WIP: Mushroom Kingdom Fusion, November 11, 2008: Demo v0.2.5 released

Mickey Mouse is, of course, a cartoon character, not a video game character. And MKF is a multi-crossover between video games only.

We do have a sort of loop hole going that you can make a level based off of, say, Super Star Wars for the SNES, as long as there are no recognizable elements from Star Wars in the level. Judgespear made the Toyland level from Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse, while avoiding adding anything that was actually Disney related, like Mickey himself.

Now then...

None of the characters are 'rushed' (considering the game has no sort of deadline at all makes that impossible). Arthur, Sonic, Roll, etc. have all been extensivley worked on and made sure to be balanced with the rest of the game (admittedly they can plow through the Mario levels, but those only make up a single world in the game, out of 11 worlds). Obreck is a god at programming, thus why he makes it seem very easy. But character coding takes hard work, as does making a complete, good-playing and looking level.

We do exercise quality control for both the game and the forums. Although we publically released the source file for an earlier beta, we have a selected group of level designers to make levels for us with our current revisions. In total we have four members programming characters and about 10 members designing levels (again, carefully chosen members).

We do set limits for this game, as well. We are currently finalizing the planned level lists for each world, both regular and secret stages. Suggestions have been closed for all but 1 world, and we are currently finishing up the cut-scene engine. Soon we will be able to concentrate 100% on finishing developing the game.

I admit that I didn't fully explain the whole GHZ thing. We aren't just slapping a Sonic stage in and calling it a day. We're resizing all Genesis graphics to be in scale with the characters (and touching up the resized graphics to restore the quality). And we also aren't directly using the original level design of these stages. For example, Green Hill Zone will have a different layout than it originally did. And it will even incorporate the underground water cave section from the Gamegear Sonic 1 version of the stage.

And we aren't including all these different game series just to 'please the kiddies.' We're including them because we've planned out how to adapt them into stages for the game and how to incorporate their unique attributes to be fun. Bioshock may be a popular game loved by millions, but we won't include it in MKF for that reason. We'll include it when we've planned out how to successfully adapt it into a fun platformer stage.

(For the record, we tried. But Bioshock is one of those games that won't work in a different genre of game).


Now for your enjoyment I will provide a rundown of the characters you mentioned and just how they indeed differentiate from each other.

Luigi: Has less traction and worse inertia than Mario (constantly slides around), jumps higher, and has a super jump that gives him a lot of distance. His fireballs move in a straight line rather than bounce. Instead of a raccoon leaf he has the bunny ears from Super Mario Land 2, which gives him better flight capabilities but lacks any sort of offensive attack. Instead of the tanooki suit he gets the Cape from Super Mario World, which is a lot more difficult to handle, but has an offensive attack.

Tails: Sonic is only ever able to fly via his Rocket Shoes, but Tails has flying by default. His raccoon and tanooki power-ups allow him to fly farther and faster, and for a longer period of time before his flight meter overheats. This may not sound like much, but it is extremely useful. He is still limited by Sonic's weaknesses, such as the knockback when hit, and poor inertia when running, as well as not having any power-ups that grant him projectile attacks.

Link: Link has been significantly changed since Judgespear last showcased him in that video. He now has three health points. He can only restore them via randomly dropped hearts from enemies. He also cannot stomp enemies, and must use his downthrust sword attack to take them out. His sword is still his main weapon of offensive attack. His power-ups do not grant him an extra hit, he'll still lose health if damaged with them on. The few projectiles he has via power-ups (i.e. the boomerang and bombs) are somewhat short distance, and can't be easily spammed. His single flight power-up, Roc's Cape, is easier to handle than the SMW cape but doesn't have an offensive attack, and Link cannot attack while flying with it.



On the subject of clashing sprites:

Where in any of the videos have you seen NES graphics alongside SNES graphics? I certainly haven't seen anything like that.

Granted, we will have stages that take place in 8-bit games (Duck Hunt, Ice Climbers, etc.) but in those cases the sprite clashing will be intentional, for humor effect (16-bit Samus going through an 8-bit Mario 3 stage, etc.).

The same thing for Classic Mario. He's supposed to feel as if he was ripped straight out of the NES original game, thus why we didn't reshade him or anything. And I have to say it's fun playing as him through The Library.

So, yeah, there's my explanation.

This post has been edited by Ben66 on Mar 14 2009, 12:41 PM

I still think Quality > Quantity, no matter what the game is.

Of course, our dev team has the same opinion. We aren't just throwing this stuff in, we're putting in the extra effort to make sure it plays and looks great.

if the sprite clashing is for humourous effect, you better damn well ensure you execute said humourous moments efficiently and properly - otherwise i'll be observing the same qualities old newb fangames had 9 years ago on SFGHQ

You'll need to defend your game with more than just "Its not a Mario fangame and graphics aren't important" It's starting to look more like a demonstration of skill than an actual game.

*cough*strawmanfallacy*cough*

Okay. Since when have we said that graphics aren't important?

We just think fixing some trivial clashing issues that will take time to fix is less important than actual gameplay.

What are you doing to help the size issue, though? Because it seems that you're doing pretty much absolutely nothing about it, and ignoring the people that can't download or play your game because of how amazingly big it is. Which, at the point of release, will probably be most everyone. It's kind of impractical to keep adding new elements and characters when the game already is so big and is likely to get several times bigger when all of it is finished.

Actually we are working on making most items external, such as major bosses, all backgrounds and the like. This will decrease the time needed for the game to load. This is a time consuming process and will be taken care of in the future.

This post has been edited by Shodian on Mar 14 2009, 07:42 PM

Dang I thought this was dead.

I don't like how Link has to use his downthrust sword to kill enemies from above. In Link's Awakening, the Goombas could be killed by stomps or sword. That will just make using him juch more diffiuclt if he can't stomp on ememies.

All of the other characters seem fine to me. When can we expect the next demo?

To be honest, I thought he played a lot like Mario when he was able to just stomp on anybody, he felt more like Mario with a sword. Of course we are still balancing out the characters, so nothing is quite final yet.

At this point of time for the release of 0.3 the following will be released:

New Characters:

Link
Wario
Roll/Protoman
Vile
Classic Mario
Simon Belmont (?)
Ryu Hayabusa <-- I doubt this will happen cause I'm still in experience with coding

Many new levels by:
JS
Ben
Obreck
Genisi
Pouncer
Tails12
Aura Lancer
Prims
Myself
plus many more.

A new money system, this will be used to unlocking things in the future.

If I missed anything I apologize. But you can check out of forums for more information.

This post has been edited by Shodian on Mar 14 2009, 08:32 PM

We are using a program called ENIGMA to defrag the coding, reducing the game's size by removing all the extra crap that accumulates in GM's background.

And as Shodian has said we're making as many elements external as possible.

oh god black squirrel RUN you've got the legions of fanboys from our entire silly forum making accounts here to come after you



...





wait whoops

really guys they get it

all of you cut it out


....

I actually agree with Black Squirrel a bit. You know, it's absolutely true the game would be that much more professional, that much more fantastic, etc, if the entire thing had a set style and all the sprites were set to that style. Take Indie Brawl, for example. Of course, it's early in development at this point, but all the characters and stages are drawn in a similar style, even though the styles of their respective games were completely different. It looks stunning, of professional quality that way.

I think, though, that Judge wasn't really aiming for that when he made the game at the beginning. Like, even in the earliest videos, Mario was SMB3 Mario, Halo...well, custom sprites, Megaman stuff was in the Megaman style, Doom stuff was in the Doom style, yeah. I guess, one aspect of this entire mishmash crossover thing, or whatever you'd want to call it, is the interesting thing of seeing Mario as Mario going through a Megaman place exactly as it looked when you saw it before, or Sonic or Tails in their styles going through the Mushroom Kingdom in its style. It's absolutely, positively mish-mashed, nostalgic, and at times clashing, but it all comes together somehow.

On a technical and honest side, though, yeah, I think one reason they just plopped everything directly from the internet mostly untouched to the game is that it'd take freaking forever to make sprites/tilesets/etc for all this stuff. At this point, it's really not worth it, and what have you. You're still absolutely right, though, it'd be fantastic, but we don't have that amount of spriters for that anyway, unfortunately.

...

The character thing, yeah, the characters are getting to the ridiculous point, where there'll probably be something like twenty (gasp) by the time it's done, thirty if you count the clones from the new clone system they're doing, but each character is fairly fleshed out, and they offer some nice (and nostalgically overloading) gameplay alternatives. You've got Mario, Sonic, Samus, Wario, and all them, full with, uh, eight or so power-ups, I think, all with their own special gimmicks and the like, hearkening back to their old games and playstyles. Though, a few of the secret characters aren't as fleshed out, like I think Vile doesn't have any suits on account of his massive uberness (somewhat on purpose, as I've heard), or clones like Protoman having no suits.

They've got it under control, though- Obreck's main job, pretty much, is coding/balancing/testing/fine-tuning the characters, besides smaller things like enemies.

...

As I see it, it's not so much a quantity versus quantity argument except in the case of sprites, which I agree wholeheartedly in. But yeah, gameplay is nice, so that makes up for it, I guess. Quite nice, indeed.

as I've heard because my crappy comp can't play it either


okay guys move out the war is over

wait I almost forgot



NEXT TIME BLACK SQUIRREL



NEXT TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmeeeeee



something tells me this won't end it anyway but whatever I tried


you silly people

also

us gits must unite you know

although I terribly underperformed with this one

my god, are you guys seriously writing paragraphs over this matter?

sprite clashing == bad


I don't care what you say, it looks bad. it really does, and until you bother to fix it, I'm not downloading this game.

in fact, you want the harsh truth? I most likely won't download it anyway, the engine is messy, I get 10 to 40 fps tops (even on my new computer) and the filesize is huge. I don't want to waste my time downloading something I wouldn't enjoy -- I haven't enjoyed any of the game so far anyways.

have a nice day!

Thanks! You too.

And to be quite honest with you guys, you need to come down to earth, the majority of the people working on this game have a job and or college to go to. And not all of us are experience in spiting, No Body and DC Hunk are our main ones now, and they have a life too. So not everything is going to be perfect first time through. As with these slow down issues, we are working on it. Game Maker is not what you call memory friendly. As we continue to externalize items, it will be a bit faster. All we ask is for patience. Well work on these over time.

Shodian has a point here. You can't expect everything to be magnificent in the early development of things. Also, it's not like this is our full-time job in life. Everyone has a life and we can only do our best with the time we have. Not every fangame can be professionally made like magic.

yes, but that's no excuse for not doing the best you can

don't worry- you have all the time in the world

Um..........what?



Obviously...some people don't know what a beta means.

I agree, the sprite clashing can work nice for a comical effect. This is the thought I have had about it so far. I see no point in changing that, unless everything starts to clash horribly; which I have yet to see.

Not really, I have an estimated 80+ years in my life and I swear if I do not get to play the finished game sometimes before I die I am going to be quite dissatisfied, and possibly even leave a negative review when it is finished!

True, but isn't this MUSHROOM KINGDOM Fusion? I thought the main star was supposed to be Mario.