Super Metroid Fugue on Globe

[JaceTheBodySculptor]

Description:

Guide Samus on her mission to a new planet that rotates very fast. She lands in the morning, when heavy fog obstructs her view. Hurry to safety before the sun heats things up by midday. In the evening rain falls and accumulates, making it difficult and slow to navigate. At midnight the water freezes, icicle spikes form, and there is barely any light. Spend your time wisely as your optimal routing will change depending on the time of day.

Features:
-Almost every major item has been edited to have an additional ability/mechanic.
-All boss fights have been tweaked, some more than others.
-An open world with no true intended route. The route you take depends on your speed and your comfort level.
-As said above, a rotating world that cycles through day and night, where if it is morning on one side of the planet it will be evening on the opposite side, and so on.

More details can be found in the readme. Please consult the readme if you do not figure out how to use either suit abilities, as in-game instructions are absent.

A rather buggy and harsher version of this hack, then named Super Metroid Revolutions, was showcased in the 2021 oatsngoats hack contest. Don't be intimidated if you watched that. Many accommodating changes have been made, for example lower spike damage.

WARNING Although some design decisions were made to make this hack accessible to less skilled players (for example you never need to walljump or mockball or ibj), one trick that is absolutely required is midair morphing. If you cannot jump from the ground and morph by the time you hit a ceiling 5 air tiles above the ground, do not play this hack. I believe everyone can do this if they practice, but it's not worth playing until you can do it with a modest success rate.

Lastly, this was designed for people who enjoy speedrunning and routing. Although I can't stop anyone from playing this only a single time, the most fun is meant to come from playing it again and tying to discover a faster way to beat it. For players who aren't normally interested in replaying for optimization, I hope the central mechanic awakens that desire in you.

Screenshots:
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Credits:
xmariedetx -some playtesting and lots of moral support
moehr -a bit of playtesting and guidance for editing the HUD
Amoeba, PJ, Nodever2, Smiley, ED, Total, Oi27 - gave me random help on ASM questions. This was my first hack and first time both writing ASM and creating levels so I asked tons of questions and they've been so helpful both during the contest and after on the metconst discord. If you ever helped me I hope I did not forget your name.
Benox50 - some help dealing with frozen enemy time
Jefe962/Person701 - I used a patch called Beam Burst to begin my development of a certain item
Onnyks and Exister - playtesting

Direct stealing of others' work:
moehr - responsible for the intro and game over screen edits
BlackFalcon - SkippingCeresV2.2, Powerbomb Reveal Tiles, and some code for walljump blocks
PJ- waking up Bomb Torizo to any item
Scyzer - SaveLoad plus editing the item % display at the end
Flamestar666 - HeatBit, allows for heat damage outside Norfair

[JaceTheBodySculptor]

Hey everybody, LetsPlayNintendoITA caught an important map bug. This led me to changing some stuff in the volcanic region in Bophades. One issue was a minor discrepancy between the map and the rooms that did not change gameplay at all. The other was harder to fix, involving Ridley's room lining up to its eyedoor entrance. Ultimately my solution was to swap a couple of doors around. Now you will enter Ridley on the bottom screen and the door to his item will be on top. Besides mirroring that prize item room, nothing else is changed.

[Sickwood]

First, I'll say I haven't had this much fun having no idea where I'm going in a long time. Some may not like the complete lack of direction, but I am really enjoying just stumbling across items and occasionally popping up into rooms that are familiar. I have encountered a repeated crash though. I didn't take a screen shot, but a room that you drop into from a vile plume, that is made of crateria tile set, and has multiple really fast respawning orbs while you weave yourself through morph passages crashes on me every time I try to go through it. A minor graphical shift in the screen happens and then it freezes with music still playing. If I need to go back and take a screen shot I will, but wanted to see if this is a known issue.

[JaceTheBodySculptor]

Wow no that has never happened! I am trying to replicate the crash but my four run throughs via quickmet in my SMART project have been fine. If there's any more info you can tell that will help. Like, is it a particular time of day? Are you using any specific items? Next I will try running through on a ROM made by the ips file I submitted - in rare ocassions finished ROMs and quickmet produce different results.

I'm also curious about this "minor graphical shift". There's one graphical error I've seen before but I thought it was nothing major because I've seen it in fine working hacks like Super Metroid Impossible. Does it involve tiles at the top right of the screen near the minimap going from black to filled with a tile of junk? Or is it something else?

[Onnyks]

I also experienced a hard lock in a vileplume room. I think it was raining as I had just waited for heat to pass. I had all ammo, morph ball and grapple, but no other major upgrades. I dropped down a tunnel to find a closed gate, then turned around and the game froze.

[JaceTheBodySculptor]

Ok I can look into that too... Onnyks if you wouldn't mind streaming it or sharing screen on discord that would help me a lot!

I've passed through the Atomic room Sickwood crashed in on a ips-made rom and that's 1/1 so far without any crashes. Going to try it on the other three event states after I find the closest etank. I'm a bit worried that whatever is going on is not room specific and it's very strange that I haven't crashed yet. Thanks for the reports

[JaceTheBodySculptor]

FYI the current bug with the vileplumes is caused by using BTS 10 on solid blocks bordeirng the vileplumes. This should only happen in watery or rainy areas/states. I will publish a fix for this hopefully tonight or tomorrow morning, but if you are playing before then, be careful around wet vileplumes! Thanks to Onnyks for reporting this issue.

Still haven't found what went wrong with Sickwood's crash...

[JaceTheBodySculptor]

Alright, I have uploaded a fresh ips that includes the crash found by Onnyks. I made some other quick changes too.

Crash fix:
Fixed a crash involving vileplumes in rainy / flooded areas. The technical reason for the crash was that I use solid collision blocks with BTS value 10 to prevent walljumping in wet rooms, and vileplumes manipulate adjacent tiles when you get stuck in them. When those blocks are not standard collision blocks, bad things can happen.

Cosmetic:
Fixed a pair of missing doorcap triggers for a door transition in Tipodiss, discovered by Exister.

Lag reduction:
Further slowed the speed of sparks in one room with a bunch of sparks and some pirates that appeared laggy. I have done this several times to this room, and it's been difficult to get right because there is an inconsistency in lag between playing on a ROM versus testing via Quickmet. I hope it is finally lag free. Beyond that one room, I'd like players to let me know if they encounter annoying lag. Sometimes it's transient and position dependent or subsides after you kill some enemies, but if you find some particularly offensive laggy spots, I'd like to fix them.

Early game quality of life:
Made more obvious an early energy tank location. I believed the hidden item to be obvious already but after watching Exister play and not get it for so long, I'm sure it will happen to other players too. Generally I would prefer to let the player discover it theirself and feel clever and rewarded, but the early game can be brutal when you don't have much health.

Sapphron also messaged me last night and told me some good information about mostly minor bugs that I mentioned in the readme. I'm trying to find a balance between taking it easy and feeling like I'm finally done with the project, and being responsive to critical issues such as the vileplume crash I never caught in my own testing. So I may tackle that stuff in the future, and maybe other small quality of life stuff like putting some area transition indicators on the map, but for now I am most concerned with game-breaking problems. Thanks to everyone who has played so far! And let me know if any more errors are discovered.

[Sickwood]

Yes, it was raining for me too and of course every time I reset I went back to the room at the same time in the cycle. I figured out that I could get through the room if I just tanked damage and didn't shoot or PB the orbs. Sorry for the delay, but glad Onnyks chimed in too, as I also had a crash at that other vile plume during rain cycle.

[JaceTheBodySculptor]

Hey everybody, I'm planning on uploading another fix soon, hopefully by the end of this weekend. The current version is mostly fine, and it's not worth waiting for the update. There are a couple of individual rooms I want to edit, one that causes a crash during the evening if you grapple into a particular block. Another room, also in the evening, can lead to a softlock if enough shot blocks are destroyed and you don't have some movement items.

Then there's the time-consuming fix I want to address: doing something about the PLM overload bug. I want to check every room and make sure there's never too many PLM blocks when you powerbomb. Letting the player sink through some blocks with a chance to get stuck is really sloppy, and even if the bug comes from the vanilla game, players ought to be protected from it, and also prevented from exploiting it. The tradeoff will be fewer speed booster blocks, but I think it will be worth it to never have the fear of sinking after laying a power bomb.

The final change I will make is to remove as best I can any cases where a player can crystal flash over a single crumble block. I often put crumble block tunnel exits as ways to leave boss paths, whose entrances are locked by some item(s). Letting players do this was not intended so I will try to remove as many of these as I can while minimizing impact on each room. Thanks to thedagit for showing off this technique in his playthrough, and also exposing the aforementioned grapple crash.

Finally, I speedran the hack tonight, defining "speedrun" loosely, not crisp movement just taking a route that felt fast and trying not to mess up, and I finished with an IGT of 1:01, so if anybody wants a challenge, sub 1 hour IGT is surely possible. Also, thanks for 100+ downloads!

[JaceTheBodySculptor]

Ok I have now uploaded version 1.22. That one spike crash is gone, and that one possible softlock in a water room can be bypassed by a vertical shutter. Many speed blocks were removed so that, outside of some less serious cases at midnight, PLM overload should never happen anymore. Also crystal flash skipping over any crumble block intended exits should be impossible now. Also fixed a grapple related softlock possibility - same room oats did it in his contest playthrough I thought I had fixed but I investigated it again and had to rearrange further.

There are still two mysterious things that have been reported to me. Sickwood told me he's had the game freeze randomly in a room that had nothing special going on. Dagit had transient issues with restarting the game after he died (exiting and loading from the save file worked fine, but he'd be forced to do that 2-3 times). The causes of these issues are still unknown to me, and they seem to be so unlikely that I doubt I'd come across them myself in 30 more playthroughs. So please let me know if you guys encounter any bugs!

[LetsPlayNintendoITA]

Ok I have now uploaded version 1.22. That one spike crash is gone, and that one possible softlock in a water room can be bypassed by a vertical shutter. Many speed blocks were removed so that, outside of some less serious cases at midnight, PLM overload should never happen anymore. Also crystal flash skipping over any crumble block intended exits should be impossible now. Also fixed a grapple related softlock possibility - same room oats did it in his contest playthrough I thought I had fixed but I investigated it again and had to rearrange further.

There are still two mysterious things that have been reported to me. Sickwood told me he's had the game freeze randomly in a room that had nothing special going on. Dagit had transient issues with restarting the game after he died (exiting and loading from the save file worked fine, but he'd be forced to do that 2-3 times). The causes of these issues are still unknown to me, and they seem to be so unlikely that I doubt I'd come across them myself in 30 more playthroughs. So please let me know if you guys encounter any bugs!

hey, any change to the map?

[JaceTheBodySculptor]

Hey space cowboys, I've yet again fixed a bug. This one is pretty big, a crash that could happen anywhere, so for anyone playing it's important to use this fixed rom version 1.222. The crash would happen if you would shoot a frozen enemy with ice beam but not kill it, and let it thaw. I tweaked ice beam to freeze enemies faster, and that involves a lot of branching and checking of values (you can imagine a decision tree that checks if ice beam is equipped, what kind of ice vulnerability does the enemy have, is enemy going to be alive after the damage, is enemy frozend already). I messed up a branch instruction in the path that handles shooting enemies that are already frozen, and when they thaw out their AI pointer would crash the game.

It's fixed now! As always, if you find any more crashes please let me know. This one was found by Sapphron, thank you for exposing it. I hope there are no more crashes, and discovering this makes me suspect that there are no more because it lines up with previous reports of bugs.

[JaceTheBodySculptor]

Hello my friends,

Tonight I have uploaded version 1.3, which adds a feature to an existing item, some balance changes to boss fights, and beyond that, very minor fixes like a slope here or there.

New item functionality: Charge beam now does something that is sorely needed in this hack. I'll let it be a surprise. I've been slowly working on a new hack and after playing around with this feature, I decided this hack would benefit from it too. Charge never did anything cool, and it fought with Overdrive in terms of usefulness, so the new power will add diversity to play experiences.

Balance changes: Boss health now scales depending on progression. There are three stages: early game, mid game, and late game. Early game the bosses will have 1x health, mid game they have 1.5 health, and late they get 2x health, compared to the values set originally in this hack. This makes picking up extra ammo and energy tanks a real decision and rewards player skill/execution more. No more killing Ridley in 5 seconds if you saved him for the end.

A relatively minor change: Plasma beam doesn't pierce enemies anymore. The piercing made Plasma stronger than intended, particularly for some boss fights, and it ought to be more clear that Spazer is the heavy duty damage beam in this hack.

Bug fix: I fixed a bug that must have always been around but I hadn't caught. It involves Black Falcon's Skipping Ceres patch. An error in the code would mark a boss as dead when it should not be dead at the start of the game. It would only come up when a new game file is created after saving a previous game file. It's fixed now, so players can make and keep multiple save files.

That's all. If anybody catches anything, please let me know. It's been a while since a major bug has been found, so everything seems stable, and this will probably be the final update.

[JaceTheBodySculptor]

I know I said that was probably the last version, but I noticed a small error, so version 1.31 has been uploaded. The error was a map tile that I lazily changed - the location of Charge beam moved around (same room, different corner) and when I edited the map I carelessly copied a tile that was marked for the map station layer. It is now properly hidden until it is explored.

I did change a small thing, nothing exciting, but it's worth mentioning. The damage values for ice beam and wave beam are now swapped (this includes beam combinations and charged shots). I've felt for a long time that wave is too powerful, considering its utility and availability in this hack, plus ice is not very useful. I may not have made this change if I did not have another reason to upload a fix, but now that I've changed it and played around with it, it feels better to not kill enemies with so few shots early in the game.

Even more minor, pink and gold walking space pirates now instantly freeze when shot by ice beam, rather than block those shots.

More minor yet, solid collision blocks were added to a couple rooms near morph ball to prevent a rare chance of buggy door transitions if the player would hit a door block near the top of the room.

[Tower]

Does anyone has a read me or a list of all changes to items and bosses?
Cuz the one on site got 404