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).