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(Hiatus) [WIP] [GM:S] [HE 6.1] - Revival of the Fallen King

(27/02/2016)NOTE: The project is going under hiatus for a long time. Real life syndrome.

Hello, SMWC people. I am Low Highscore, or just benjausen. I am an amateur game creator and this is my first project. It's very ambicious for my current level, but I hope to finish it as a high quality product. It's a Super Mario Universe fangame, and it's powered by Hello Engine v6.1.3. I'm making this because I always wanted to try my hands at fangaming, but without having to worry about ASM code, free space, patch compatibility, ZSNES/accurate emulation support, sprite memory and much more technical boring mumbo-jumbo. My ASM knowledge is very limited, but my GML is far better (still not even medium).

I am going to reveal some details and the main plot (there might be a backstory, like in TSRPR)

Plot:
It's the future in an alternate Mushroom Kingdom ruled by Queen Peach, along with our hero, now known as King Mario. In the last Koopa invasion, Bowser has been killed by Mario and his kingdom defeated, destroyed and terraformed, so in that place now remains a tropical valley that reminds to the Dinosaur Age, where the Yoshis live now because their island was destroyed by an intercontinental missile, co-habiting peacefully with tame Koopas. But his son Bowser Jr, a.k.a. King Bowser II is still alive, now grown-up as the king of the new Koopa Kingdom, that signed an armistice with the Mushroom Kingdom. His political behavior became every day more hostile, and spies from the Pipe Kingdom revealed that Bowser Jr. is planning a new invasion that is disguised as a plan that incriminates the Mushroom Kingdom for international crimes, turning the world against it. And that his factories in the extremely contaminated Koopa Wasteland are working at full power, and that this new planned invasion is part of an even bigger plan to take down and rule over the different kingdoms of the world... The rumours became true and the Mushroom Kingdom was being attacked by the Koopa Wasteland Kingdom for no reason. King Mario wanted to take care of the situation by himself, risking his own life to save the world.


Oh, and why the game name?
IT'S A SECRET, but you probably already guessed it. Just keep your little mouth closed, or there's no cake for you #smw{:D}.


Features (as of 24/01/2016):
-Four different title screens
-16:9 Widescreen
-Different scaling+filtering options: Normal, HQ2X, 2xBR, HQ4X and 4xSmooth
-Improved dialog boxes
-Shader effects
-SPC Music Support, this means custom music from and for SMW hacks* (under testing)
-Dual platform (Windows/Linux)* I'm going to use DLLs.
-Nifty submaps
-Cutscenes*
-A tutorial level
-Different bosses full of action...
-An alternate timeline (details are secret)

Screenies**:







*May or may not be implemented.
**The content in the screenshots is heavily subject to change, and there are no map photos yet because I still need to build the submaps. I pray to God that I can finish this project and keep my motivation.

Engine: Powered by Hello Engine 6.1.3
Tools: Game Maker Studio, Paint .NET, TexturePacker, more
One world demo coming not so soon!

EDIT: Corrected most grammar
I support:

There is a story behind every pair of eyes.
Originally posted by benjausen

I'm making this because I always wanted to try my hands at fangaming, but without having to worry about ASM code, free space, patch compatibility, ZSNES/accurate emulation support, sprite memory and much more technical boring mumbo-jumbo.

Originally posted by benjausen

technical boring mumbo-jumbo.

I guess you are not really the type to make a game but whatever.

Also with "Hello engine" you mean a Template for the game maker Engine?
Futhermore I noticed a little grammatical error I suppose? Gamemaker is an engine and not a tool, I am pretty sure about that.

but I guess all those things I just mentioned are not really important knowing this is your first project. I hope you'll learn a lot from doing this, I personally did and still do.

Why am I so butthurt about gamemaker templates being called engines?

Originally posted by Jesse
I guess you are not really the type to make a game but whatever.


About SMW hacking, I already tried but I'm just too lazy to make a proper hack and I keep cancelling it after a few weeks.
I like coding, I just don't like to worry about ASM/machine level opcodes, abstract memory sections and so on. I find more pleasurable "set thing = red" than "set red 0xDF36B red: db $FF0000 RTS" or "0110 1000 0110 0101"

Originally posted by Jesse
Also with "Hello engine" you mean a Template for the game maker Engine?


About the engine part. Hello Engine is in fact an engine, not directly like C++ or ASM, but written in the GML language as it uses it's own code written in GML and GM:S is just a base game making engine. A game based on an engine of an engine, something alike. About the template part, try imagining that it's the counterpart of something like Visual Studio, but much less complex.

GML -> C/C++/C#/CD/etc... -> ASM -> Binary Machine Code

Originally posted by Jesse

Futhermore I noticed a little grammatical error I suppose?


Sorry about grammar. I'm a Spanish speaker and my English is far from perfect, because I still lack skill to handle some grammar level situations. Well, at least I try to make it understandable.

Originally posted by Jesse
Gamemaker is an engine and not a tool, I am pretty sure about that.


Yeah, Game Maker is an engine, but I refer to workspaces as tools, think something like:
Game Maker -> GML tool and Visual C# -> C# tool.

Originally posted by Jesse
but I guess all those things I just mentioned are not really important knowing this is your first project. I hope you'll learn a lot from doing this, I personally did and still do.


Oh, thanks. I'm sure I learned a lot of things, like what is a 2D array and how to execute external DLLs (Final product might not be cross platform after all).

Originally posted by Jesse
Why am I so butthurt about gamemaker templates being called engines?


IDK. A question of personal likings, I guess.
I support:

There is a story behind every pair of eyes.
On the topic of whether or not GameMaker: Studio is an engine, it is to an extent. It's an engine in that it provides functionality for audio, graphics, and even some built-in physics and such. However, it's not as built-up as something like, say, RPG Maker, which is really an RPG engine. GM gives you a more flexible but less fleshed out experience. It is both an engine and a tool, I would say, and something like the Hello engine could properly be called an engine.

Anyway, the game itself. Not a ton of stuff was shown, but I've got to say the background in that desert area really clashes with the style of the foreground. The foreground is cartoony in the traditional Mario style, while the background is much more photorealistic. The title screen background, however, looks great. I'd want to see some more level screenshots and/or videos to really give feedback though.

Now on the features, I personally think you should ditch SPC support. OGG or MP3 music is going to be much more flexible, although it will drive the size of your game up due to the files being larger than SPCs. Since this is a PC game, though, that shouldn't be a huge concern really. Aside from that, make sure you include options to remap keys because some people (like myself) don't like the default controls that are shown in your screenshot, and some people might like to use a controller so that should be supported as well.
Originally posted by K3fka
I've got to say the background in that desert area really clashes with the style of the foreground. The foreground is cartoony in the traditional Mario style, while the background is much more photorealistic. The title screen background, however, looks great. I'd want to see some more level screenshots and/or videos to really give feedback though.


That area was a tutorial level prototype, and it was scrapped in favor of a better SMW-themed alternative with graphics that don't clash. (screenies coming soon, will fix broken HUD)

Originally posted by K3fka
Now on the features, I personally think you should ditch SPC support. OGG or MP3 music is going to be much more flexible, although it will drive the size of your game up due to the files being larger than SPCs. Since this is a PC game, though, that shouldn't be a huge concern really.


I won't ditch SPC support. If all the music were to be in MP3/WAV/OGG format, it would be too heavy and take time to load, see Mushroom Kingdom Fusion (you know you want to avoid that). At least it won't take that much time this way. Also, when you have SPC support you can access a gigantic library of cool songs that sound good with SMW instruments, and converting them to OGG/MP3/WAV would be a waste of space, while SPC files just take a few kilobytes. Another reason, I like SMW custom music. I know this defeats the cross-platform idea because of .DLLs but I'm sure Linux/Mac users might be able to play using Wine, albeit losing some speed.

Originally posted by K3fka
Aside from that, make sure you include options to remap keys because some people (like myself) don't like the default controls that are shown in your screenshot, and some people might like to use a controller so that should be supported as well.


Yeah! Will work on them soon. I don't like these controls, but I'm just researching for a proper method like replacing controller calls with a global variable or script, it's matter of time, but later because I'm busy working on the map engine. Thanks for the feedback ;)

EDIT: Mappable controls almost ready.
I support:

There is a story behind every pair of eyes.
Originally posted by benjausen
I won't ditch SPC support. If all the music were to be in MP3/WAV/OGG format, it would be too heavy and take time to load


Not necessarily. You can always just stream those files instead of loading them into memory completely, which isn't recommended, anyways (just a single decoded music file in memory can easily take a few tens if not hundreds of MB of RAM). Streaming, when done right, won't have any noticable delay at all. If you really want to stick to light-weight formats, though, I recommend using a tracker format (like MOD, IT, XM etc.) instead. Those are easier to edit, since good tools for them are more widely available, and good libs already exist for them (like DUMB). Also you avoid the problem of potentially using some copyrighted/protected material via the SPCs in your game. Now I'm not too familiar with the specifics of SPC files, but from what I know, they always contain a dump of the whole SPC code of a game, so basically each SPC file contains a small (probably copyrighted) portion of a game's ROM. Although I guess that probably doesn't matter to begin with, since in those cases, the songs themselves would already be copyrighted, anyways.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!
It's also a Mario fangame. I wouldn't stress out too much about copyright issues with this one.
Originally posted by K3fka
It's also a Mario fangame. I wouldn't stress out too much about copyright issues with this one.


Sure thing. I kinda realised that myself while writing that post, which is why I added the part at the end. #w{=P}

I guess the other advantages of tracker formats still apply, though.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!
Originally posted by RPG Hacker

Not necessarily. You can always just stream those files instead of loading them into memory completely, which isn't recommended, anyways (just a single decoded music file in memory can easily take a few tens if not hundreds of MB of RAM). Streaming, when done right, won't have any noticable delay at all. If you really want to stick to light-weight formats, though, I recommend using a tracker format (like MOD, IT, XM etc.) instead. Those are easier to edit, since good tools for them are more widely available, and good libs already exist for them (like DUMB). Also you avoid the problem of potentially using some copyrighted/protected material via the SPCs in your game. Now I'm not too familiar with the specifics of SPC files, but from what I know, they always contain a dump of the whole SPC code of a game, so basically each SPC file contains a small (probably copyrighted) portion of a game's ROM. Although I guess that probably doesn't matter to begin with, since in those cases, the songs themselves would already be copyrighted, anyways.


Originally posted by K3fka
It's also a Mario fangame. I wouldn't stress out too much about copyright issues with this one.


Oh thanks! I am not streaming the file because of the reason you pointed out, that's why I prefer to compress and uncompress on load, and hence that's why the Kilobyte-sized SPC comes to utility, and if you take a look at a .TXT music file, you can tell the SPC700 is a tracker itself, being a sequence of commands that trigger samples and warping effects, like Famitracker. About containing a copyrighted part of the ROM, I can guess you refer to the SMW instruments, but otherwise it's purely SMW custom music, made by SMW Central users and Copyright would be not necessary. Although this is just a small fangame so it would be a waste for Nintendo. And avoiding the 'Super Mario' prefix will decrease the chance of being hunted down, that's why SMBX has been killed. Thanks for the feedback, your suggestions will make my game better. Will resume after I get my new laptop, and will update with new screenshots and fixed menus.
I support:

There is a story behind every pair of eyes.