As you can see, I have begun coding weapons and adaptors for the game. First up is Mega Man's faithful doggo, Rush. But, I'm not gonna lie. After completing Rush Coil and working on his jet mode, I ran into a slew of problems. Mostly due to how the player interacts with him. Thankfully, after 24 hours of coding, recoding, cursing, and bashing my face against the keyboard, Rush is seemingly fully functional in game!
Up next will be work on Proto Man's and Bass's adaptors. See ya next time!
Another small, yet fun update (for me at least). I started adding in a graphic layer to the game to cover up the collision layer. After some tinkering, though, I learned that it was VERY easy to create ANIMATED tilesets within Godot. So, why not recreate a couple of screen from the stage of the very first Robot Master I ever defeated as a kid. Can you guess who it is? Or which version of the game I was playing? With that, I leave you with this screenshot. I'll try to shy away from stealing already existing tilesets in the future. But animating the lava elements of this section was so much fun. X3 Who knows? Maybe I can use this concept for a future project.
Summer is upon us and I have a snippet of an update for everyone. I've been steadily hammering away at the game as much as possible. I tend to stick to one golden rule when working on a project such as this. "Always try to do SOMETHING each day. Regardless how small of a change it is." Aside from missing a day or two here and there, I think I've stuck to this rule fairly well given my hectic home life. Haha. Anyhoo. Things are going well for the game after being brought from Clickteam Fusion to Godot Game Engine. All three playable characters have their individual movesets decided and implemented. The idea is to allow the player to bring two characters into a stage at a time, ala Mega Man X7/8. And each character will have their own section of the game that only they can traverse. (Example: Mega Man can get under low ceilings, where Proto Man and Bass cannot). This opens up a LOT of opportunities for exploration and extra goodies the player can stumble upon. As of right now, I'm working on the menu screens, saving and loading data (option data for now. Game saves come much later), and adding the spawn points for the player when they begin, or continue in, a stage. On top of all this is the lovely (#notsolovely) debug menu that I've hastily slapped in to make things smidge easier. In the options menu, you'll be able to set the size of the game window, adjust the sound effect and music volume, adjust the controls, etc. All of which saves to a config file that auto-loads when the app is started. I'll be sure to include as many options as I can so you can customize how you want the game to look and play. After that, I will begin work on some actual stages to trod through, finish the pause menu, and maybe add in the quick-swap that Mega Man 11 introduced. Either way. The game is progressing, slowly but surely. ^_^ I hope everyone has a safe and fun 4th of July. I'll see you next time! Take care!
The above is a quick test app that I threw together to test Godot Engine's Android exporting capabilities. To be honest? I'm happy with the results. Even on something as simple as what is shown in the video, running on my dinosaur of a tablet.
What does this mean?
Well, nothing yet. I want to focus on getting the game finished for Windows before I even consider this. But it does open the doors to porting the game to other platforms, Android included. Granted, the UI would have to be tweaked for touch controls for players that lack a physical controller. nd of course, optimizations aplenty. But it could mean that one day, you could play Mega Man Chronicles on the go! That in itself makes me a very happy dev.
Also, no. What is shown in the video is NOT the actual game. It was just a quick throw together that I whipped up for funsies. I'll make another video when MMC is farther along in development. As in, has a complete stage or two to look at. Until then. I'll keep everyone posted. Cya!
Just wanted to take a moment to wish everyone a Happy New Year! I'm still hard at work on this project and can't wait to show you what I've been working on behind the scenes! 2019 is shaping up to be very exciting!
There's two updates to this game that I felt ready to share.
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:
That's a loooooooot of screen real estate to fill... 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!
One FINAL update to the Palette Swap system before I move onto other portions of the game. As of right now, all 3 playable character's alternate palettes are in place, and items found in game now reflect the player's current palette.
I've also managed to add the Quick Swap function from later Mega Man games. Now that this is in place, I can now move my focus towards other aspects of the game (Weapon/Item/Adaptor/Stage development anyone?) I have decided to include a video below showing off the entire function in action. I hope you all enjoy it! Til next time!
