What would you like to see in a Shantae Fan Game?

Sounds good so far.

But you might want to make some visual examples.
Like you have been doing with the Shantae 3 Predictions that you have drawn.

Would make it a little easier to follow, if you catch my drift.

Out of curiosity, what type of graphics style are you going for, assuming sprite rips aren't involved?
Pixel-based, or hand-drawn? A mix of both, perhaps?

Right now, I'd say Pixel-based.
But the other two are also accepted, if someone can do it.

We're still open for pretty much anything.

Personally, I'd prefer HD hand drawn animation. Pixel art is ok, but I'd like to really show off some hand drawn visuals.

Yeah, you can't show Wayforward what you're capable of with sprite rips. =P I'd prefer to stay away from those anyway, it'd cheapen the quality of the game by using existing copyrighted material. Creating original stuff is way more refreshing. How's the art going to play out anyway? Are you going to be doing all the animations yourself or will it be a team effort? I'm still onboard either way, I'm just eager for more details if you can provide them.

Anyway, I'm blown away you already have a lot of the concept written down. I'm still rereading it to make sure I understand it all! I'm liking the approach though, even if half of it is confusing me ATM. It's such a new idea it's going over my head. It'll sink in eventually. XD

What kind of resolution do you want this done at anyway? If you're going for HD, the 320x240 I've stated for the main project won't be enough. The size shouldn't be a big deal as long as you don't go over 1024p, but my personal safe bet is 720p so the game is more accessible to kids with mid-end laptops and desktops. I'm only mentioning this because Game Maker may flip out if individual image files are massive enough, but I'm willing to split sprites and backgrounds into separate pieces, just like WayForward did on the GBC with the original Shantae, if it means keeping the game from giving me an ASM error. Just tell me what resolution you want so I can get started on some basic scripting for the guts to this game. =P

Also, you still haven't mentioned what approach is going to be taken with the art style. Personally, I'm imagining the more serious style of Shantae dancing around beautifully on a stage; I dunno if I could take an HD chibi Shantae as seriously. Are you going to make use of those dimensions for the extra detail?

Paragon-Yoshi wrote:And then what's with her jumping around on several tiles of ground? That's platforming man.
Which is what she first and foremost is, no matter how it is shaped.

I think you missed what I meant. It's that platforming isn't Shantae's only element, she does a lot more than run and jump all day. You've got a little action here, some adventure there, and a few RPG elements for good measure. There are a lot of elements going on all at once that you just don't see in one sitting with a 2D Mario game. I honestly feel she's improperly categorized in GameFAQs' platformer section, in a terribly misleading kind of way.

Paragon-Yoshi wrote:I'd go for the sprite-style of the official games.
But I think both work and are worth trying out.

Adhering to the style of the offical games would be a lot easier, since it's not as anatomically serious. (No excuse to be sloppy, but still requires three times less planning and screw ups behind the ink lines! =P) This will also mean my Disney-inspired idea won't mix well, so we might need some time to figure out how that will work with vectors while sticking to the crisp shading style in RR. I dunno, I might just make vectors of both and see how they look downscaled in a doctored screenshot. That would be the fastest way to test which style is more fitting for the project.

Who said anything about ripping sprites?
We could make sprites from scratch in either style.

It's just that pixel art seems to be easier to do and thus might be the more obvious choice.


As for the rest:

I think you missed what I meant. It's that platforming isn't Shantae's only element, she does a lot more than run and jump all day. You've got a little action here, some adventure there, and a few RPG elements for good measure. There are a lot of elements going on all at once that you just don't see in one sitting with a 2D Mario game. I honestly feel she's improperly categorized in GameFAQs' platformer section, in a terribly misleading kind of way.

Sorry, but you're wrong.
Shantae IS a platformer, no matter how much different elements have been included.

Banjo-Kazooie also had adventure elements and yet was still a platformer.
And yes, down the core, Super Metroid is a platformer as well.

But seriously, what's the problem with her being considered platformer?
She is a platformer with adventure and a few RPG elements. I don't see the problem there. :/

.Luke wrote:What kind of resolution do you want this done at anyway? If you're going for HD, the 320x240 I've stated for the main project won't be enough. The size shouldn't be a big deal as long as you don't go over 1024p, but my personal safe bet is 720p so the game is more accessible to kids with mid-end laptops and desktops. I'm only mentioning this because Game Maker may flip out if individual image files are massive enough, but I'm willing to split sprites and backgrounds into separate pieces, just like WayForward did on the GBC with the original Shantae, if it means keeping the game from giving me an ASM error. Just tell me what resolution you want so I can get started on some basic scripting for the guts to this game. =P

Also, you still haven't mentioned what approach is going to be taken with the art style. Personally, I'm imagining the more serious style of Shantae dancing around beautifully on a stage; I dunno if I could take an HD chibi Shantae as seriously. Are you going to make use of those dimensions for the extra detail?

I believe a resolution of 720p would be the best to work with, and splitting the background and foreground pieces would be very helpful (especially if you want to to do something fancy, like Shantae jumping from background to foreground). As for the art direction, I'm thinking a nice middle ground between the promotional Shantae: RR artwork and chibi style used for the game. Not quite Chibi, not quite Serious, but a great spot somewhere in between. It's one of the many things I'll have to draw up first just to be sure.

Oh, and if there's any artist that are serious about hopping on board with this project, that's great. The POA I'm working on should handle everything we'll need to get started and stay on track. It'll just take me some time to complete.

I look forward to seeing that then. ^_^ You'd need it to showcase the artstyle you have in mind for Shantae anyway, which I'm interested in seeing also.

And 720p should work, especially if Shantae's sprites are small in comparison to the background. We might be able to leave her sprites in one piece, but if the background needs separating into 128x128 tiles, I wouldn't mind doing that for even animated backgrounds or foreground scenery to keep it stable.

Paragon-Yoshi wrote:It's just that pixel art seems to be easier to do and thus might be the more obvious choice.

BWAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAAAAA AHAAHAAH X'D

Paragon-Yoshi wrote:Sorry, but you're wrong.
Shantae IS a platformer, no matter how much different elements have been included.

Banjo-Kazooie also had adventure elements and yet was still a platformer.
And yes, down the core, Super Metroid is a platformer as well.

But seriously, what's the problem with her being considered platformer?
She is a platformer with adventure and a few RPG elements. I don't see the problem there. :/

Okay, you got me there. My label maker just crapped two clips and fell over, if that makes you happy. =P I can get a little obsessed with categorizing things sometimes, and yet I don't care if a watermelon is really a fruit or vegetable like some people do. :# I've never seen Metroid-style games as platformers because of all the other elements in there, it feels more like a vehicle that carries the action than the very point of the game itself; just another piece of the puzzle holding it all together.

.Luke wrote:BWAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAAAAA AHAAHAAH X'D

Hey, what is your **** problem? :/

Okay, you got me there. My label maker just crapped two clips and fell over, if that makes you happy. =P I can get a little obsessed with categorizing things sometimes, and yet I don't care if a watermelon is really a fruit or vegetable like some people do. :# I've never seen Metroid-style games as platformers because of all the other elements in there, it feels more like a vehicle that carries the action than the very point of the game itself; just another piece of the puzzle holding it all together.

Then stop being so picky. Problem solved.

I was actually in the middle of editing that line out. :# It was more of a joke than anything else. At least I cut out the animated GIF I was going to put in there; even when I'm feeling silly I'm above taking it too far.

Anyway, just so you know, it's not actually easier to make pixel art. You have to shade everything manually pixel by pixel and in most cases you don't even have layers to work with, and rotating or stretching stuff gets pretty ugly. You have to pick out all the colors for a palette, anti-aliasing takes even more time and usually a lot of guess-work, etc. It takes a real pro to make good looking pixel art, so imagine how the average hobbyist is going to fare with those odds? You wouldn't believe how messy making presentable pixel art is compared to just screwing around with a warm up drawing in GIMP or SAI.

Well, I did shock the living crap out of the creator of the SRB2 Riders mod once with a fully animated Rouge character skin in a week's time, (300+ frames done entirely with pixel art on KolourPaint.) all compiled in a wad file and ready to go, but that came with an inhuman ammount of man hours and the constant urge to puke from sitting in-front of a LCD screen for hours on end; no joke, and I did all that for not a penny. He never asked me to push myself like that to finish Rouge sooner either, my priorities were just that screwed up back then; my eyes still hurt just thinking about it now. ;_;

Well, I didn't know there was that much to it.
However, today I figure there are tools to make things easier.

I think I might try playing around with SAI some time, and try to get some pixel art done with it.
That is, if I ever consider doing pixel art.
But we will see.

I need to know if this game will run at 60 fps? Most of the dance steps in this game would only take Shantae half a second to perform because Shantae would dance on beat and there are normally 2 beats per second in most songs (2 bps or 120 bpm). Going with 60 fps will give me enough animation frames to make her dancing smooth and keep the timing perfect with the beat.

Trust me, keeping a dancing game running at 60 FPS will be a lot easier than keeping a darned Sonic game going at those speeds! I don't even have to disable instances outside the view, cut corners on calculations, or even have 30 scripts being called simultaneously in every step! Granted, it will be graphically more demanding in HD, but not impossible for the average mid-end computer these days to run, although I'm willing to dig Game Maker 8 out of the grave if we need hardware-acceleration for more special effects (Like rotating the camera slightly, and motion blur effects for insanely well-performed dances.) and keeping the large, animated images on-screen from hurting the framerate any. I doubt that will be a problem in GM 5.3a because of how few objects will be on the screen at once, but we have an option if performance becomes an issue while drawing HD sprites in real-time at that frame-rate.

Paragon-Yoshi wrote:Well, I didn't know there was that much to it.
However, today I figure there are tools to make things easier.

I think I might try playing around with SAI some time, and try to get some pixel art done with it.
That is, if I ever consider doing pixel art.
But we will see. ;)

Paint.NET and GIMP do make the process far less sloppy and gross, but the tools aren't as quick to access in some cases, and neither have a traditional line tool like KolourPaint/Vista's MSPaint do, (Which is mostly how I get around in pixel land.) so the process is slowed down by a bloated, overkill UI; there's a bit of a comprimise with either method. On one hand you don't even have layers to work with, and on the other I personally get frustrated trying to switch tools every half-second like I can at lightning speeds on KolourPaint.

Paint.NET and GIMP do make the process far less sloppy and gross, but the tools aren't as quick to access in some cases, and neither have a traditional line tool like KolourPaint/Vista's MSPaint do, (Which is mostly how I get around in pixel land.) so the process is slowed down by a bloated, overkill UI; there's a bit of a comprimise with either method. On one hand you don't even have layers to work with, and on the other I personally get frustrated trying to switch tools every half-second like I can at lightning speeds on KolourPaint.

Okay then.

As for SAI: It does have the "Binary" Tool. Which does seem to be made for pixel-art, in the way it works.
Together with some textures, it might make shading and stuff a lot easier.

Still working on the POA for visual purposes, but here's what I know for sure so far. I thought I'd share it so you'll know what we're getting into.

THE GAME MENUS - At the main menu screen, you can select START GAME to play, or EXIT to leave the game (the credit info will be at the bottom of this screen). Selecting START GAME will take you to select menu, where you can select your song choice, difficulty level, switch Random Mode ON or OFF, switch Spectate Mode ON or OFF (so players could just watch Shantae dance if they felt like it), RET-2-GO! (starts gameplay), and HOW-2-PLAY (the tutorial gameplay event where we teach the player how to play). There could always be more modes or optional switches added later (like extra characters or being able to change the background location for example). You can also see the Hi-Score and Ranking for every Song choice + Difficulty Level + Random Mode (ON/OFF) at this screen as well. You can choose to go back to the main menu from here as well.

THE GAMEPLAY - This game will have a preset series of dance steps for each song and difficulty for that song (4 preset series of dance steps for each song choice, like Rock Band), but it will still be flexible enough to handle a random series of dance steps for Random Mode (just like the original Dance Parlor mini game). There will be no "Failure" event during gameplay (like Dance Parlor), so even if you're doing bad, the song still continues and you still get to keep on playing (your score and chances of getting a High Rank will be the only thing the suffers). The objective will be to reach the highest score and get the highest rank you can (ranking will be like Rock Band). It's possible to pause during gameplay. If you pause, a little menu pops up asking you if you want to RESUME, RETRY, or QUIT. Resume starts the song back up after a 3...2...1... count down (like Rock Band), retry starts the song over with the same settings as before (if played in Random Mode, the step series will not be the same), and quit takes you back to the select menu.

THE DANCES - Shantae will have a total of 17 Dance Moves out of a possible (max) 25 Dance Moves. It's good to know the max number in case more characters ever got added into this game. Who wants to see Sky, Rotty, or Risky dance? Heck, I'd like to see Patricia Wagon from Mighty Switch Force dance too! Most of Shantae's moves will share some of the same starting and ending positions, so even tho it's an additional 10 dance moves plus her original 7 dances, it shouldn't be to much of a pain to animate if it's done bit by bit.

THE ANIMATION - The animation process will be seperated by body parts (Head, Ponytail, Chest, Abs, Hips, Arms, and Legs) and they will work in unison to create one image. To take full advantage of the 60 fps, each dance move animation will be given a set number of frames based on the Beat(s) need to preform that dance move. To give an example, let's say there's a song in this game that has 2 beats per second (bps or 120 bpm), so that gives us a maximum of 30 frames per beat (120 bpm is the standerd I'm using for the animataions). It will be challenging to animate all 17 different dance moves. Here's the dance move frame count: 7- 1Beat moves (30 frames each/ 210 frames total), 3- 2Beat moves (60 frames each/ 180 frames total), 1- 3Beat move (90 frames total), 3- 4Beat moves (120 frames each/ 360 frames total), 2- 8Beat moves (240 frames each/ 480 frames total). That's a total of 1320 (composite) frames of animation.

There is one huge problem I want to address right now. Most songs will play a little faster or slower than the animation and gameplay standard (60fps/ 2bps), so we'll have to figure out a way to sync the gameplay and animations to the BPM of the song that being played. Question for .Luke: Is it possible to slow down or speed up the animation and gameplay to sync to the BPM of the song that the player selects?

THE MUSIC - For this game, music will be a must. All song choices must be as close to 120 bpm as possible. I'd like to have to have at least 5 different songs for Shantae to dance to. Burning Town Forever Remix would be a perfect choice because it's 124 BPM and it was used to promote Shantae: RR (the song choices don't have to be Shantae related or from WayForward, they can be anything you'd like to see her dance to). I guess that's leaves 4 more songs, so I'll leave those up to you all.

I dont know what i would be able to help with but I am trying to get into video game design so maybe it can be a bit of a learning experiance for me to. I'll try to help in any way i can though

MikeHarvey wrote:
There is one huge problem I want to address right now. Most songs will play a little faster or slower than the animation and gameplay standard (60fps/ 2bps), so we'll have to figure out a way to sync the gameplay and animations to the BPM of the song that being played. Question for .Luke: Is it possible to slow down or speed up the animation and gameplay to sync to the BPM of the song that the player selects?

THE MUSIC - For this game, music will be a must. All song choices must be as close to 120 bpm as possible. I'd like to have to have at least 5 different songs for Shantae to dance to. Burning Town Forever Remix would be a perfect choice because it's 124 BPM and it was used to promote Shantae: RR (the song choices don't have to be Shantae related or from WayForward, they can be anything you'd like to see her dance to). I guess that's leaves 4 more songs, so I'll leave those up to you all.

The SuperSound DLL I'm using for my Sonic engine allows for speeding up and slowing down of tracks at almost whatever speed you want on demand; you can even change playback volume and positions since the whole OGG vorbis file is copied to RAM. (I want to avoid MP3s like the plague. They don't preserve bass very well and it generally sounds more ear-grating at lower bit-rates, which is especially bad for a game built around music. Even worse it's a propriety format with royalties attached!) Avoiding transcoding is a bit of problem, since a lot of these remixes are published as MP3's, but I can record any remixes in that format we get permission to use through my audio hardware on Audacity, that way nothing important gets lost during the conversion, and it will sound exactly the same. (Or at the very least you won't notice the difference! =P)

Damizean's animation system (Which I modified the crap out of for my character skinning system.) can also change it's speed in ways Game Maker's built-in one can't; it's super flexible. I should be able to script a line of code that will allow the character animation speed to vary based on the music's tempo.

Tomorrow I'm going to create a basic sketch in KolourPaint of what I've visually grasped of this concept so far in my head, that way you can point out what's missing or out of place. I need to make sure I know what I'm writing in GML before I do anything, otherwise it will just be a beautiful mess of code that we can't use. XD

Okay, I know we have "Shantae: Ret-2-Go!" now as our main project.

However, I figured I bump this topic.
Since we're still planning to make a full-fledged Shantae fan-game, that actually plays like the official games.

And we're still open for ideas here as well.

That is a good point, Paragon. We're still plenty open to ideas for a platformer/adventure fan game, so any new ideas are still welcome.

I've already unloaded all my ideas so far, so I'm kinda dry right now, sadly. D:

Well, I might as well contribute something.
Which art-style should we go for?

Personally, I think the game "Rayman" does show a style that suits Shantae.
(Of course, adjustments need to be made.)

Once again, I am ONLY talking about the design and art-style.

That's certainly an idea worth exploring. ^^ Rayman has a very interesting art style once you get past the whole no limbs thing, (I mean that as in it's the first you notice. XD) taking a few hints of inspiration from that game might be fun to toy with. I loved how crazy and eye-catching the sometimes-abstract backgrounds were, there's a lot of directions we could take that in. I'll try to mull over some ideas regarding that while I sleep. =P

I don't think we can go wrong with a Rayman-oriented artstyle for Shantae.
Of course, if there is anything off, feel free to address it.