[SimplyDanny]

Cyber Fighter is a work-in-progress Mega Man 1 hack, one that aims to totally redesign the look and feel of Mega Man into something totally new. Planned changes include new original characters, a sharper and more refined presentation, reworked levels, altered weapons, and some quality-of-life changes like replacing the score with a lives counter and spike behavior similar to future games.

As for current progress, a good chunk of the sprite work, aside from the CWU01P bots and a handful of tilesets, is complete. Tilesets have taken a while due to the fact I'm rehauling graphic organization for more tilesets. Design-wise, editing has already begun on certain levels, though they're far from complete. I have a few old level design concepts lying around, though I'm not sure how well they hold up, with one of them being a maze that I'm unsure of how to implement in this game. As for other bits, all the music currently has been ripped from Rockman Claw, although I would like to hack in some new music myself, though I'm not familiar with composing music, let alone in this game's sound engine. My goal is to make this hack as polished and as fun as possible, showing that you can make a good quality hack with Mega Man 1, even if the base game is quite weak compared to its successors. I'm currently working on this in my off time, so don't expect much updates or a fixed/defined release date.

[Supergamerguy]

Hey everyone, so here's a new project that I've been working on for a while.
Although I've only really started off with editing the spritework so far, I thought it'd be interesting to show off what of it has ben done so far.



As for current progress, the sprite sheets of the protagonist, Tomodachi, and all the robot masters are done and implemented, though I might find myself updating them at some point in the future. Enemies and Fortress bosses are partially done, alongside the title screen and stage select, though they will be altered as I plan to integrate RetroRain's Mega Man Remastered into it for save game progress. As for tile sets and level designs, they are all still in very early development, so don't expect much out of that. As for other bits, all the music currently has been ripped from Rockman Claw, and some ASM edits from it might be added in like spike invulnerability and proper y velocity. I hope to make this hack as polished as possible, showing that you can make a good quality hack with Mega Man 1, even if the base game is quite weak compared to its successors. I'm currently working on this in my off time, so don't expect much updates or a fixed/defined release date.

OOOOOH looks great! Keep up the good work.

[SimplyDanny]

Hello, everyone. It's been a while since I've touched thread, but I've basically been updating a few things here and there, especially graphically. Now to get a few things out of the way:
1. I've actually updated the main post a bit! I updated the title screen and stage select to better reflect the current state of the ROM, alongside adding a few screenshots showing off some of the new tile sets for the fortress stages.
2. Speaking of the fortress stages, thanks to some intense graphics compression (sacrificing only a teensy little bit), I have been able to create enough free space to practically make an entirely new set for each fortress stage. Of course, this is gonna take a while to deal with because the editor isn't really friendly when you mess with the PPU of stages, but I've managed to get a solution for the issue. Of course, the background graphics are easily one of the biggest things left to deal with in this game, but I've already started taking a few steps towards that.
3. Sprites for all the entities, objects, etc. are basically complete. With the exception of CWU01P (whom I haven't really come up with an idea for), every sprite has been either updated or replaced. In fact, the only thing left to do with some of the sprites is resolve some quirks that arose from reorganizing the graphic sheets, like Bombman's equivalent's (Hotraze) bombs looking wrong on the introduction, or the ending sunset looking astronomically messed up. Most of these are due to the fact that I can't the data for these anywhere for some reason, so for now they'll just have to be things to polish for later.
4. As for things that I've yet to start on, AI is easily one of them. I'll mostly be focusing on editing the boss AIs, though editing the weapons would also be very nice. I already have the disassembly (which has been a godsend, even if it is undocumented enough to be annoying to deal with), so they shouldn't be too much trouble. If I'm ever in the need to try and figure out how to execute something, though, I will probably ask.
5. I have also restarted the whole process of manually ripping out the ASM for a few ROM hacks, specifically LSMMega's Classical and Tsukikuro's Claw (both creators will be credited, both in-game and on-site), since I basically didn't document any of the interesting changes so I was left in the dark. Classical for the most part is finished, while Claw is still very tricky to deal with, due to the changes being more intense. I'm not focusing on these too much right now, considering how draining it is (I'm literally taking the hacks and slowly morphing them into the original game with the help of IPS Peek). I might also consider using RetroRain's Remastered hack, but that is an absolute headache and a half that I do not want to deal with yet, so I should just focus on finishing the main hack first.

So anyways, yeah, I've done a substantial amount of progress on this hack, and comparing to the years-old original prototype, I think it's morphing into something special. To celebrate how long I've been working on this hack, I decided to post a table of the character's evolutions, compared to their Mega Man counterparts and earlier iterations

Anyways, hopefully I can continue working on this project in the future. For now, though, I'm going to keep taking my time and try to balance it with my college life any many other projects (Xerox Mission is also still alive, but not being worked on as much).

[diablo666]

Cyber Fighter is a work-in-progress Mega Man 1 hack, one that aims to totally redesign the look and feel of Mega Man into something totally new. Planned changes include new original characters, a sharper and more refined presentation, reworked levels, altered weapons, and some quality-of-life changes like replacing the score with a lives counter and spike behavior similar to future games.

As for current progress, a good chunk of the sprite work, aside from the CWU01P bots and a handful of tilesets, is complete. Tilesets have taken a while due to the fact I'm rehauling graphic organization for more tilesets. Design-wise, editing has already begun on certain levels, though they're far from complete. I have a few old level design concepts lying around, though I'm not sure how well they hold up, with one of them being a maze that I'm unsure of how to implement in this game. As for other bits, all the music currently has been ripped from Rockman Claw, although I would like to hack in some new music myself, though I'm not familiar with composing music, let alone in this game's sound engine. My goal is to make this hack as polished and as fun as possible, showing that you can make a good quality hack with Mega Man 1, even if the base game is quite weak compared to its successors. I'm currently working on this in my off time, so don't expect much updates or a fixed/defined release date.

Wily 1 in the lab - looks good graphically. Plus such detailed enemies

Wily 3 is a great-looking "underground passage". I always thought that there should BE more mechanized than there is in MM1

Enemies, bosses are so detailed and voluminous. That's exactly the "Wow" Effect.

However, so far they have not impressed: MegaMan, IceMan.

As for the Megaman, it's just that the design is unusual to my eye. At the expense of IceMan - he's just like from MegaMan.exe if you look closely. I still can't accept the appearance of ICE.EXE

[SimplyDanny]

Wily 1 in the lab - looks good graphically. Plus such detailed enemies

Wily 3 is a great-looking "underground passage". I always thought that there should BE more mechanized than there is in MM1

Enemies, bosses are so detailed and voluminous. That's exactly the "Wow" Effect.

However, so far they have not impressed: MegaMan, IceMan.

As for the Megaman, it's just that the design is unusual to my eye. At the expense of IceMan - he's just like from MegaMan.exe if you look closely. I still can't accept the appearance of ICE.EXE

Thanks for the feedback. I don't really see how IceMan looks like the .exe one aside from the general "blue cold parka" look, but I do admit that both him and Megaman are some of the weaker looking characters. Though honestly, that might be mostly attributed to their color, especially in Megaman's case with how off the contrast is.

I decided to mess around with the color schemes for Iceman and Megaman, while also retooling their heads a bit.
Here's a few variations of what I got.



I'm hoping some of these are a step in the right direction. Again, thanks for the advice.

[diablo666]

Iceman - 2 or 3 row - 5 column - really already looks more interesting. And more original

Megaman - it's hard for me to choose here, but for some reason I choose 2 or 3 from the end. The color is very similar to the "Cyber Soldier"

The icon of the head is again the last option hooked. It's probably the stripes that give it a slightly more military theme.

However, it's up to you to decide :-)

[Googie]

This is lookin' really smooth, can't wait to play it when it's done. 

[SimplyDanny]

Alright, a bit status update.
I've made a handful of alterations since I posted, so here they are.

First and foremost, I have changed the sprite palettes on my concept art so that it looks more accurate to the original hardware. This is to ensure that the sprites I draw end up looking exactly like they would on NES, and hopefully run into less issues like Tomodachi's color scheme.

Speaking of which, Tomodachi (this hack's Megaman) has been given a slight overhaul!

More detail has been added to the helmet and I chose a new palette, based on what would give the best contrast (by making the red brighter) and what would blend less with a darkened background (avoiding too dark or too bright colors because of it). This does not mean this color is final though; I'm still somewhat hesitant on using this palette, so any feedback is appreciated. His "Citizen" form might also need a new palette too, but I'm still deciding on that.

Alongside Tomodachi, Cryoice (Iceman) also got a bit of a facelift, specifically in color, alongside making a scarf variant for them.

I still haven't decided on which one to use yet because although I really do like the scarf covering up the mouth a lot, I think I like the expressions of their mouth as well. Because of this, I have opened a quick poll at the top in regards to whether or not he should keep the scarf or not.

Finally, I have at last finished the last enemy sprite that was left, Starseer (CWU01P).

And with this sprite complete, the only thing left graphically (aside from fixing some sprite errors due to reorganization) would be the background tilesets, which will most likely take a while. Despite having a baseline idea for what I want to showcase in them, I'm unsure about what direction to take with them. Either way, this should cover the current status of the game at the moment. As for the graphical fixes, those would include fixing Bombman's bomb in the intro, the Sun during the ending cutscene, and pretty much just the entire final boss. I might need help ironing those out later, but for now, everything's under control at the moment.

[Timaeus]

This project looks really cool. The sprite working is really awesome and well made, I liked them alot. Keep up the great work~

[diablo666]

Honestly, the boss is "In the Wily room" - it looks really interesting.

Your Main Character looks almost like a Megaman X. But, I agree with the palette...  it's worth working on. Because it looks Orange rather than red

Your IceMan - it looks much different and more interesting. At the expense of the face and emotions - I will personally leave it to your opinion

[Googie]

About Cryoice have a scarf, make two versions of the hack so people can choose between a scarf or not.

I'm lovin' the progress, this'll be a classic when it's done.

[SimplyDanny]

I have two exams this week, which means I probably won't have too much time to work on the hack right now.

At the very least, though, after a lot of experimenting, I've finally decided on a palette for Tomodachi that I'm most satisfied with [15 12].

And to show off, here's the sprite set, updated with a new palette (alongside the title screen pose sprite, which probably won't be added, but thought it looked cool).

[diablo666]

  wow. it really looks good.

And at the expense of the title screen - if you can, you can move it to the Japanese one... if you want to do it for two regions (Japan, USA)

[ExL]

Why don't you give Tomodachi some blaster instead of buster and make him reaceive ammo instead of weapons(like ice ammo)? That'll derivate him further from MM
Also Tomodachi still looks like <some>Man, because of trademark boots and helm. Helm's fine, but boots screams MM and they could be changed to make him even less megamanish...
I've tried to edit it to show what I mean:

[SimplyDanny]

About Cryoice have a scarf, make two versions of the hack so people can choose between a scarf or not.

I'm lovin' the progress, this'll be a classic when it's done.

Thanks for the feedback, Googie! I'll probably do the optional patches thing, but it seems like people want him with the scarf, so that'll probably be the default.

wow. it really looks good.

And at the expense of the title screen - if you can, you can move it to the Japanese one... if you want to do it for two regions (Japan, USA)

I probably won't be able to do this, since I have no more graphic space, although if I ever do port it to RetroRain's Remastered patch, I will definitely try to add it.

(It would probably look something like this:

But again, it's more so a daydream than an actual goal.)

Why don't you give Tomodachi some blaster instead of buster and make him reaceive ammo instead of weapons(like ice ammo)? That'll derivate him further from MM
Also Tomodachi still looks like <some>Man, because of trademark boots and helm. Helm's fine, but boots screams MM and they could be changed to make him even less megamanish...
I've tried to edit it to show what I mean:

I appreciate the suggestions and all, but my goal here isn't to derivate further from Megaman. Rather, I want to create my own take on a Megaman-style experience, and I think Tomodachi's current design both fits the game I want and looks good.


Now, for the (little) news I have:

I'm probably going to start reorganizing all of the enemy graphics soon, which of course is going to be a colossal pain, since I'd need to repoint it all. It will definitely be very troublesome considering that I still have some unresolved issues with some sprite hicups (like the sunset and the final boss), but hopefully, it will be worth it in the end (since that means I'll have enough space to add another tileset).

In other news, I've decided to implement more of the new tilesets and even rearranging the level data! Here's some pretty screnshots:


...And here's some screenshots:

[diablo666]

Although I see errors in the graphic plan, but I will say this: "It looks interesting and delicious"

I like the way enemies look. The background and elaboration are interesting and pleasing to the eye

[Timaeus]

These look sick man. I see great things coming from this. I loved it. Keep up the great work~

[julayla]

I have to admit, this is not a bad idea. It'd be interesting to see how the final product works out