next »

[DanFornace]

Website
SmashBoards
Youtube

Introduction:

Hey TIGSOURCE! I am here to introduce a fan-project that I have been working on for a few months now. The project consists of me, Dan Fornace doing art and programming, and InversePhase covering Sound Effects and Music.

We are working on a relatively experiment recreation of the Super Smash Brothers series as if it were released for the Gameboy Original and was a part of the franchise. Of course, I will be taking away many of the restrictions since I am actually developing it for Windows Pc with Game Maker. However, we want the presentation to be authentic as possible. I have been working on 4 color pixel art while InversePhase is working with authentic chiptune skills to create sounds that match the game.


Gameplay:

While I am making a fan game, I hope to add many of my own design elements and choices to the game. Since this is for gameboy, I will have a static screen rather than the zooming and moving that is capable in 3d. I will also be using simple stage designs rather then the monstrosities that populated two-thirds of Brawl.

I am also simplifying the combat for the Gameboy. The controls consist of the D-Pad. A to Jump and B to attack. There are no shields, no grabs, no dodges, no smash attacks. Therefore to balance characters and attacks, I am relying heavily on starting and ending lag as well as knockback. Damage and Death percentages will be similar to the series but I do not plan a direct correlation on attacks.

Since there is only one attack button that means there are only 9 attacks. Up down forward and neutral for the ground and the same plus backwards for the air. That means that characters will not take direct translations to their movesets as I am picking the most unique moves in my mind to form the characters.

Finally, I am simplifying the roster. I plan on having 4 characters right now. I plan on making at least one that is not from smash with my own moveset. I may also up the roster to 6 and add another original moveset. I have some ideas that change the way the game is played and make characters more unique so I plan on implementing those.

Demo v1.0:

It is with great excitement that I present to you the first playable demo for Super Smash Land.

Here are some of the screenshots from the first demo.

And Finally here is the download (actually a link where you can find the final build):

Super Smash Land Site


The controls .txt not only have the controls but you can change them to whatever you like. If it does not recognize the control it goes back to default. I also have it so you can open up the joy2key included in the zip and plug in 3 usb controllers and already have them mapped accordingly.

Defaults for player 1

Arrows Move
Z is jump
X is attack
Enter is Start
Backspace is Select



Videos:

1.)


2.)


  

-Dan
[/list]

[RCIX]

Awesome! i'll definitely be playing this the second it gets released!

Puh-lease confirm Pikachu, he's my favorite Smash character <3


and if you do end up doing another character, i would vote for Meta Knight, he's my other favorite!

The engine looks like its really good, but to add realism, you should do 2 things:
1. Add a brief delay between frames when attacks are contacting -- it gives a more meaty feeling when you actually hit the target.
2. Make some of the attacks have strong knockback, like the Smash attacks from SSBB -- so you can send your opponent flying after you pump up his percent. Of course, the knockback should be higher the more percent there is

[flavio]

Fantastic!

Let me know which you like best.

Number 2.

[Inane]

This is 2bit, silly billy.
Also, I like 6 best.

[RCIX]

I think 4 or 5 is my favorite.

[JaJitsu]

I think i like 4 or 6

[PleasingFungus]

I'd... go with 4? Maybe. So hard to decide!

(They all look pretty great.)

[tesselode]

I'm going with 3.

Anyway, I hope this doesn't turn into another terrible Smash clone with inaccurate gameplay and overall terribleness. This has potential, especially since it's on a smaller scale than Super Smash Bros. I think too many try to accomplish by themselves what the many people who worked on SSB did.

[snowyowl]

I like all the even numbers. No, I don't know why it should be that way, but it is.

[jwk5]

6, the green of the gameboy screen kills my eyes after a while. I've always hated it.

[Hangedman]

Make it selectable?
Go with 6 and use colour filters, just like playing an old GB game on a GBA and pressing different buttons at the start.

[anosou]

6, the green of the gameboy screen kills my eyes after a while. I've always hated it.

Yup. Or maybe 5 if it was just slightly brighter.

[jwk5]

Probably the easiest way to go about it would be to do the game in solid black and white and then place a colored square over the screen and set its transparency fairly low so that it overlays the black and white graphics. This way you could change the screen colors to whatever you want any time. You could still get the classic GameBoy colors with it.

[MaloEspada]

i think the animations mainly lack impact.
attacks in SSB always feel they have much impact (smash attacks).

maybe you could experiment with keyframes.
something like what star ocean blue sphere did:





(on topic: i like 6 best)

[dumbmanex]

I enjoy #5 best, second would be #7.  I think the lack of saturation is what I like.

[DanFornace]

@ Color Pickers

Thanks guys. I was leaning toward 2 and 7. I am still am leaning toward them a bit, but I might try jwk's method and see if I can get desirable results. I am also thinking about just ditching it and going ahead with the gameboy color palette. Arghhhh my brain.

@RCIX

Thanks. But no confirmation on Pikachu yet as I am still playing around with what character's movesets would fit the game the best. Also for those two other additions. The engine currently features both hitstun (the freeze frame effect) and certain attacks having more knockback than others. Check out the third video to see both in action.

@tesselode

Yeah, this definitely has different and smaller goals than most smash fan games. I am trying to get the engine as good as I can make it and I have a pretty easy to do character addition system so once I get the engine where I like I can add the 3 other characters. Possibly 4 others.

@HangedMan and jwk

Yeah, someone brought it up on the smashboards too and i think that palette swapping ability would be really nice to have but I know that I couldn't get something as specific as 2 or 7 where I hand-picked colors that have a variety of saturation/hues. I may start converting my graphics over to black and white for the time being and play around with a layer with low opacity in game. If game maker had an overlay option that that would be exactly what I would want =P.


@rdein
Yeah, I see what you mean now. I have been trying to figure out ways to get the impact to be just as enjoyable as the Smash Series. I didn't think my attack animations were the problem but more the hurt animations and the hit stun not being obvious enough. I could play around with being even looser in my animations, but I am working at about 2/3rds scale of star ocean blue sphere which makes every pixel change that much more dramatic. Which attacks do you think would be first to change, or are all of them too static?

I was thinking of doing a flash when you first hit someone and possible some punch and burst sprites that show up when you hit. Do you think making an animation for getting hurt would help? Like 3-4 frames from most hurt to recoiled. I had it as one sprite so there was a clear distinction when you are in full control and when you are hurt.

I would like it to be more obvious when people are getting hit, but at the same time, I don't want it to feel like the game lags when you hit people (ie too much hitstun)

I'll probably play around with what I can do in the engine before redoing any animations.

I also plan on recoding how I do multi-hits a little bit so comboing is easier. Right now when you get hit you are immuned for a short period of time based off an attack. So multi hit attacks have a short time, while single hits have a longer time. But I think I would rather have it store the attack that hit you so you can get hit again instantly if its a new attack.

[jwk5]

If game maker had an overlay option that that would be exactly what I would want =P.

It does, look up blend modes in the help file.

[James Edward Smith]

It occurs to me that characters like Mario probably should look more like their sprites from Gameboy games that they were in rather than trying to look like a recreation of their appearance in Smash Brothers.

[tesselode]

It occurs to me that characters like Mario probably should look more like their sprites from Gameboy games that they were in rather than trying to look like a recreation of their appearance in Smash Brothers.

But then it wouldn't be Super Smash Bros-y!

[InversePhase]

Hi, I'm Inverse Phase, and I'm really just getting started on the music and SFX for Dan, I have some experience in creating music and sfx for games but I haven't done anything terribly recent, so this is going to be a fun adventure for me. I thought I might outline a few of my own goals with the project for anyone that's curious and answer questions that pop up.

This post got awfully long, I hope at least someone finds it interesting.

Since I'm a unix user I won't be able to answer any questions regarding code/Game Maker, but the way I understand things, with Game Maker we don't have explicit channel control. I'm aware of the hardware limitations of the gameboy, but I can't reproduce EXACT gameboy science such as a music driver that will cut off a less important part of the music to play a sound effect.

To that end, we're just going to have separate audio files for music and sound. My basic approach is to use mostly whitenoise for most sound effects and attempt to use them more sparingly in the music. Plus I intend to limit sound effects to a single channel of audio during creation.

I've accepted the reality of things; there will be a bit of overlap. Some sounds might get played on top of eachother, or we'll have one or two places where there is both whitenoise in SFX and music. But Dan is primarily going for an aesthetic. We aren't limited by the hardware even if we're pretending we are. I'd venture to say we want to make the project fun rather than getting extremely nitty gritty and making things hard on ourselves for what amounts to reasonably little gain. It's not commercial and there are no (real) deadlines.

Anyway, on that note, I don't have a whole lot of time to donate to the project so my updates will probably be in bursts where Dan may have more of a consistent ability to work on his project. It's his game, after all. =] Because of that, we're probably going to reuse a few gameboy resources.

I took the liberty of creating the sound effects (even the "familiar" ones) you saw in the video by hand. There's more to come, and probably a little tweaking to be done also. I'm doing the sfx the hard way because I haven't fooled around with it much and I wanted more experience in that department.

The music will initially consist of 8 stage musics that will be kind of longish. We'll also have 6 other ones (intro, menu, character select, game set, ending/credits, and game over) that will probably be, for the most part, short and loop where necessary. In the interests of time and actually helping Dan achieve his goal, if a gameboy version exists of a stage song used in smash, we'll probably just bring that over instead of me doing a cover from scratch.

Since there are smash-lookalike and then smash-inspired stages, we decided on direct covers of the stage music for the smash-lookalike stages. I'll write an original tune inspired by each character for the "inspired" ones. The latter will be an interesting exercise. I feel like I've gotten pretty good at covers (see bandcamp for examples). I'm not too worried about those.

Anyway, this is getting long so I'm going to just say I hope you enjoy the project, my music, my effects, and I welcome any constructive criticism!