Chozo Necropolis Hack, mock screen shots

[monktroid]

Hello from the new guy :)

I'm currently working on the bones of what - perhaps in the long run - will be something fairly substantial.  I come from a programming background and I seem to be getting along with ASM thus far so expect some custom stuff in there too!

I have also been doing graphics work for decades so I've relished getting back to the days of 16 bit design. Thus far I have almost completely redesigned Crateria by hand.  I'm heavily inspired by the very beautiful "Shadow of The Beast" series on Amiga (games that are less fun to play now but still timelessly pretty); the SoB style compliments the metroid theme pretty well in my opinion! judge for yourself!

thoughts and feedback welcome!

[OneOf99]

Those graphics don't look have bad.

However, I would refrain from using postimage...

[Steel Sparkle]

not bad at all!

[LiquidDreams]

Ominous... I've always liked Shadow of the Beast. It had a very unique look/atmosphere.

This looks promising, I'd suggest changing the horizon line a bit -- maybe put some more interesting structures scattered along.

[FPzero]

The graphical style feels different from vanilla Super Metroid but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm very interested to see what else you can do with the engine because I like what I see here a lot!

[benox50]

Really good looking custom GFX, I also dont see graphical style mismatch which is great !

[monktroid]

The graphical style feels different from vanilla Super Metroid but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm very interested to see what else you can do with the engine because I like what I see here a lot!

At the risk of sounding controversial, i found quite a lot (though not all) of the tilesets in the original quite underwhelming. That isn't to say I don't think it's a superb game; just, compare it to - say - Castlevania or even the megadrive sonic franchise.  I know they're a different aesthetic but, still, given what can be done with the 16 bit/256 world, it could be better.  I mean, SoB was originally constrained to 64 colours and look at how stunning those early efforts looked! If you actually look at the tiles pixel by pixel in SM, the composition isn't that strong; they miss quite a few tricks popular with other games (cross-hatching for texture, islands of colour for metallic highlights etc.) If my lousy memory serves me correctly, it was one of the franchise's earlier releases for the platform, that may have had something to do with it.  That and deadlines perhaps.  It's no coincidence that really stunning-looking games like Earth Worm Jim came along that much later.

[FPzero]

SM's graphics are good but I can totally understand where you're coming from here. But even if the graphics are as strong when looking at them individually, I think what the game nails is the atmosphere and presentation. Subtle lighting, fog, palette animations, haze, and weather take the graphics from being merely good to being great. SM is a game where its visual presentation is a sum of all its parts. Combine that with the generally alien feeling you get in a number of areas mixed with the music that you have a good formula for why people remember the audiovisual presentation so fondly.

That said, we're always looking to try and replace existing graphics with new stuff, or combine old sets together in new ways. That's why I don't really see your comments as controversial. There's almost always room for improvement in these things and it's always a blast to see what people can come up with then they are creative or talented enough.

Also, Super Metroid was a 1994 release, so that puts it right in the middle of the SNES's lifecycle.

[monktroid]

SM's graphics are good but I can totally understand where you're coming from here. But even if the graphics are as strong when looking at them individually, I think what the game nails is the atmosphere and presentation. Subtle lighting, fog, palette animations, haze, and weather take the graphics from being merely good to being great. SM is a game where its visual presentation is a sum of all its parts. Combine that with the generally alien feeling you get in a number of areas mixed with the music that you have a good formula for why people remember the audiovisual presentation so fondly.

absolutely agree. Brinstar, particularly, always felt so weird and foreign to me. I think the thing I loved the most about SM was all the references back to NEStroid. I loved the fact you walked through mother brain's first lair at the start of the game.  I loved the way that - if you look near kraids room where the wrecked ship has crashed into brinstar - you can see bits of the wall breaking through from the original game.  I don't think i'd seen a game with easter eggs before and that blew my mind.  It felt immersive in a way I'd never experienced before. I don't think i'd ever played a game with such a strong exploratory aspect to it before.  Man i used to play that thing in the middle of the night while my parents were sleeping, looking for 100% of the items! I was so disappointed when samus' suit didn't change at the end though (it was only in the PC age that i realised it was based on speed rather than item collect!)

[benox50]

You also dont have lotsa space on each Graphic set, using a big custom picture/structure will just take too much space. Look for the bigger boss in the game how much they take in the tilesheet.

[monktroid]

You also dont have lotsa space on each Graphic set, using a big custom picture/structure will just take too much space. Look for the bigger boss in the game how much they take in the tilesheet.

more's the reason to reduce enemy count and up trap count  :grin:

The above tileset is pretty careful with color depth. I took quite a lot of care to keep the palette pretty muted. suffice to say, crateria's surface is completely reskinned with new tiles in this instance!

[Quote58]

SM is a game where its visual presentation is a sum of all its parts.

Hit the nail on the head there. The use of FX, palette blends, glows, animations, and scrolling backgrounds allow modular tilesets to create beautiful areas that feel distinct from each other while using less detailed parts. It's like the old trick of some games from the commador64 era, where they would have regions of the screen using one 8bit palette, while other regions use a different 8 bit palette, allowing for more detailed large scale images, made of less detailed areas.

This is just my opinion on super Metroid, I'm sure there are examples for and against this, and it's only a general idea but:
I think the comparison to castlevania is actually a very useful one, because they are two games that took completely different approaches to visual style. The thing is, castlevania is a game made of set pieces. Every room in a castlevania game is meticulously crafted for that particular room or set of rooms (library, dining hall, chapel, etc.). This could've been done for Metroid games, but it wouldn't have made sense, because that's not what the series is going for. Super castlevania 4 is beautiful, it really is, but it's also not very modular. The tilesets can be used in different ways, but not even close to the variety you can come up with in super Metroid, and it's easy to see from the sheer volume of incredible rooms people around here have made with the original gfx. Super Metroid has tilesets for each area, because the gfx are supposed to be like different parts of the same planet. They all use the same visual style, and very similar structure for ground/walls/background/decorations, so that all the rooms in crateria feel like they are one continuous structure.
But it's also indicative of the goal of the design in general. It's focus is not on looking super detailed or visually stunning, it's on making a cohesive world that you want to explore. They put more resources into making an intelligently designed world that subtly pushes you in the right directions while allowing you to feel more and more accomplished and powerful. To do this really well, they needed a toolkit that was able to adapt to the level design, not one that restrained the level design to serve the aesthetic style of the particular room.
Neither visual style is any better or worse than the other, I love how castlevania games look and I love how Metroid games look, because both styles serve the purpose of their designers. Castlevania is usually set in a castle and the surrounding areas, so each room in the castle needs to be detailed enough to be believable, but Metroid takes place on alien worlds that haven't been terraformed. You explore cave networks and underground bases, not like, a library.
That being said, super Metroid was also under big time constraints, and I'm sure had they been given more time to work on the game, they would've gone over the gfx again and made them less basic in the end. Luckily, this community likes to try and improve the gfx. For example, my tilesets are mostly made of edited vanilla gfx, which I've worked on and added new tiles here and there to complement the original ones, to create more visually interesting tilesets that can still be used almost as modularly. And of course Dmantra with Cliffhanger and Eris made some of the most varied and interesting new gfx out of the existing gfx just by changing the palette and tiletables.

"You also dont have lotsa space on each Graphic set, using a big custom picture/structure will just take too much space. Look for the bigger boss in the game how much they take in the tilesheet."

Very true, but that's an intentional decision made on the engine. They could've used more gfx per tileset, and they also could've easily had a different tileset for every single room. The way VRAM is laid out for layers 1/2/3 is not set in stone, it's just the balance that the devs decided on for the game.