Difference between revisions of "User:Game Trooper"

Revision as of 12:20, 26 November 2021

About me

Greetings one and all, I'm Game Trooper!! Entrant of MAGMML2's Volcanic Furnace, and long time Mega Man fan. I'm seasoned in editing various wikis (which will be listed below) as early as high school, so I feel that I can be a big help to one I feel very passionate about. I have also helped build one of them up from its infancy, and have even been an admin for one of them. I absolutely enjoy helping out wikis like this one grow, and educate newcomers on what the wiki's all about. If you need any help, please don't hesitate to post it on my talk page!! I'll get back to you as soon as possible.

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  In case you wanted to know what I'd look like...

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  One of my Wiki portraits I created.

Other Wikis

I can be found on many other wikis.

They include:

• Mega Man Wiki
• Ratchet and Clank Wiki
• Scaler Wiki

and

• Overlord Wiki

Dev Commentaries

HELLO! These are my unofficial commentaries of how I created my level. I'll try to keep them brief, but I imagine that some people will be curious as to what I was thinking of when designing them (I assume that a particular Durgon will 'eventually' get to this, so hi!).

(It will go without saying that if anyone else edits this, this will NOT be reliable until I personally fix it.)

Volcanic Furnace

The Concept

As any fan would understand why I entered, I have always wanted to create my own game, and after 'insert-Gaben-9-years-dev-joke-here', I finally got to throw my hat into the ring. The idea for a fire level was actually one of the things I stayed with from the get-go. I had FEVERISHLY watched AceSpark's level design video series and reviewed MAGMML1's winner, Glass Man, for direction. I concluded that for reference, keep the stage about 28 frames long, introduce each gimmick one section at a time then combine them near the end, and place checkpoints around areas of difficulty. The idea of a fire stage stemmed from an early Robot Master of mine named Scorch Man (kinda silly seeing Bootleg Zook and Sunrise showed up, and originally so did Eternal's). Ultimately, despite being a programmer by trade, he was cut due to time restraints and lack of game maker experience. The stage was mostly winged, and I plopped down what I thought might make for a fun or challenging setup. One of the ideas I KNEW I wanted to have in some form was some sort of mine cart segment (akin to the final moments of Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom (YOU KNOW WHAT PART IT IS)). However, due to poor spriting skills and again, lack of game maker experience, I used Guts Lifts as a substitute. Some things I know people might wonder is the Foot Holder showing up and why not a Guts Lift. The short answer was that I thought it'd be kinda fun and challenging; simple as that. I had understood that I had to combo the two elements that I implemented near the tail end of the stage. The idea of guts lifts over some of these traps not only fit classic Mega Man level design, but actually looked fun and challenging. In retrospect, it may have been a little too tough still, despite putting safe platforms in as a breather. Another part people might be wondering about is the skippable mini boss. I had not realized this until I decided to try it. When I found it out, I felt it a funny little way to speed run, so I left it in. A similar quirk can be found if you grab the 'hidden' E-Tank, where if you die before reaching the actual route you needed to take, it would spawn you at the next checkpoint. Again, this was left in as to compensate for some difficult level design portions. In terms of the Killer Bullet segment, I was thinking that a simple Guts Lift segment would have been too easy without any enemies. In hindsight, 'explosive sinewave enemies on tiny moving platforms while jumping over to other tiny platforms' was a bit excessive, and Tackle Fires or more Guts Lifts could have solved such a problematic area. As for the interesting choice of tile sets, I wanted to explore my artistic prowess in level design. This looked okay at the time, but in hindsight I can safely say that it is pretty bad (I can assure you that I am actually a better artist than that). Lastly, because I am certain people will wonder this, while multiple test playthroughs of the level were done, they were all done by me. I had no other means at the time to be able to get others to playtest. Had I known how and who I could playtest the level, I am sure many of the issues would have been able to be solved.

The Reception

Of course, when an announcement for a MAGMML2 contest placement went public, I had to be watching where possible. And I was thrilled to find out that (In terms of tier placement) I had done rather well; it was actually where I expected to place in the competition. All criticism was taken into deep consideration, from both the judges and the streamer (FlashMan85, who is now also a judge in MAGMML3, so I made a good call). In addition, I had went to look at other youtubers who played the game for more feedback; some were harsh, others more encouraging. One thing that I did as soon as I could collect my thoughts, was to go back and update the level to be more polished. I chose more consistent enemies that fit the stage, used more appropriate graphics (as well as fewer tile sets), and apply every judge suggestion. I also had made a few other changes, but are not worth mention at this time. I can safely say that the level has been improved over its submitted version, and I have learned that with a little more effort and polish, I do have what it takes to for a competent level designer.

Running Down a Drain

When the MAGMML 48 Hour contest was announced, I was curious about participating in a competition with a time frame of only two days. With the previous one under my belt, I had thought it would be a fun challenge. To clear this right out of the gate, the title of the level was indeed a mishearing of the lyrics. For the longest time I truly thought the line was “Running Down a Drain”, instead of the intended lyrics “Running Down a Dream” (this is to confirm what I shared with JupiHornet in the private, now closed MAGMML 48Hour discord channel). One of the big contributing factors for naming the level was what I had rolled for the contest- Wave Man pipes. What I saw that I just thought, “I could make a sewer level, I guess. Wait! You know what? Why not?! I'll just name it after that one song I misheard the lyrics to. It'll be great!” I had learned my lesson from the last contest and decided to stick with one or two tile sets that meshed well. Part of the reason the stage looked as it does, was to bear a sort of relationship to Tom Petty’s music video for the song. The hard part about making the level at that time was, of course, only having two days to complete it, having three exceptionally weak enemy types, debugging, and, of course, real life. At the time specifically, I was working a regular job, so I only had the weekends to work on it. Further, if I didn't like it and wanted to try again, I would have to wait until the next weekend to roll another set of gimmicks and enemies to try again. The weak enemies were a major reason why I had the three mini boss fights. Putting it simply there's only so much you can do with these three enemies. The Jamacys had some potential for some good setups as well as the Jet Bombs (which can be seen with the re spawners), but the Space Mets gave me little to work with. I wanted this to be as far away from an enemy spam level as I could which was my big concern at the time. Additionally, I didn't know what to do with wave pipes either, since they were used very minimally in the level, they initially showed up in. Hindsight 2020, there are some really nice puzzles I could do with this, if I had more time to actually flesh these ideas out. Because of the small timeframe though, everything felt very rushed and so the bare minimum when it came to implementation of gimmicks and enemy placements were not as good as they could have been. If that wasn't enough, some of the things in the dev kit didn't work right either. During my testing, one of the big stumbling points was using the wave pipes. I had to really work around how buggy these things were. One moment Mega Man would ignore the end collision tiles for the wave pipe and get launched off the side of the screen into the great beyond. In another instance, I wanted to use them for the boss room only to find the boss also wanted to use the pipes and caused the entire thing to crash. Because of the small time frame as well, it also meant that testing wasn't always devoted to the entire level. Hence why I never found the spike in the bottom right corner of the second snail fight, or the two times where you could just get shunted through a wall into a previous screen unintentionally. At the very least, choosing music was possibly the easiest part. I found the track early on from the remixer CRIZ SONNY, and immediately knew this was a winner. everything just slowly fell into place (or at least as slowly as a 48-hour contest would permit). As for the ‘secret room’, I just thought it would be a fun thing to have. I didn't have enough time to reskin the Volt Man sprites and the thought of the Disney short, Geri’s Game, was an amusing touch.

The Future

With MAGMML3 to release a devkit in the future, and a chance to show off what I learned, I feel that my best works are yet to come. In the meantime, I hope this was helpful to getting to know a little more about me and my entry. Enjoy the wiki, and I will see you in MAGMML3! Also, there may (or may not) be a slight chance I was involved with a few other projects recently (*wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*).