Metroid: Dreadnought v1 - Tech Demo Release

[personitis]

After playing Hunters so much a long while ago, I do believe that Combat Hall is quite narrow in comparison. If it's not though and is to scale, it may be a good idea to open it up a little. That aside, it all looks pretty damn sweet so far. Keep up the work!

[SirAileron]

I can vouch that it's to scale. That stage was just about the tiniest thing there was.

[Metaquarius]

Capture the Baby

OMG I laughed so hard... Nicely found.  :lol:

From what I saw, the battle arena looks super messy, beam flares everywhere, all right for Doom I guess, might be a bit too fast-paced for Metroid ? My opinion is not worth a lot since I have never played Hunters. :colonrightv:

[TerminusEst13]

After playing Hunters so much a long while ago, I do believe that Combat Hall is quite narrow in comparison. If it's not though and is to scale, it may be a good idea to open it up a little. That aside, it all looks pretty damn sweet so far. Keep up the work!

I can vouch that it's to scale. That stage was just about the tiniest thing there was.

Thank you!
Even if it's to scale, we might be opening it up a slight bit. Initial playtesting is...cramped. Which makes sense in hindsight, since Hunters was much slower.

From what I saw, the battle arena looks super messy, beam flares everywhere, all right for Doom I guess, might be a bit too fast-paced for Metroid ? My opinion is not worth a lot since I have never played Hunters. :colonrightv:

All opinions are very much worthwhile, whether you're familiar with Hunters, never played it, stuck with Primes, or grew up on Super. I appreciate everyone's viewpoints and want to try and cater to as many (reasonable) opinions as possible. This is, above all, a labor of love.

So, with that in mind...
...here, have something taking care of the messy beam flares!

metroid_cl_noeffects

[Quietus]

I definitely prefer the no effects version. :^_^:

[TS666]

Oh hello, I registered today and I have a question:
How I can load your game?: I downloaded all on the GitHub page in a ZIP but there's no exec. file or something else, also I tried to download Doomsday and the original Doom 1 WAD, but it seems this's not the method.
That's it, I'll may give you some feedback if I have ideas, from now thank you, I'll wait the answer!.

[Quote58]

Wow ya the no effects version is much better

[Kitsune_Phoenix]

*deleted post*

[TerminusEst13]

Oh hello, I registered today and I have a question:
How I can load your game?: I downloaded all on the GitHub page in a ZIP but there's no exec. file or something else, also I tried to download Doomsday and the original Doom 1 WAD, but it seems this's not the method.
That's it, I'll may give you some feedback if I have ideas, from now thank you, I'll wait the answer!.

Hello! Sorry for the late reply, I've been busy lately.
At the moment, it uses Zandronum, not Doomsday--either way, though, there's no pre-built .pk3 in the github, it needs to be assembled manually. This can be done by extracting the /pk3 folder, going inside, and zipping up everything inside as a .pk3 file.
Testers and mappers get a pre-built alpha .pk3, however, but considering this is getting closer and closer to release, it might be better to just wait a little bit longer for a finished release. :D

I kinda want to suggest some things regarding the story. Also, some additional code from the open source Quake engine would probably make full 3D environments easier to create (things such as multiple floors, with rooms on top of eachother.)

Done, thank you. With 3D floors, it's now possible to have multiple floors and rooms on top of rooms.

Anyway, my idea regarding the story is actually heavily inspired by Unreal and it's expansion Return to Na Pali. [snip]
Like the idea?

I'm a huge fan of Unreal and I loved the story to pieces, but I'm really not a big fan of the whole "the Federation is a stereotypical corrupt government body and kills anyone that knows too much" plots prominent in fanfiction (and Other M).
That being said, the first half might be interesting, and once I get the tech demo out I'll definitely be brainstorming more about that for the story.

[Kitsune_Phoenix]

*deleted post*

[Zhs2]

I don't usually reply to your posts because the descriptions of what you're trying to do often encapsulate the action of attempting using a hammer to screw bolts in, but a thought: you mean what the Federation attempted to do with the SA-X?

[Kitsune_Phoenix]

*deleted post*

[TerminusEst13]

I think I'm actively avoiding working on the player sprites.
Been working a lot on replacing the placeholder sprites with proper variations, and each time I keep forgetting that I'm not an artist.



From left to right, a man's testicle, a space bong, a space aquarium, a big space dildo, a big orange nose with wings, a keep left sign, and a really big space dildo.
i'll take "what is a consistent lightsource" for 500, alex

On the plus side, this leaves me with just the weapon pickups or the player sprites.

OR I CAN CODE A METROID-STYLE PICKUP SYSTEM INSTEAD



The screenshot is simple, but there's a surprising amount of work that went into this.
See, the way this system normally works is that on picking up an item, it checks to see if you've acquired any of that item before (i.e. if you're on your first/second+ energy/missile tank)--and if it's your first, it freezes you in place, gives you temporary invulnerability (just in case something like a crusher or lava or acid or something or whatever), stops the entire world, mutes the music, and plays the familiar jingle for about six seconds, before reversing all of that. If it's not your first, however, it just displays the banner and plays an item acquired sound (not the jingle!). In both cases, however, pushing the Use key stops the sequence early and allows you to go back to normal right away.
HOWEVER in online play (especially Deathmatch), stopping for a whole six seconds while everyone else goes along is a pain in the ass--so online, the first-pickup behavior is ignored completely.
AND ON TOP OF THAT this project has interested people who have never played Metroid before, and the idea of a big banner blocking their view and/or stopping time is probably going to be irritating or counter-productive to them--so I made a console variable that allows people to ignore this pickup system entirely in favor of retro-FPS-style "message in the corner".



This works on the client's side, so in the event of cooperative play, a player who wants Metroid style pickups and a player who doesn't want Metroid-style pickups can go alongside each other without having to worry about either's selection affecting the other.

...that being said, the system probably could use a little more polish. Something I'm considering is, rather than changing the music to the item pickup jingle, is to temporarily mute the music--so when it plays again, it picks up from mostly the same area, rather than starting all over again. And that's not even getting into...
...Sorry, does this sound too complicated? Yeah, it's an unbelievable amount of code for just a simple little thing! But it's Metroid, so it's worth it.

[Kitsune_Phoenix]

*deleted post*

[Quietus]

I like the idea of a mix of the two.  I agree that it shouldn't stop play at all, so it'd be like messages for required keys or secrets being revealed.  I'd like a box that pops up in one of the top corners, which displays:

ENERGY TANK ACQUIRED
CAPACITY INCREASED TO
800

This way, players would soon be familiar with the message, and can quickly glance up to see what their capacity has changed to without interrupting gameplay.

[Crashtour99]

A missile capacity of 800?  This ain't Oxide Quietus...

[Yuki]

A missile capacity of 800?  This ain't Oxide Quietus...

He said E-Tank, Crash :P

[Crashtour99]

. . .    Damn my mis-reading... 

[Quietus]

Hehe.  Yeah, that would be serious overkill. :grin:

[TerminusEst13]

I like the idea of a mix of the two.  I agree that it shouldn't stop play at all, so it'd be like messages for required keys or secrets being revealed.  I'd like a box that pops up in one of the top corners, which displays:
This way, players would soon be familiar with the message, and can quickly glance up to see what their capacity has changed to without interrupting gameplay.

Hmm! That might be interesting as a third option, actually, sort of a hybrid between the two--that way people who want something not quite retro FPS style and not quite Metroid style can have a nice combination of the two.
After the tech demo is released, I'll see if I can fiddle around with this.

A missile capacity of 800?  This ain't Oxide Quietus...

Hehe.  Yeah, that would be serious overkill. :grin:

This might take a while.

[Quietus]

Ha.  I fully suspect that there are some maps that it'd suit.  I've never been a fan of the slaughter types, however.  :neutral:

[TerminusEst13]

Ha! Ha! Time for SCREENSHOTS.






The first three are potential DM maps submitted by acquaintances UnholyPimpin and Mystical, featuring a strange alien mothership and a gothic cathedral.
The fourth, though...well, I won't lie. Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch was kind of a big inspiration for this.

Development-wise, we've been coming along at full steam. An extremely talented coder by the name of ijon tichy has joined for the time being, and under his guidance practically the entire system has been rewritten to be much faster, much smoother, and much more efficient. New weapons were made, bugs have been crunched, sprites have been replaced, and we've managed to add support for the ZDoom game engine as well! We're so close to release now it's not even funny--I'm looking at maybe one more hurdle and a few more testing sessions, and then we can push this tech demo out.

Unfortunately, that one final hurdle is giving me a lot of trouble. I have a backup plan, but it's a bit of an ugly one--so before I pull it out, I thought I would ask you guys first to see if anyone is interested...



Simply put, I'm not an artist, and there's a few things that could use a touch from another hand a lot more skilled with a pencil tool than myself—most importantly, the player skin!
Samus has a set of placeholder player sprites ready, but they're...ehm...well, as you can see above, they're kind of shoddy. In fact, you could say they're quite terrible.
Okay, let's be frank, my sprites are shit.

The short of the matter is that I want to recruit an artist to help polish up/fix Samus' player sprites. The outline/base is already done in the placeholder, what's needed is shading them up and polishing them for proper proportions/consistent details/etc. At the moment, they're really quite messy.
Samus deserves much better sprites than she currently has, and I'm simply not a very good artist so I can't really provide it.

For those interested, please send me a PM or a post saying you're interested and I'll send you a link to the existing Samus sprite sheet for you to do what you want to it.
Full credit will be given for your work, and if you desire I can link to your portfolio/blog/site/whatever you'd like.

Thank you for reading. With your help, hopefully we can get over this final hurdle and get out the door!

[Kitsune_Phoenix]

*deleted post*

[TerminusEst13]

[Kitsune_Phoenix]

*deleted post*