Light

AM2R has workarounds everywhere. When I get stuck with a problem, there's times when the best way to solve it is to avoid the situation altogether.

This happened with subtractive blend modes. Whenever I used them, the transitions to the map screen broke, and artifacts appeared on the screen. Every once in a while I start to experiment, and I did find a way to solve that problem... a workaround within a workaround.

But what do you want subtractive blend modes? - you might ask.
Among other things, it can be used to create a real, multi-source lighting engine. 

The one in confrontation just supports the light emitted by Samus. In a couple of minutes I was able to do some surface magic and come up with a pretty fast lighting engine. With this new tool, I can make some of the existing areas more atmospheric, and change the way certain places are designed.

For example, the lower part of Area 3 was going to be just a vertical shaped breeding grounds area, with a different tile. Now it's a dark and mysterious place, with bio-luminescent plants and insects that light up parts of the area.

Gammas look pretty scary? Try fighting one in the dark, only seeing its electrical attacks.

Now, before you scream "What??? Another feature that's gonna delay the game even moar????!?", it's current implementation involve adding a variable to a room, nothing else. I do have to add a property to the enemies or objects that emit light, but that's pretty simple. I still have to test it in more systems, and optimize it a bit, but for now it's looking really good.

About the rest of the progress... The lower part of Area 3 is being modified to fit better with the dark room motif. The tilesets are being expanded, adding much more variety, and sticking a little more to the overall area design of the rest of the game. The upper part of Area 3 has some small unique mechanics that I'm still tweaking.

It's been a couple of difficult months, and having a small project, even something that goes well, means a lot. Thank you very much for the awesome support you showed, I really appreciate it.

Slowly getting back up

I don't usually talk about my personal life, but when I do, I only mention events that affect the development times of AM2R. This has been the case lately. I wasn't able to renovate the rent contract of my studio, so I had to close it down. For the last 2 months I've been tearing apart the place I spent almost a year of work building. All of my equipment is at a warehouse, including my studio PC.
Things can get pretty chaotic in this economy, you never know when the rent can raise all of the sudden, and this can be really harmful if you're caught off guard.

Pink looks more Super Metroid-ish than lavender

Anyway, progress was pretty scarce these days. Some small details were tweaked, including the color of the Wave Beam. I added many debugging tools to make the weapon/enemy balance much faster, and I managed to fix a couple of bugs involving sand blocks.
Development will be a little slow for a couple of more weeks, the only part that will be completely halted for some time is Music Production (I don't have any physical space to set up my studio rig right now).

"Full Free Time" development will eventually start again, the most difficult part of this phase is over.
Thank you very much for all the support, AM2R wouldn't have come this far if it wasn't for you guys.

Ok, now for real

Before I move on with the real news, I have to thank Sabre230 for the help in this year's April's fools post. He made the awesome 8 bit Adam portrait.

Ok... now into the progress this month.
I revamped some of the rooms of Area 3, now they have a more interesting enemy placement, and some of them have the Speed Booster contemplated for either secrets or shortcuts. Some small bugs were taken care of, along with some beam rebalancing (yet again).

A couple of personal issues left me with no free time. I did manage to advance a bit on some fronts, but I was unable to dedicate AM2R the time it deserves. Hopefully, all will be sorted out in a couple of weeks.

Thank you very much for following the project. As soon as I make significant progress, I'll be happy to post it. Have a good week!

Just one cart!

I've fixed the elevator bug, Samus could get stuck if she went back to the room with the Ice Beam.
GFX compression was optimized, now the game will fit a single NES cartridge, instead of the old design that required cartridge swapping. It only takes a small 4 minute boot-up decrunching sequence, pretty fast for this ammount of data. Apparently, the custom mapper works like a charm.

Now, since there's been many questions lately, I decided to group the most frequent, and answer all of them here.

AMOMR FAQ

- What's Project AMOMR?
Project Another Metroid Other M Remake is a project that aims to bring the Metroid masterpiece that is Other M to the NES. It's being coded from the ground up in assembler and debugged via emulation. The final release will be as a standard NES Rom, along with a limited edition of gold-painted cartridges.

- Why the NES?
Well, Other M is a masterpiece, as I mentioned, and one of the awesomest things it does well is to have a very complex game engine, mapped to the equivalent of an NES Gamepad and a Zapper. The game was adapted very swiftly, the only requirement is to have a Zapper plugged into the second controller port, along with the NES pad in port one. Don't worry, if you don't have a working Zapper, or a CRT television, you can enter first person mode using the select button on the gamepad, and moving a crosshair.

- How about the story?
The story is really important. It stands as a testament of how localization and voice direction is of extreme importance regarding design and aesthetics. Now it'd be unrealistic to try to convert all the cutscenes to NES graphics. There are some animations and in-game dialog in the cartridge, but the experience is limited this way.
The way I found to solve this was to include, along with the cartridge, a VHS tape with all the cutscenes. Whenever the game prompts you to play a scene, you can press the TV/VIDEO button on your remote, and play the tape with the corresponding scene. This keeps the spirit strictly retro, as it uses the technology found in the NES era.

- Are there any changes to the game?
Even if Other M is a masterpiece, it has room for improvement. Most of the complaints from Metroid Fans come from the underdevelopment of the relationship between Samus and Adam. Now, I added radio communication in the middle of the levels, so we can hear them speaking (well, reading the dialogue) without interrupting gameplay. This expands the exposition of their past a lot, and helps the player make a connection to both Adam and Samus.

- If there are changes in the script, will the story be better?
Of course! I found it really strange to hear the words "a certain" too often, being consequence of translation from another language. So, I decided to rewrite the entire script with the use of my the expert skill of English I has master. I use text replacement to change "a certain" to "a specific", it sounds more natural. "The Deleter" was changed to "The Eraser", it now sounds 40% more awesome.
Sector 0 now ejects from the facility if there is damage inside the sector AND there are living human beings inside, the original way sounded unrealistic and impractical. The self destruct sequence is called "The Exploder", and it's referenced all the time during the final escape sequence.

- How limited will be the cartridge release?
It'll be 50 units. All of them will have their eeproms flashed manually, and the corresponding VHS recorded in PAL or NTSC, depending on your country of origin. The cartrige is region-free, and auto-detects 50hz or 60hz refresh rates.

- When is the game gonna be released?
April 1, next year. Hopefully.

Fixing the bugs...

Ok, new update.
I was able to contact one of the many people experiencing problems with the first room transition of the game. I was able to fix this bug, among others. So, if you were anxious to play the demo, and had trouble getting into the first cave at the landing site, be sure to try v1.21.
You can find it HERE.

Kousoru was kind enough to share his version of the SpiderBall with me. It works in his engine, but mine handles collisions differently. I sat down this afternoon to code the SpiderBall from scratch, now it's clearly separated in specific stages (evaluate terrain, direction, execute movement, etc.), instead of the simple system with many workarounds for slopes that was before.
Now it works like it should, it flows much better than before.

Anyway, the most critical bugs were solved, I'm focusing on polishing the rest of the game.
I want to thank all the great people that gave their oppinions, comments and bug reports about AM2R.
Have a good weekend!