PLAYABLE EXE OF THIS LEVEL - drive.google.com/file/d/1_umQ... Credits: Bond Man Sprite (thumbnail) by MarshadowSlime Bond Man Stage Theme by Dark's Tunes ( • High-Rise Construction... )
I love that this simultaneously feels like a MM1 level, while also feeling unique from the other MM1 levels. For a boss fight, I think that Bond Man would try to trap you in place, and then slam into you from above. Like other MM1 bosses, it wouldn't need to be complicated.
The MM1 guy is here to ruin the day or something I guess? Things that are spot-on: - Graphical style is very accurate. You had 3 16x16 stage specific tile slots unused which is pretty close to MM1's space limit. It's true that MM1 didn't use its 4 palettes cleverly, but 2 of the 4 palettes are left completely unused here. - Guts Lifts, Gabyoalls and Killer Bullets being able to appear on screen at the same time without graphical glitches. Edit: There'd be even enough RAM space for the barrel enemy's graphics too actually. Nice. - Gabyoalls only treat solid blocks as walls in MM1, they go through spikes and ice blocks. You successfully avoided putting them next to 1 tile high glue blocks, even if by accident. Edit: As a fun fact, MM3's electric ones don't even check for walls lmao - Guts Blocks are not placed on different backgrounds before the boss corridor. The game loads a different 32x32 texture in place of the block before and after the first boss door. Things that I'll let slide: - MM1's engine can only do 4 different collision types at once. This is because palette data and collision data for a single 32x32 block is stored in a single byte. Bitwise $10, $20, $40, $80 are for collision, $01, $02, $04 and $08 are for palette data, and which collision bit is which block type is read from a lookup table. Your level breaks this limit, as it has Null, Solid, Ladder, Spike, and Glue. It however would be possible to trick a part of the collision system to consider ladders as spikes on certain circumstances for example with a simple enough hack. Since your enemies do not interact differently with the glue blocks, I'll just assume there's code in place that overrides the output of the map reading subroutine by reading the player's location and comparing it to screen and x position lookup tables, and depending on the result, it swaps the ladder block type to the glue block type. I actually did this in my WIP MM1 hack, as rewriting half of the game just to be able to use more block types at once would have been a nightmare. It just works. The technical stuff you wouldn't know about without touching the MM1 level editor at least once: - You didn't use the NES section type scroll stops at all. MM1 room data is made up of 8x8 32x32 metatiles, with the bottom 16x16 tile row completely ignored when reading the room data. In short, if someone decided to remake this level in the actual ROM, they would be missing some tile data. However, there's a bigger problem... - There are only 192 unique 32x32 metatiles available to use per RM/Wily stage pair in MM1. The engine can't do more without... doubling the ROM size and rewriting the entire game to store each level data in a different bank and rearranging all the data in the ROM. You used 240 or so unique 32x32 metatiles. That's about 2-2.5 RM stages worth of 32x32 metatile data! MM1's space constraints are that ridiculous. - In vertical sections, falling down on the wrong side of the screen back into a multiple-screen horizontal section would cause the camera to instantly focus on Mega Man in the original game. Not a good sight to be honest. The room at 8:28 and 9:58 are good examples, both having pits on the left side with a horizontal section down below. The originals (notably Cut Man) always tried to make it impossible to fall back to the previous screen in these cases. - In MM1, Guts blocks can only be placed on a 32x32 grid (from the top-left of the screen) without the game overriding the wrong background tiles. Loading graphics is done entirely in 32x32 chunks. It really sucks actually. Not only that, Mega Man would fall inside the blocks after the screen transition, as Guts Block collision is completely disabled during and after screen transitions until the player regains control of Mega Man. That's why Cut Man's boss room has a small ledge next to the door. Enabling the collision would open up a different can of worms... The technical stuff you wouldn't know about without looking at the game much closer: - Mega Man 1's engine simply cannot do the lift screen transition without major modifications to the screen transition and object handling subroutines. It'd be possible to code this though (albeit would probably use up the remaining free space in the ROM, leaving none for anything else), and vertically* moving lifts are completely doable. Edit: How did I type horizontally instead of vertically?
this is an incredibly good analysis!! thanks a ton for taking the time to write this! while i was going for more of a halfway-accurate halfway-modern style for the level design, i did wonder what the level could be like working with the nes games' metatiles and such also in planning for the video i was wanting to use the mm1-6 quads though tiled didnt support them unfortunately :/
@@michaelwave1997 While there's no option to change the quad size when creating a new map, the Tiled Megamix fork does technically support any quad sizes. The width and height of the map are not editable within the program, but you can edit these parameters manually in ordinary text editors (existing tile layers will retain the old dimensions, editing the dimensions of those layers will corrupt the file unless you manually expand the CSV/Base64/XML data, but newly added ones use the new map size) or you can just click the 'Infinite' checkbox and the map will be dynamically resized, I don't like it though. However, even if you don't do all that, simply using your own quad grid (just a layer that you put on top and you draw the quad grid yourself with tiles then lock it lol) and using the NES type camera will do the trick just fine. If you want to revisit this idea later in the future, like for an 'if Oil Man and Time Man were originally in MM1' scenario or something or if you are just simply curious, for checking how many 32x32 metatiles you have currently used in your level with the NES quads, you can make a copy of your level in Tiled, remove the object layers, if using the NES style camera then expand each screen to be 256x256 by adding an extra row of tiles below each screen (between screen transitions too) and filling in the blanks, export the result as an image, use GMare's import from image function, and import the map with 32x32 tile size. It's a bit of a pain to do each time though. This reminds me, there's a good reason why the 10+ year old MM3->MM9 NES demake was quickly abandoned. Most of MM9's levels just use way too many metatiles for how MM3-MM6 were programmed. There'd be a way to get around that though in MM3 and possibly other games too. Doubling the size of the metatile table to 512 and adding a 256 byte bitwise lookup table to determine which page of the metatile table should be read when reading the room data. It'd take just 1.25 kb of ROM space per level to do so. Though that's easier said than done cuz a duckton of code would be needed to be relocated (a nightmare) or 16x16 tiles would need to be limited to 128 instead of 256 (there's no real need for 256 unique 16x16 tiles), though I'm pretty sure it still wouldn't be quite enough free space per bank in MM3's case.
Awesome Level! It really felt like you took the good parts about the MM1 level design and put them to good use with this. Also didn't expect to hear my remake of that One Shot One Kill theme! Thanks for the credit!
I honestly couldn't understand the voice very well, but still, the art and the level layout looks so nice! It's a nice usage of the guts lifts and feels very faithful! Good work :3
Mega man 1 custom levels? Never though I’d see the day As a level desinger I have to say this is very good, but heads up, next time you do mega man levels jump when entering a boss door:)
making a fangame now that's exclusively bond man's stage and nothing else like there's 8 robot masters but they're all bond man and all of the wily stages are just bond man as well mega man: bond man edition gonna be the first mega man game to sell 1 bondillion copies JOKES ASIDE I did actually play the stage it felt super accurate to the weird janky charm of mega man 1
@@Izzythemaker127 He and Oil were both discarded back in 1987, however, in 2006, Oil was re imagined for Powered-Up and Time probably took Bond's spot for some reason. EDIT: Ice Man was originally going to be Bubble Man with a water element.
