Hack Design Preproduction

[Grimlock]

Do you guys do any preproduction before hacking or do you build/design as you go?

I'm considering writing something up on preproduction and was wondering how you all approach it.  If you aren't familiar with the term "preproduction" it's basically the steps you take before launching a project.  It can also be done as you reach new phases in a project such as starting up a new area or planning out graphics.   

I do a lot of preproduction myself which includes researching various concepts, drafting area layouts, graphics planning, various potential types of obstacles, and so forth.

[Drewseph]

Originally I did not do much planing other than a flow chart for main upgrades.  however when revisiting Tourian for Axeil edition I made sure every detail of the map was planned ahead of time in Photoshop. [spoiler=Map of Tourian][/spoiler]

[RealRed]

preproduction for Hyper Metroid was kind of merged with production. I made maps using SMILE's map editor in order to think about how I wanted areas to connect and so forth, then printed out several printed copies of those maps in order to draw out item placement and sequence. Of course, things would change over time as I tested and tried what was and wasn't working, design-wise, but it was immensely helpful because I always knew what I could and couldn't ask of the player for each room. The "what do I do with this room?" question was removed from the design process because planning made it always clear.

Also, knowing what I could and couldn't do to the game before deciding what to include was highly useful. Admitting your limits in terms of romhacking abilities (GFX, assembly knowledge, TIME) will let you make sound decisions about what your hack will be like in the end. Also removes development snags like "I want to include this, but...". There's not always someone who wants to make your shit for you.

[DSO]

I am sick of preproduction. Seriously. It's my own fault for working on utterly grandiose hacks, but in any case, I have a lot of experience with planning out hacks. And yet my one hack that finished was entirely unplanned and was more 'lol a bug let's build around this'...

So, this is what I got up to in the planning stages for Angry Fire Chozo 2. Spoilered because images ahoy.

[spoiler]All areas were named and mapped out in relation/connections with each other, along with their sizes. The planned total screencount came to 6000.


All items and upgrades I was going to put in were listed, along with a progression tree list of what items unlocked the ability to grab what other items and an intended item route.
For the curious:
[spoiler]ITEMS AND UPGRADES
Morph
Bomb
Power Bomb
BoostBall (wonderful vertical :D)
SandShredder (lets you burrow downward in "sand")

Energy Tank
Weapon Tank (increases base weapon damage)
Varia (protects from heat damage, reduces freeze|corrosive damage)
Gravity (Free water movement, ability to move slowly in Sea's "solid water", protects from freeze damage.)
Encounter Module (Protects agaisnt corrosive atmospheres)
Slipstream Module (free movement in Sea's "solid water")
Amulet (Protects from curse and adds slight damage resistance/health regen)
Phantomskin (Protects from all damage but eats ammo while active)

Hiesenberg Boots (Allows "normal" gravity in all areas while activated)
Speed Booster
Space Jump
Screw Attack
Dimensional Shift (Can perform short range teleports in held direction as long as Samus will emerge in air tiles. Has recharge timer to prevent abuse)
Time Stopper (Freezes enemies and consumes ammo while active)

Missile
Super Missile
Max Impact (Missile/Beam damage increases with velocity)
Overdriver (consumes energy and adds it to weapon base damage)
Dark Draw (Super Missiles pull certain enemies within radius into them)
Grapple
Souleater (drain enemy health while grappled, various reactions determine whether it kills enemies or leaves them alive with 1hp [to prevent rippers being annoying to grapple)

Charge
Quickcharge (instant firing charged shots, only 1 beam on screen at time, eats a lot of ammo)
Ice
Wave
Spazer
Plasma
Light Module (Adds "light" element to beam weapons)
Dark Module (Adds "dark" element to beam weapons)
Water Module (Adds "water" element to beam weapons)
Wind Module (Adds "wind" element to beam weapons)
Earth Module (Adds "earth" element to beam weapons)
Thunder Module (Adds "thunder" element to beam weapons)
Fire Module (Adds "fire" element to beam weapons)
Ice Cluster (Enables Ice SBA)
Energy Pulse (Enables Wave SBA)
Acid Rain (Enables Spazer SBA)
Explosive Vortex (Enables Plasma SBA)


Item totals:
Energy Tank
Max Energy = 1999
   Visible         Orb               Hidden
Energy: 25             100                 50
Number: 12              10                 12
Health:300               1000                600
Total Etanks = 32

Missile
Max = 500
   Visible         Orb               Hidden
Amount:  2              5                 10
Number: 25             30                 30
Totals: 50            150                300
Total Missiles = 85

Super Missile
Max = 150
   Visible         Orb               Hidden
Amount:  1              2                  3
Number: 17             35                 21
Totals: 17             70                 63
Total Super Missiles = 73

Power Bomb
Max = 100
   Visible         Orb               Hidden
Amount:  1              2                  3
Number: 15             20                 15
Totals: 15             40                 45
Total Power Bombs = 50

Weapon Tanks = 5

    38 suit upgrades
    32
    85
    73
    50
     5
_________
   283 collectable items total[/spoiler]
I also had a list of songs and what areas they'd be used in as well.
There was also a list of hex tweaks.
There was also a list of major ASM things to be done.
[spoiler]ASM/PATCHES:
Main gamestate engine transfered to RAM
Compressed scroll data
Room headers in any bank
Door pointers expanded to 3 bytes for room headers
Special spinjump restart
Palette Blends Patch
New Control Scheme
New HUD
Third Pause Screen
Enemy Follow/Warp/Draw In/Upgrades Etc.
Glowpatch
Curse effect
Freeze Effect
Corrosion Effect
Enemy elemental resistance/weakness
Room Names
New FX3 B bits
RandomFX
Teleport Blocks
Door Speedups/Custom fade speed
Expanded Message Boxes
Third Layer
[/spoiler]
I even had a level design guide for myself, mostly to do with making the game easier. I knew with such a massive world people would need direction, so I had planned to give it to them in a very simple visual way.
[spoiler]One of the goals I set is to make the game fun and ideal for console conditions. Another goal is to make the game feel like a professional product. Also important is I want it to feel like an epic, vibrant world with a lot more variety than just the angry colors of the original Angry Fire Chozo.

1. Console friendly
This games' difficulty curve will be set so that the commonly traveled paths will be pretty easy for us hackers. That doesn't mean you'll never see a mockball used in the main path. It just means the mockball isn't required. I stated this before for the first hack and while it was technically true, this time I'm paying more serious attention. For example, this case from the original is no longer acceptable. (The tunnel entrance is denoted by a wall tile being flipped upside down, which is barely visible.)



Here is an altered version that I would consider an "acceptable" workaround, but I'm probably not going to use very much for a main path. It may see more use on side paths, but still not as much use as the example after this will be.



This is a mockup of what I have in mind when it comes to using tricks that not everyone can perform well. There's no need to do the mockball at all, you can just go over the the platform above the crumble bridge. However, the shotgate up top makes it more rewarding to do the mockball, as it is clearly faster, but there's also the risk that you don't do it properly and take damage.



2. Puzzles will be more visible/intuitive than Event Horizon.
Some people ragequit the Event Horizon demo due to not being able to figure out certain puzzles. Some of these people were even the ones I expected would know better (read: SSG's moving platform makes some people sad). Thus, no more will the platforms you shoot be just barely visible and certain puzzle elements will be introduced seperately before you see them combined to create puzzles. Hopefully this will give people the general idea of what to do...

3. Areas will have more consisency.
I sometimes have real trouble with this one. I get a lot of ideas and tend to flesh them out on a room-by-room basis. Thus the rooms in my hacks tend to shift around in style randomly. Three connected rooms in the same area may use three different tilesets and three different FX settings. While it is a form of variety, this also tends to make the world feel too random and unbelievable to really immerse yourself in it.

I'm not completely eliminating the style changes in areas, but I'm going to be spreading them out further. Before, a room might have very dark FX, and then the next contain bright transparencies, before going to a room that has no FX. There's something like that at the bottom of the first Elevator you see in Angry Fire Chozo. None of the rooms were bad in themselves, but their different interesting environments were limited to only one room. Now, I'm going to make the dark FX at least be 5 or 6 rooms large, and then the transparency effect also be in an area 5 or 6 rooms large, and then the no FX area be 5 or 6 rooms large. Stylistic changes will not happen every single room.

Also, when switching between tilesets and major areas, another idea I'm implementing is transition rooms. There will be several tilesets made up of common foreground and background elements. Let's say you're moving from a Norfair tileset to a Maridian tileset. There will be a room connecting the two areas that will contain elements of both tilesets, with the Norfair side being more strongly Norfair and the Maridian side more Maridian.

5. The world will be epic huge and full of secrets, but not too intimidating to explore.
Many people would have trouble getting through a hack this big, especially since there is a degree of non-linearity involved. You may recall from the metconst topic that the planned size was nearly 1.5 times larger than Redesign. Now that I've finished marking the boundaries of the areas, it appears more likely to be between 1.8 to 2 times as large. Yeah. Even if the main path is easy, exploring it sounds like a pain. So, I've taken steps to allieviate that pain.

One method I'm using is to denote doors that are guiding you along the route to progress to another upgrade. That is not to say every door in every room along the way will be marked in this fashion, I'm not using them to direct you straight to the next upgrade you can get. But they will let you know when you're entering the right general area you need to be in. Let's say you encounter a fork in the road, where going down leads to a fairly large area but that does not lead to any important upgrades, just item collection. Going to the right takes you to the area you need to go to obtain some item you need to progress. Here's a mockup of what you might expect to see:



This should help people keep track of where to go and what to expect when entering an area. Of course, maybe you'll see these kinds of doors but they require an upgrade you do not yet possess to open, requiring you to come back later in the game. To help you remember areas you'll want to return to later, each submap will have markers you can place on your map screen.
[/spoiler]
Also, there was some graphics work being done beforehand too. I had, in my head, a mental picture of what each area would look like and was wanting to get the graphics together before I started building an area. I was far from getting everything together, but some graphics artists like Red Monk3y were really helping at the time. For instance, he helped me with the title screen.


And we also had some back and forth discussions on other graphics I wanted. I'd send him pictures or a kinda mockup, like I wanted the final area to be visible as the background of the smaller area that led up to it, I wanted it to be a temple sucking up a star. He asked me what the temple looked like so I made a terrible mockup in paint. (Hint: the following image may clue you in that drawing is not my strong suit)

He kinda got the idea but didn't know what do to with a temple like that so he asked me to make a better mockup, lol. So I made a mockup of the temple with some of the graphics I had available.

And then he delivered awesomesauce.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10779677/Final%20Area.wmv

ANYWAY THE POINT IS I WAS GETTING GRAPHICS TOGETHER BEFORE DOING MAJOR BUILDING.

And I think that about covers the AFC2 preproduction I was getting up to.

[spoiler]AND MOST IMPORTANTLY IF YOU ARE A GFX ARTIST PLZ DO DRAW BECAUSE WHILE I CAN'T DRAW I TOTALLY CAN USE YOUR GFX IN WAYS YOU NEVER PREDICTED, JUST ASK JAMES.James plz get back to drawing soon.[/spoiler]
[/spoiler]

I'm getting up to even more preproduction in my current project. For instance, the custom MDB with all sorts of new rooms and roomstates will be finished before building starts. And I have files with all the lists of pointers needed for doors and PLMs, with all the valid pointers already created in the ROM and ready for use.

I would be interested in speaking more with you about preproduction, once the music editor comes out and already with the sfx libraries being released, there's already new areas to cover with preproduction such as sound design...

[Retroo]

The background in that video is just amazing!

[Lunaria]

I do lots of pre-production, but I usually don't write it down anywhere. Aside from planning and idea balling, I also do quite a bit of analysis of both my ideas as well as other games before I do something.

[Quietus]

My problem is always the opposite.  I plan everything, and have it all planned out.  Then I get one room done, and lose interest.

Maybe I could do some one-room hacks... :grin:

[Zero One]

I did tons of pre-planning before starting out my hack. I had:

   
• Item/Boss Progression - including sequence breaks
• Item Counts
• Area Names
• Patches
• Graphics Edits
• Text Changes
• Notes for level design
• Complete maps

I was pretty prepared, but I also gave myself enough room to do extra stuff if I wanted to.

[Vismund Cygnus]

Recently I've taken to doing 100% of my planning on paper before I even touch my computer. It's probably my web design study that has made me so menstrual about my planning, but also because I had no plan going in for Sunshine and it ended up taking me a year just to get any of the base stuff done. Of course I ended up learning halfway through that that doing no planning was a terrible idea, so I made some very rough outlines of what I wanted to have done.

Because I don't want to spoil any of that (even area names would be giving a way quite a lot), here's some of the planning I've done for a random mini-ish-hack side project:
[spoiler]
[spoiler=Spoiler because large image][/spoiler]
I already had in my head a very clear idea of what I wanted to do for this one. It's a very linear path you have to take through each area and as such, I felt it was necessary to plan the very order of the landscape you'd be in at each stage. However virtually everything is accessible from the very beginning, so I wanted to make sure that the rewards for completing each area are fairly balanced so no matter what area you go to first you'll always feel well rewarded.

There's another 3 or 4 pages solely for map layouts and minor pickup locations/progression, and already I feel like this project is coming along a lot better even though the level design itself is almost 0%.
[/spoiler]

That said, if anyone pays any attention to what I say in the relevant thread, you'll find that even without planning I try to do as much of the framework as possible before even touching the levels.

[Digital_Mantra]

I wing it, build a room, get ideas for how it will connect to the next. I do zero preproduction.
I do think that if I had one planned out properly, I could make something way better than anything I've made.

[Jiffy]

I sorta do a RealRed style more than anything else. Build all the maps first (and align them if I can be bothered, lol.) then make the rooms in the order that the Player would most likely go, giving my Beta testers more content earlier. I do all PLM repointing, Enemy Placement, etc, while I'm editing a room.
Sometimes, if I dislike the area, I'd revamp it.
When I finish the area and I, or my Beta Testers, are not happy with the difficulty of it, I'd add more enemies. Simple.
So yeah, that means Arrival falls under a "Communist" category, haha.