I´ve been with a lot of work lately. Life is eating my time away, but I manage to find time for the project once in a while. I even drew a tileset while I was recording voice actors for a documentary.
I retiled most of the breeding area 3, I had to add more variety to the tileset, it was too repetitive. Changed the tiles of the tunnel connecting area 3 with the main shaft, instead of a recolor of existing brick tiles, I´m using new original tiles.
The Gammas were tweaked yet again. Some fights are in very closed spaces, and some gammas were moving too fast.
Zeta Metroids are coming out pretty well. Both HyruleSwordsMan and me are working on animating a wireframe sketch of the zetas with all the required actions, before he starts drawing the details. This gives us an idea of how many frames each animation will take, and how many positions need to be drawn for every part.We´re trying to make things look as fluid as possible. For example, the current sketch for the walking animation has 21 frames.
The Zeta sprites will take more time to produce than the past Metroids, but it´ll be worth the wait.
A lot of people asked me to show screenshots or videos of the Gamma Metroids. The way gammas are drawn, they use sprite rotation much more than the Alphas. Rotation is applied subtly to give the body a more "floaty" sensation, and to each limb to create the animations in real time. The thing is, that most screenshots look distorted in at least one part of the Gammas. That´s why I want to show it on a video, instead of images.
Now, I still have to redo some of the animations. Most of them look very mechanical right now. Whenever I find time to redo them in a more natural way, I´ll post a video showing a fight.
Only if you want to spoil the surprise of running into them in the game.
Do you want to see the Gamma Metroids?
EDIT: I almost forgot to mention: Lee Evans of Downwards Compatible closed a series of great Metroid related articles with an interview with me. I cannot recommend his blog enough, it´s a great read.
