Well, I’m beyond my arbitrary self imposed time limit of no updates. With nothing finished at hand, I had to be creative, so I decided to at least put together this video with the recent stuff I’ve been working on. I’ve been working, you know? Then I noticed it’s April 1st. How am I going to be taken seriously if I post on such a date? Well, this is no joke, Mega Man X is coming. I’m beyond the point of no return with this, so hopefully, I’ll have this released before April ends.
And I love so much to play as X. Yeah, gameplay and balancing will be most likely broken after this. But what the heck, this is just too much fun.
In other news, I read Mega Man Universe has been canceled? Well, that’s one less game to tear apart enjoy. I hope this video cheers you up at least a little bit.
I don’t know how it happened, but somewhere, when I was in Panama I screwed up the High Scores and Speed run records code. Well, that was a lot of time ago. Recently I’ve been busy fixing up a lot of stuff that I don’t like anymore, cleaning code, moving around stuff, and overall extracting a base platform for further projects. So I decided it was time to fix the scores problem once and for all, but while I was at it I thought, this code is below my current standards so let’s do something extensible that will be usable for other games and not just this one.
It took longer than I expected, even considering the few hours I can devote to it, but I’m really happy with the results. Now I feel like modifying my old games to use this new high records backend, but now that I remember, I also have to restore the HTML view of the scores. For now, probably I’ll just take a break. Anyway enjoy, and try to beat my records! Happy Holidays!
After all the Mega Man 2 hype surrounding Mega Man Universe, I was wondering what’s up with Mega Man 2 and the Mega Man 2 Robot Masters. Why is the Metal Blade considered to be God’s weapon by some? Even better, how can I tell if it is enclosed forever in Mega Man 2? As there’s no simple way to answer this, I decided to simply put Metal Man to the test.
So, in this update, I bring you Metal Man as a new Bass Abyss playable character.
With Metal Man come all the simple controls you’d expect from an 8-bit character. Just note, he can’t slide, but he can run. Also shooting will fix him on the floor.
Metal Blade
Metal Man’s weapon can be shot in eight directions and here is where the major fun comes from. You can literally reach anyone from anywhere. The blades go through walls and are really strong. Your only limit is how fast you can shoot them. I recommend you to use a gamepad and Joy2Key for superior controls.
Super Jump
I was going to call this Robot Master Jump but whatever. Essentially, when you combine UP and SPACEBAR (jump and up) Metal Man will jump higher than usual. With so many new custom levels, I was concerned about releasing a new character but not being able to get through the new maps. Well, this solves the problem, for Metal Man at least. I still want to solve this for the other characters, but with a little more time, I’d like to try another route.
This month IRAGINATION is another year old! Have fun!
Well, this was fast. In this update, I bring you three new custom levels by Hunter. As usual, you can check them at the Custom Level section of the game’s title screen.
The levels are:
Hunter’s Temple
Hunter’s Temple 2
Hunter’s Temple 3 – Nightmarish Tamp
Well, probably I should save you some frustration and tell you that I was able to beat them only with Bass and Samus. But other than that the levels are pretty long and challenging. Temple 3 at least has to be the largest map I’ve seen so far, and the engine didn’t die on it! The difficulty builds up in every step so take your time and make use of Bass as Samus aiming abilities to clear your path safely.
I’m thinking of ways to overcome the limitations for other characters to get through the long jumps required for this kind of level, but only time will tell what the future holds in this regard.
By the time you read this Metroid Other M should be already on stores. To celebrate this, in this update of Bass Abyss I decided to give Samus a new set of moves. Specifically the ability to aim! Bass can shot in seven directions. Well, Samus now has the full eight directions set, and this applies to all her current weapons.
Aiming doesn’t work exactly like with Bass. Samus doesn’t get stuck while aiming, she’s pretty agile, she can run, duck, jump while aiming. I didn’t want to dumb her down so the only way to solve this was to add yet another keyboard key. I’m always weary about adding keys because the game it gets more complex for the player to play, but oh well, there’ll be always characters with simpler moves that you can use. We have to accept that Samus leans to the direction of more complete but more complex characters to play with. Although I personally find this entertaining, I don’t pretend to make levels were you absolutely need to aim to get through.
So, how do I aim with Samus?
On land or air press SPACE BAR to aim up.
On air you can hold SPACE BAR or DOWN to aim in any eight directions.
While running, if you hold SPACE BAR or DOWN, you’ll aim up forward or down forward respectively.
If you are standing or ducking, you have to hold Z to aim. By default she’ll aim up forward. Then you can switch by pressing DOWN or SPACE BAR. This essentially is the same control scheme she had in her Game Boy Advance games (Zero Mission and Fusion).
I’ll be honest, this Z key is the move that I find the most difficult to handle, but as usual you can map the keys to the layout of your preference. I really hope this to be the very last key I add.
The level editor has also been upgraded. On request I’ve added a good batch of enemies since the last time. I’m not going to spoil the full list but thanks to Scorpion there 4 new maps where you can check them all. The levels are very well designed and entertaining. To access them just go to the Custom Level section of the game’s main menu. They are the first four ones at the top of the list.
Factor 2 – Scavenger Hunt
Factor 3 – Floor S
Factor 4 – Sector 0
Factor 6 – Ground Zero
Here are some pics for Samus in one of the new custom levels!
Although I’m still more focused in code clean up and reorganization, the next update shouldn’t take this long. That FIFA World Cup sure was distracting.
And finally it is here. Remember to clear your browser cache to force the download of the new version.
In the previous post I have pretty much revealed all the major features of this update. So, here is more information.
Proto Man mode
Time for some 8-bit Proto Man goodness. All the features you expect from him are here. The ridiculous strong shield that rejects all enemy attacks. Also, a slightly improved buster based a bit on the one from Mega Man X4. If you have played with him or seen videos of him there’s not pretty much I can add.
New Bass attack mode
Well, Bass needs a little more explanation. If you are used to playing with Samus or Doom Guy, characters that can switch weapons, that’s exactly how you switch the attack mode while playing with Bass, by pressing (by default) DELETE or NEXT PAGE. As usual, you can set these keys to anything of your liking.
There’s a little purple icon under the energy bar that tells you what mode you’re using.
How do you fire upwards? You hold the SPACE key while shooting. This was a usability concern and I found no other solution but to set a new key for this. The UP key is already used for jumping so it was an awkward decision, but functional in the end. You can set the keys any way you want anyway but all the demo gameplay of my previous video was recorded using the keyboard with the default settings, so I don’t think it will take you too much time to get used to it.
Just as in Mega Man & Bass, you can’t move while shooting. But at least your shots do go through walls.
Yeah, these updates are based on Capcom’s Mega Man 10.
Some other changes
Player-to-environment collision detection has been vastly improved and most bugs and annoyances should be gone. Items fall correctly on floors, platforms react correctly to the wind. It’s a real joy and the actual real deal of this update for me.
For ease of use I’ve altered slightly the form where you change the window resolution and scale. Now these options are separated in two lists. I’ve added 640×480 and 320×320, but as I’ve said in the past you can pretty much try any resolution you want. Of course everything will break in crazy configurations, so I can only realistically support normal and widescreen modes.
All the levels are unlocked. The game has no plot so there’s no point to lock them. You can take a look to any level you want.
Doom Guy starts with all the weapons unlocked.
Samus missile pickups give her more ammo.
Better run animations for Bass, Samus, Mega Man and Fire Man.
A performance change I had to do to save bandwidth was to disable the automatic download of the whole game as a background process. You can turn it on manually on the Advanced tab of the pause menu.
I called this 1.0 beta because I think I’m through the worst part, fixing the collision detection that was terrible in many places.
There were a lot of things left on my to-do list but I had to do a cut somewhere to make this update. Now I can calmly figure out what to tackle next. The big ones of course are new/final levels and bosses/enemies and level editor but I’d rather not state the specif items I will be working on. Last time I ended taking a different direction (this one). All I know this game is my programming playground and I still have many things to experiment with and improve as I go along.
Hey, at least this is not Duke Nukem Forever, you’re actually playing the game as I develop and learn from it.
