me. He got in there and did the job without bla bla bla teen angst. His mouth is just a neutral line most of the time, and the first games didn't really have any lines/speech for him.

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So, where to go? Here's a few things I wanna do. A 'true to the game' MM1 cover, with the same amount of fun as the SMB1 EU cover. These are the original Megaman covers (they're missing the Famicon one which was kind of fun).

Maybe it would also be neat to make some illustrations like the Kid Icarus instruction booklet had. Also, I wanna continue my Mega... uh, -maiden(?) project which is like 6-7 heads, and that would require some larger enemies and higher detail resolution, which could be a fun elaboration.

The cuter 'Super Deformed' scales are fun too in a way, but (at least when it comes to robots) I tend to lose interest when there are no details to explore or they are exhausted too quickly by the eye. With too much simplification and focus on narration and gesture, designs can be a bit like... a 4 note jingle; Catchy and easy to get, but not quite satisfying on an intellectual level.

Rebel Squad

Here's something I've been working on every now and then. It's a little project based on the strategy games by Julian Gollop. You've probably already heard of X-COM, but he's also responsible for the Rebelstar and Laser Squad games. I thought it would be fun to take those universes and merge them into one. Well, here it is:

The Rebel Squad Project

As you can see, I went for a cute comic style. To be frank I'm not that fond of the realistic approach that has been used a lot in various remakes. The older games were cute and colorful, and X-COM featured a comic style intro. A lot of people I hear talking about X-COM also seem to want to retain or expand on the relatively complex gameplay with the base, hunt, character and strategy elements. Not many games have that kind of width and depth to boast.