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Personal Projects / FINISHED: Twin Bee "Remastered" (MESEN HD patch)
« on: May 15, 2020, 07:10:30 pm »
INTRO Hello again friends!
Here's my latest! project (6th one!), while doing the tedious missing backgrounds for my previous project Battle City, I started working on this! This time it's a graphic makeover for Twin Bee for NES.
This is a great little game, and often cited as being responsible for creating the entire "cute-em-up" genre alongside Fantasy Zone (It's still pretty fun to play minus some questionable hitboxes, and I feel that it doesn't get enough praise in the west [despite having quite a few sequels, soft-reboot and even a full-fledged remake for the PSP] ) it has a 2 player co-op mode (with a quite curious mode where P1 and P2 can combine their shots, something that's not often seen), and it's not too challenging!
With this I tried to strike a balance between old and new, and trying to keep the charm of the original, and even tho I did actually make an alt sprite with the classic colors for TwinBee, I feel is hard to pass on the charm of the Detana revision (and the actual arcade colors)
For this I would very much like to add a foreground UI with maybe a portrait of both Twinbee and Winbee, a more charming Title screen that showcases the characters, and ideally, I'd love to add moving animation to the sprite which do not exist (if player presses left-right on d-pad as a condition) and also tinker with custom music and add something like this bitching remix by Magical Trick Society in their album Shooting Battle Arena https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dc7lbF7ONA to the game but to be honest I'm quite lost as to where to start so far.
Also, I didn't find any patches that enhance the game, but if someone wants to work on a 3 player mode and add GwinBee I will absolutely support it and add graphics to it!
Anyway, here is some media, and no download at the moment!
COMPARISON IMAGES 
NO PATCH YET, SORRY! Anyway, here are some images
So, today I abused the fact that MesenHD dumps an entire new tileset (when it's basically the same tiles with slightly different colors), so now level 3 has sort of shifted into something quite different than the original. I took existing elements like bone bridge, mountains, dirt tiles, etc that were already part of the original, and gave it a more coherent theme.
So it went from this:
To this
This is very appealing to me, because the original Twin Bee was very limited on what it could offer visually, with all the levels looking fairly similar, despite trying to have variance (so I could offer a very spring-like 4th level, with pink colors, which I feel is the direction they wanted to take)
Problem with this is that even tho it's infinitely more pleasing visually (imo) it leads to a new set of problems:
1) Now enemies (even tho it's a very wacky in tone-game) feel a bit out of place there now, since the tone of the stage is so specific. The "theme" of the enemies for that stage is "animals" (from cockroaches to, crabs, lobsters, to whatever the hell is the gray thing with wings that shows up later) which already is super broad and felt kinda weird (not to mention that some of them are rocket-like creatures with wings, while others are merely "flying" animals.
At this point I'm toying with the idea of actually shifting some of the enemies around in different stages or even creating new ones that fit the theme better (something I already did to a certain point) hell, even make the end bosses thematically coherent (like, say on the first stage, all the enemies are fruits and vegetables, so make the "Onion King" ship, actually an onion...and not just something that remotely looks like it), so in this case, take all the enemies of stage 3 and make them consistent and thematically coherent (like cave-lava related, like bats and stuff) or in the proposed example of the 4th stage, make the enemies insect or flower related.... but I feel that it might be straying waaaaay out of the original if I did those things.
The alternative is to go back and just stick strictly to the original (so no lava level theme) and just keep everything the same.
An even more hardcore alternative would be to have a "faithful" pack that sticks to designs of the original and have a "Remix" version that basically takes the concept further.
Thoughts?
Also still looking for help on how/where to start with the audio/song in case someone can chip-in
So it went from this:
To this
This is very appealing to me, because the original Twin Bee was very limited on what it could offer visually, with all the levels looking fairly similar, despite trying to have variance (so I could offer a very spring-like 4th level, with pink colors, which I feel is the direction they wanted to take)
Problem with this is that even tho it's infinitely more pleasing visually (imo) it leads to a new set of problems:
1) Now enemies (even tho it's a very wacky in tone-game) feel a bit out of place there now, since the tone of the stage is so specific. The "theme" of the enemies for that stage is "animals" (from cockroaches to, crabs, lobsters, to whatever the hell is the gray thing with wings that shows up later) which already is super broad and felt kinda weird (not to mention that some of them are rocket-like creatures with wings, while others are merely "flying" animals.
At this point I'm toying with the idea of actually shifting some of the enemies around in different stages or even creating new ones that fit the theme better (something I already did to a certain point) hell, even make the end bosses thematically coherent (like, say on the first stage, all the enemies are fruits and vegetables, so make the "Onion King" ship, actually an onion...and not just something that remotely looks like it), so in this case, take all the enemies of stage 3 and make them consistent and thematically coherent (like cave-lava related, like bats and stuff) or in the proposed example of the 4th stage, make the enemies insect or flower related.... but I feel that it might be straying waaaaay out of the original if I did those things.
The alternative is to go back and just stick strictly to the original (so no lava level theme) and just keep everything the same.
An even more hardcore alternative would be to have a "faithful" pack that sticks to designs of the original and have a "Remix" version that basically takes the concept further.
Thoughts?
Also still looking for help on how/where to start with the audio/song in case someone can chip-in
IMAGES
