1. What's in a resolution?
I've asked a few members of the Mega Man community about how I should handle the game's overall resolution. While quite a few want me to stick with the 4:3 ratio seen in the NES games, a surprising number actually wanted me to give 16:9 a shot.
There's a couple of problems with each:
The vast majority of PC gamers (and phone users now that I think about it) use 16:9 monitors and screens when playing games. And while the game can be enjoyed in windowed mode at the standard NES resolution of 256x240, you run into problems when going full screen. You can either have a black void on either side of the game window, stretch the image so that it fills the entire screen, or the option I'm thinking of: include a wallpaper option ala the Mega Man (X) Legacy Collections.
But I could ALSO just rework the camera system for a 16:9 resolution, but this in itself presents it's own problem:
One of the main issues I ran into when playing Mega Man 11 when it first released was the extra time between Mega's shots fired and when I could shoot again. Where I felt I COULD shoot again, the bullets previously fired were still on screen, leaving me with a "NO SHOOT FOR j00!" scenario starting out. This would be an issue for this game as well, as fans know that Mega Man can only fire 3 bullets at once (2 if you're playing as Proto Man). I'm sure with a lot of careful planning, the game could be designed around the wider screen, but I think I'm going to play it safe for now and leave it at 4:3 with the option of black bars or a wallpaper.
2. OMG WUT?!
Itching to know what I mean by THAT, ain'tcha?Well, to be honest. I've been a Clickteam product user for years. Starting out with my first game made in Klik n Play (My God I'm old...). I've spent every waking moment I had available hammering away at this game and making it as good as I possibly can in the months I've been working on it.
Then I stumbled onto a game engine named Godot.
Honestly, I didn't think I was ready to start learning actual code, which Clickteam Fusion does not require to make games. But after some tinkering, I managed to port Mega Man Chronicles over to Godot...
...In less than 24 hours...
After that I began adding more and more until I decided to ultimately switch to using this engine for the completion of my game. Where I would be mindlessly clicking away in CTF, I was actually programming Mega Man, bringing him to life in a way that I thought I was not ready for.
Now, I'm not going to bash Clickteam's products. In fact, I highly recommend their tools for those who wish to learn how to make their own games but lack the time (IE: Myself) to learn a programming language.
But. If you have the time, I highly recommend giving Godot a try. They have a MASSIVE community that can help out, many YouTube tutorial series covering a wide variety of gameplay styles, online documents to learn their on board language, GDScript (it also support Visual Scripting, C#, and C++), and probably the best part of it all? It's open source and 100% free.
No, seriously. I mean free. It's released under the MIT license, which mean zero fees, unlike similar engines like Unity. Your game is YOUR game. And it can be used to produce games and apps to Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS, and HTML5 our of the box.
That said, I want to personally thank Clickteam and it's user base (Particularly N64Mario for his own Mega Man engine and answering a ton of my questions and AlmightyZenTaco for his tutorial series on YouTube.) for all the help they've given me over the years. I've passed my copy of the program onto my children in the hopes that they can learn how to make their own apps and games the same way I did way back when.
Take care, and I hope to share some big news with everyone sometime after the holiday season! Great things are coming!
Well.... At least I'd like to say thanks for the mention. Hope things go well for you under Godot engine. Let me know how it turns out. I'm curious as to what Godot can do for Mega Man that CT Fusion can not. I had my own thoughts on handling colors on a character sprite in 2018, as opposed to what I was used to back in the day, which is now considered slow today. Maybe Godot has a similar feature, or some method that can handle color swapping as complicated as Mega Man. Any way, good luck with your work man. :)
ReplyDeleteGodot has quite a few options that I can use. Personally, I'll be using a shader to handle palette swapping. It's easier on RAM usage compared to CTF's RGB setup, and I can port the game to other platforms without running into compatibility issues like with some CTF extensions. I'm pretty excited to give it a whirl.
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