A Mario fangame! It's a fangame! With Mario!

[Zero Kirby]

Okay, I figure it's probably easier to get feedback when I get the right idea across so here's another MIDI put through the M&L3 soundfont:



And just try to imagine it being used for something like this:



Feedback would be great because I really want to make sure this idea works.

[Makermatic21]

Everything looks great! Just wondering how you are progressing?

[Zero Kirby]

Everything looks great! Just wondering how you are progressing?

Quite slowly, actually. Soundfonting the MIDIs in a manner where they don't sound bad is a little more difficult than I thought (the pan flute has been getting quite the workout let me tell you what since it sounds nice just about everywhere so far) and I can't find MIDIs of every song I want. So I'm probably going to use the soundfonted MIDIs for the world map/level music and such and use game soundtracks for boss fights, the title screen, and the like - basically "impressive" moments (hey I think my title screen is impressive thank you very much)

If you'd like to see "progress" on the soundtrack, here you go:


The idea is that the farther you are in the level, the more instruments play. Not sure how I'll pull that off but I like the idea so if I can make it work I will. If I can't, I won't. Simple as that.

(The "time-up speed-up" is done in-engine with FMOD, and sounds vaguely the same as it does in the video (which was done in Audacity!). 33% faster with a pitch increase. So I've definitely made THAT work.)

Oh, and here's a redone version of the Map Screen (now with 100% more inspired by Yoshi's Island)


Naturally as you progress through the game the music fills out more and more. I always like that in games and is one of the many reasons I love Yoshi's Island.

If I ever released a soundtrack (which I won't because none of the music's mine) I'd call it something like "Super Pan Flute Classic: Return of the Revenge of the Pan Flute's Revenging Returning 2 Revenge Reloading Revenge"

I've also been trying to work out an Options Menu! Hooray, gonna get that shit done mmhmm. Basically it's still going to work like what I posted on it earlier but between coding it and working on music, it's going fairly slowly. Once I'm done with that I'll finish Boost Mario and then the rest of Mario's powerups before I move on to making enemies, and THEN there's still the matter of finding sprites for the various worlds and levels I want to do, and don't even get me started on boss fights. Ugh. I've been planning a requests topic for a while but I want to make sure I know what I'm asking for and that I can do it, first.

To be honest, a lot of my ideas are kind of big and I'm not entirely sure I'd be able to pull them all off - which is why I'm trying to refrain from sharing them so I don't disappoint anyone but myself. But at the same time I really want to bounce them off someone so I can get feedback as to whether or not they're actually good. Eh. Whatever. The lamentations of an artist.

I always love hearing feedback of whatever I have posted though, so fire away!

[Virt]

I love the idea of more instruments the farther you move on the map.

It reminds me of Mario Party's Minigame Island, sorta.

[Zero Kirby]

I love the idea of more instruments the farther you move on the map.

It reminds me of Mario Party's Minigame Island, sorta.

I completely forgot that Mario Party did that. I think Mario Party 2 did something similar as well with its Mini-Game Roller Coaster.

Haven't played either game in forever though.

[Zero Kirby]

Because I love mockups, let's look at one, 'kay



Oh man that Options menu I've been spoutin' about for some time now! A mockup of it, anyway. With "Help" at the top. Hell yeah I'm good at this

So for Display you've got the obvious screen size, which doesn't change resolution, just changes the size of the window to appropriate sizes (full screen you can just hit F4, let me be lazy). You can turn off the Controller Icon which tells you if you have a controller plugged in or not - for convenience's sake, really. And the Heads-Up Display, might go the Kirby 64 route and let you pick from a variety of them, but I know I'll probably have a "minimalist" HUD that takes up less screen. If you'd like to design an HUD for for the game that's kind of nice and takes up about the same amount of space as the one in that screenshot, go right on ahead! If I like it I'll use it in my game and give you credit for it.

Controls, obvious. You'll be able to pick from a number of presets - QWERTY, AZERTY, Dvorak, and Colemak for keyboards, and so far XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 for controllers - and have a custom for either keyboards or controllers - this section of the menu will have a defined control scheme that doesn't change based on your preference, simply for ease of use, and both a keyboard and controller scheme can be active at the same time should you choose to swap mid-game - you'll be able to pick and they'll be highlighted in the selection thingy. That was a long sentence. I'm sorry. If you have a controller/keyboard that's not listed, feel free to link a map of them in the topic and I'll probably get around to adding a preset for it - I really don't imagine it'd be too hard once the customizable controls are actually PROGRAMMED.

Sound and Music, you can change the volume of the sound effects or the volume of the music to your preference, values starting at 100 and ending at zero where you can't even hear a thing. If you're the kind of guy who'd rather download a bunch of .BRSTMs from Brawl Custom Music and play them in Winamp, this will be for you. And of course, a Sound Test, because I like Sound Tests, even though you can only use it to play music, so Sound Test is an odd name for it. You get a number and the name of each track which is nice, so you don't have to fiddle around with going through each choice to find the one you want, but can still count the number of tracks in the game. But before you immediately jump into it, it's actually going to be locked the first time you play the game. How do you unlock it? Well... I'm not telling you. Pfft, that'd be silly and ruin the entire point of making it an unlockable. You don't unlock it by clearing the game though, I'll tell you that much. And if you do unlock it beforehand (not that I'm saying you can), you'll have to hear a track in game for the track to be listenable in the Sound Test.

Achievements! Whoa, nelly, that's a lot of Achievements, there probably won't be that many and in such close proximity to one another and the icons will probably not all be exactly the same but it's meant to be laid out like the Checklist of Kirby's Air Ride - ones you haven't completed will of course be greyed out, and when you highlight them, you'll instead get hints on how to unlock them as opposed to being told how you unlocked them. Like clearing the game as Mario, as listed above. Of course, why would you be able to clear the game as anyone but Mario, I have no idea. Will the Achievements have unlockables? I dunno. I imagine some might. Maybe not all of them.

Being still just a mockup, none of this has been programmed quite yet but rest assured it'll probably happen fairly quickly - it really is just a lot of copy and paste at this point. Sure there'll be a bit of number-crunching but since it's just set up like the Help menu, it'll be pretty simple to do.

Feel free to suggest improvements on this menu, by the way! And I'm sure you're wondering, "How do you make left-right selections on things next to each other?" Well you actually have to activate each box by selecting it with Button 1. That's how. That's when the arrows actually show up, not when they're inactive. So this mock-up is a little inaccurate. A bit. Maybe.

Oh yeah, and that's not what the background will actually look like. This is a little more accurate:



And no I haven't forgotten that I should fix the colors on the menu a bit - that comes after it's done, though.

EDIT: I suppose I should've mentioned the functions of each button, as well - 1 is jump, 2 is run, 3 is charge Boost Jump (as Boost Mario), 4 is the item box, and 5 is pause.

[Zero Kirby]

Okay I'll try not to post every single day again in a row like this but I put together this video (with annotations) to help demonstrate how far the engine and game as a whole has come along and whatnot. And stuff. Yeah.

The video is poorly (read: not at all) edited because I'm lazy (read: actually because Sony Vegas is being the dumb right now, and not because I'm lazy)

[kaB00M]

Excellent work. Loved the sky diving part in the video.

[Previous]

Your "pretty background" may look nicer with some parallax scrolling

Other than that, this is pretty solid. Can't wait to see more (any play!)

[Zero Kirby]

Your "pretty background" may look nicer with some parallax scrolling

Other than that, this is pretty solid. Can't wait to see more (any play!)

Mmm, that's really difficult to do with tiles, like I have it set up right now. And good hill and stuff backgrounds in M&L style are fairly difficult to find, and ones that loop even harder (if they even exist)

BUT! A really really really really really long time ago I did make an engine test thing with M&L sprites and I used backgrounds from Mario Kart Super Circuit with parallax scrolling, here's an example



I tried this in Classic and now this





Backgrounds themselves clash, but I can try building some custom ones.

[Previous]

Does GM still only support one layer of tiles etc with no scrolling? Bummer.

[Zero Kirby]

Does GM still only support one layer of tiles etc with no scrolling? Bummer.

There's multiple layers of tiles allowed, but scrolling's another matter. There's a shift function but it appears to work in relative and not absolute terms, which is what I want to create the parallax effect.

I am doing some research into it and have found a couple results. I'll test 'em out, see what I get.

EDIT: And I found a solution! It needs some working around and'll require a lot more work, but it'll create a good parallax effect once it's done!

[Previous]

Well it's been a long time since I worked with GM so I really don't know anyting about it today XD

Good luck with it, heh :>

[Zero Kirby]

Well, it kind of works, anyway



The only problem is that it causes this horrible tile-splitting because the values don't round up to whole numbers (and whenever I force them to, the parallax effect breaks). So I tried using overlapping tiles:



Yeah, not even sure what's happening here. (actually I have a faint idea) But now building backgrounds out of them is a pain because I work on a 16x16 grid with 17x16 tiles, so I have to lay them more carefully and stuff. It's a pain, yeah, but what can you do?

I'm gonna make this work though. Somehow.

[TheShyGuy]

How bout keeping the actual parallax value and when drawn, just round the value(not the actual value). Ignore if you did this. I thought you were rounding the actual value when its set which would probably break it.