Merry Christmas!

I leave you this little present before I disappear for the holidays. Now on Bass Abyss you can play as Samus. To make things interesting, I’ve added new gameplay elements, emulating some features of the Metroid games

New movements

Press Down to crouch or aim down while jumping.

Pressing Shift will not dash forward automatically. Shift enables run mode. Samus will move faster when you press left or right.

New Weapons

Spazer Beam: The default weapon. Never runs out of ammo.

Missiles: Usually more powerful than the Spazer beam. Limited ammo.

Super missiles: Way more powerful, but very scarce. Use them wisely.

To switch between weapons you can use either the PgUp or Supr keys.

Those are the default keys. As usual you can customize them at the pause menu, pressing Enter while playing at any time.

In general Samus can be faster and agiler than the other characters. Probably too fast. If you find Bass scary to play with, Samus might be even scarier. Don’t jump too high or you may kill yourself with any spikes at the ceiling.

Your ammo will be recorded between levels. If you die in a level, you’ll start it again with the same ammo you had when you entered the level the first time. This acts a bit like the quick save feature of some first person shooters. Enemies killed will drop ammo.

Honestly the point of add Samus was to develop the weapon system. I’m rather happy with this first prototype. I’ll give it good use in future projects. Everything else was a matter of tune the physics to make her behave roughly like in the Metroid games. Too easy, too hard, too cheap, you decide.

Why not up or diagonal shots? Morph Ball, etc?

Well, I tried to keep things simple. Samus is a very complicated character to model, and she pretty much doesn’t need anything else to get through the Bass Abyss levels. This is not a Metroid game anyway. It would be nice to make one but I’m still in 2-D sprite fest mode. So stuff like the Speed Booster or the Screw Attack are beyond the scope of this update, and while it would be cool to enable them in the future, they are not priority. Just to figure out a good missile logic took long enough.

That would be it for now. While I’ll keep coding, probably you won’t see any new update for this game until 2007. So have fun with this and don’t forget to report any bug you find.

Oh, and for those who are still asking for a plot. I mean, come on. Bass, Imps? Cacodemons and now Samus? Seriously guys, I’m not even going to try.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2007!