Mockup Frenzy #8: Megaman!

[huZba]

Really nice stuff all round. Delkaes has too many palettes. Should be easy to fix. Could use a bit of mechanical elements just to create that weird techno-organic feel that's very prominent especially in the MMX games.

@ Waltuo. Checking out some megaman sprites, it does seem like a waste to include black in most palettes, so maybe it would be a good challenge to make that NES X without black outlines and separate him from BGs by other means.

@ Mt® awesome mockup. The health bar uses megaman's face palette in the games. If you include mega-blue in the health bar it will flash when you charge the shot and it's a bit of a waste to overlay sprites in the health bar.

Here's part of my artilleryman stage.

The orange cannon is mostly BG tiles while the grey parts are sprites. When you blow it up, the small guy comes out BOING BOING.

[Ben2theEdge]

huZba that mockup is dead, dead sexy! 

One thing you might want to consider changing is the gray color of the enemies. I guess it depends on whether or not you want to go against established video game language... gray usually feels solid/impenetrable/deactivated. I'm sure now that I said that someone will find a dozen screens of gray enemies but I think they feel a tad lifeless.

[Froli]

huZba that mockup is dead, dead sexy! 

Indeed. That looks awesome 

[huZba]

Ah.. that's a good point. I'll change the enemies. It's giving me all kinds of ideas too, using the color as a gameplay element. Active/inactive enemies and stuff. Thanks!

[Conzeit]

Hubza: Indeed! Very very cool. Did you mean to remake the beggining of Neptune's stage in Gameboy's MegamanV/RockWorld5 ? it is freakishly similar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl-w4WWDM-0

Waltuo:I thought you'd be interested in seeing the official take on it. These were from GB remakes of the X games.

http://www.sprites-inc.co.uk/files/X/Xtreme1/X/
http://www.sprites-inc.co.uk/files/X/X/xcmsheet.gif

[Dusty]

Was playing Megaman 2. This might seem a little off-topic... but I was going through Windman's stage and then came to some clouds. These clouds are drawn in front of the player... and I'm not talking small clouds, but huge, take-up-half-the-screen clouds. I thought NES only have one BG layer? Any idea how this was pulled off? All the while, birds dropping eggs that hatched 7+ little chicks, and fragments of egg, and huge sprite platforms.

[mice]

Dusty:
Sprites can be behind the background. But in front of the background color (the common color in all palettes).

[QuickSilva]

Yes this technique was used very well in Mario Bros 3 too where you could drop behind the scenery in the first level for a secret exit.

Jason.

[PypeBros]

as for the "large sprite" (80x80 plus expenses), you could try to do that with 5 'wide sprites' that you reprogram on horizontal return so that the hardware has 5 new sprite again on the next line. Also, you could try to do that by reprogramming characters if the sprite's movement is slow enough and easily predictable (e.g. a platform that always moves up or that always moves down). When your "sprite" has then moved by 8 pixels, you come back to the initial "frame" and show it one tile above its former position.

Depending on the hardware, that can be just a trick or a programmer's nightmare, but i could suggest both software and hardware tricks to achieve something alike (including bank-switching hardware trickery that would be über fun to code with).

[Dusty]

Dusty:
Sprites can be behind the background. But in front of the background color (the common color in all palettes).

What about the platform, though? Perhaps they used sprites for that... but these I dunno. That's a lot of sprites.