An Insect's Adventure, in-progress Metroidvania game

[Mayo-chan]

Hello all, I've actually been lurking this place for years, and I've been wanting to show you this project I've been working on quite some time. I'm not exactly 100% sure if this is the right board to post in, but it's a safe bet and it's definitely Metroid inspired.

The game is called An Insect's Adventure, and is largely a love letter to the greatness of Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, among other favorites. The game has a heavy focus on exploration and replayability, and built from the ground up to accommodate for speedrunners. There are RPG elements to the game as well, slightly inspired from Final Fantasy II's system of levelling up based on your actions, though highly simplified. You will never need to level grind to beat bosses or enemies, the game is highly skill based and offers you a slew of options that are very speedrun friendly.

Opening cutscene video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-7zQ5Lw6Y0

Sorry for the bad quality, but the intro basically shows the premise of the game. A meteor has crash landed into an alien planet, and you take the role of an insect named Bugsey who had awoken later deep inside an underground labyrinth network of tunnels.

Armed with a large hammer, you explore many types of cave systems, mines, ancient ruins, underground jungles, and the desolate aftermath the meteor left in its wake.





Bugsey himself isn't the only creature who lives in the cave of course, as you'll constantly be faced with a large variety of opposing insect creatures, including squishy spiders, buzzing bees, and a large cast of massive bosses that you'll be smashing the guts out of. That is of course, when they aren't smashing your guts out.





You can also find friendly characters who will join your side. If melee combat isn't your forte, you can play as Rei Armstrong, an android with a Mega Man-esque buster and rocket boots. You may also rescue a little girl named Maya Naise, who can throw her hat like a boomerang and clings to it like her life depends on it (she does). All 3 characters have unique abilities and playstyles and when you find them, it quickly becomes encouraged for you to keep swapping between them when you get stuck. As you progress through the game and level up more, you'll find the differences between the characters will grow larger and give you even more options for exploration and combat.





The objective of the game is intentionally unclear, but you'll figure for yourself that the meteor, and the environment it created are the antagonists of this game.

Seriously though, the quality of the screenshots or the video don't do the game justice. Below here is a download link for a public beta:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/3rrry6t22zs9zih/AiA+Demo.zip

I highly encourage comments and constructive criticism after playing. The date for the game is correct, it's a project I've been working and revamping through since I first got into game development since before I went to high school. There has been many sources for inspiration and motivation throughout the project, including Digital Mantra with his beautiful Super Metroid Eris hack, and Dr.M64 and AM2R. The game is Joypad compatible with customizable controls and several different resolution sizes, and keeps a steady 60 FPS on modern computers with some options to make it easier on older machines. No, there is no Mac version.

You can actually make it pretty far in this build. You can explore the entirety of the game up to the final area, I would say the game is around 90% complete for those of you who love hearing percentages  ;)
The bugs I am looking for are far and few between, mostly minor inconveniences but nothing game breaking.

I would love to hear your feedback on this game.

[snarfblam]

I have to say, having only spent a few minutes with this, it looks pretty badass. Sweet music, solid physics, polished graphics. Can't wait to spend a little time with this later on.

[Lunaria]

I'll maybe look into it and play it later.

Though, if it's 90% done and assuming you own the rights to all the assets. Then I strongly recommend going forward with actually releasing (and charging for,) the game once it's done!

[Samario]

An enjoyable game from what little I've played, though I have found some anomalies/bugs - keep up the good work

- When talking to Rei, if you are dashing into her, your afterimages persist throughout the scene
- Rei can sort of hang off the edge of specific cliffs, being in her falling animation but not actually falling
(reference picture)
- You can't charge a shot, dash and jump at the same time with Rei (intended?)
- Sometimes, if you die from lava, the game doesn't stop generating your remains, causing acute slowdown
(reference picture)

Other than those, this is very good!

[Mayo-chan]

The charge, dash and jump thing is because you're on a keyboard :P
You probably can't shoot missiles diagonally in Zero Mission on an emulator either, something to check out.

The other things are good finds though, I'll be right on top of that!

[Samario]

Oh, and another thing
- Turning scanlines off does not persist across death

[LinkaMeister]

Mayo-Chan, I really enjoy it so far. I find it a really great game.

[Mayo-chan]

I fixed up the glitches that were mentioned in this thread and more, you can download the update here:
https://www.mediafire.com/?3rrry6t22zs9zih

I usually reupload the game every week with whatever I added or fixed, the download link is always the same. Looking forward for those of you who play through the whole thing.

[LinkaMeister]

When using controller, it register up and down as two presses on the select save and options.

[Samario]

- This bug hasn't been fixed
- It's possible to get permastuck here if you down+right jumpslam into the corner
- Holding down+up and shooting does not have a "shooting up while crouching" animation
- Spamming down+jump allows you to multi-jumpslam on the ground
- Jumpslamming onto an elevator while holding down delays the "hitting ground" sound until the elevator stops
- I can't see how to use the grab rungs figured out
- The player lags behind the zipline position
- Either I have less than a pixel's worth of health, or I did not die when I hit 0 health
- The Lizardman randomly started slamming into the ground repeatedly, moving slowly toward me, instead of trying to jump on me
- Rei can clip through the small gap to Maya's container
- Rei can clip back into the middle of the wall and is either ejected back to the right or down through the floor, killing her

[Mayo-chan]

Thank you for the post, I hadn't felt very motivated in working on Insect's Adventure lately but giving me little goals like this makes it easier.

Some of the glitches are ones that I tried to fix before but couldn't find the cause, like Lizardman's 'dance', but now I feel more motivated to try again until it works.
I can tell you for sure that the health bar 'glitch' isn't really a glitch, you have like 1 HP, but it's an easy fix nonetheless.

As for clipping, did you ground pound into a small corner or something like that?

EDIT: Okay the health bar thing apparently can't be fixed, it's a Multimedia Fusion thing, just like how certain controllers won't work with it.

[Samario]

Yes, I jumpslammed into the corner of the small passageway (since due to an unrelated bug the text for the Lizard Tail flashed on screen for about a frame, so I didn't know what it did), clipped through the other side, tried to do the same thing after rescuing Maya, died.
Edit: ALSO
- You can climb on the wrong side of wall rungs
- You can get stuck here, and pressing down clips you to the bottom of the area

[Mayo-chan]

I'm sorry for you and everybody else who enjoyed this game on this forum, but when I woke up today to check on the game, the entire thing corrupted into an unplayable mess.  :sad:




Last night I must've not been paying attention, but I decided to delete my backups and store the game folder in my jump drive. This morning when I woke up, several global objects had their graphics scrambled, meaning I have to redraw the sprites again, but there's still more. When I checked the engine, I got like 30 messages saying objects were corrupted, and only a 10th of the engine is left.



I'M GOING TO HAVE TO START THE GAME ALL OVER AGAIN
THIS IS REALLY FUCKING BAD  :cry:

[Mon732]

...but I decided to delete my backups...

Something hacking Super Metroid has taught me is backup, backup and backup. I've also had a zip file corrupt when it was copied to my flash stick before.
When copying stuff I would recommend that you check that the copy is intact and always keep a backup somewhere else just in case.

I haven't had a chance to play this yet but it looks great and I love metroidvanias so don't give up. Use this as an excuse to make it even better than before. :P

[Mayo-chan]

Yesterday's post was an April Fools joke. Not only has the game not been ruined, but I've been working on improvements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmR2XR0n9rU

I've been through that phase before though, I NEVER delete my backups.