Fear Factor, Part Deux
Saturday, August 28, 2010
More to say on this later tonight, but my friend ArmageddoN has come through again, taking my slapped-together Yellow Lantern stance sprite and really making it sing. Plus I've finally started putting the smart-paletted sprites in the SFF (been using the old palette up until now), so the color separations look better. See what you think:
Old and busted (mine)
New hotness (Arma's)
We've got a yard crew over here at the house today to remove some old dead trees and stumps, so I don't know how much MUGEN time I'm going to have, but I hope to have something else to show later tonight.
Labels: Green Lantern
Fear Corps Face-off
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Quickie tonight, it's been a busy weekend:
Who will lead the Yellow corps?
Hal's Yellow Corps mode is now in progress. Be afraid. ;)
Labels: Green Lantern
Balancing Hal
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
I've been thinking a lot lately about how to balance the different "X Lantern" modes in the upcoming Blackest Night Hal Jordan. While I don't want to make 6 completely new characters, I really do want each mode to feel different from the others, reflecting that lantern corps' philosophy while retaining Hal's core personality. While working on the Red Lantern mode, I came to believe that my original plan falls short of that goal.
Baseline: Green Lantern mode
First off, I'm making some changes to the regular Green Lantern moveset, many based on SethZankuten's play-balanced remix. Here's the revised movelist:
- Taunt: lantern charge (only way to increase power bar)
- Specials:
- Ring Strike QCF + P
- Emerald Swordsman QCF + P (in air only)
- Charging Ram QCF + K (ground and air)
- Buzzcut QCB + P (anti-air)
- Plasma Sphere QCB + K
- Hypers:
- KO/Smackdown QCF + PP
- Emerald Knight QCF + KK
- Ion Force QCB + PP
- Ring Slinging QCB + KK
- Soldier of Oa QCB + PK
Common changes: All custom lantern modes
The custom modes will all have the following things:
- custom stance
- custom intro: (many of these donated by ScruffyDragon forum regular Amon-Ra. Thanks, bro!)
- custom win state (and sometimes a custom lose state too)
- passive enhancement: something that makes this mode somehow "better" than the others
- quirk: something that makes this mode unique, and potentially more challenging
- 2 custom specials: each replacing a move from GL mode
- 1 Hyper: also replacing a GL move
Based on this revised plan, here's what's currently on the drawing board:
Red Lantern (palette 07)
- stance: more aggressive
- intro: ring takeover & blood cough
- win: growl/shout at P2's ko'ed body (think Savage Hulk's winpose)
- passive enhancement: does damage to P2 when grabbed/thrown
- quirk: no voices, only grunts and growls. Harder to launch combos.
- Special 1: Plasma Vomit (replaces Ring Strike)
- Special 2: Jet Flyby (replaces Charging Ram)
- Hyper: Flames of Rage (replaces Soldier of Oa)
Orange Lantern (palette 08)
- stance: arms crossed / defensive
- intro: "MINE!" (hugging the lantern)
- win: P2 identity theft
- passive enhancement: hyper moves cost half as much power as normal (since I can't give you a "1000%" power bar ;))
- quirk: no taunt to recharge the lantern; when it's gone, it's gone
- Special 1: Selfish Grab (replaces Plasma Sphere)
- Special 2: "Go Away!" (replaces Emerald Swordsman)
- Hyper: Construct Corps (replaces Soldier of Oa)
Yellow Lantern (palette 09)
- stance: proud, arms crossed (a la Sinestro)
- intro: Hal-as-Parallax, then suit changes into standard Sinestro Corps
- win: smug laughter
- passive enhancement: moves do more damage
- quirk: moves take slightly more power to use
- Special 1: Sinister Spike (replaces Buzzcut)
- Special 2: Cruel Grip (squeezing sphere; replaces Plasma Sphere)
- Hyper: Parallax Entity (replaces KO/Smackdown)
Blue/Green Lantern (palette 10)
- stance: slightly chaotic; lots of energy bleeding out of fingertips
- intro: with Saint Walker ("All will be well")
- win: ring raised high
- passive enhancement: powerbar quickly recharges whenever you're idle for a short time
- quirk: moves sometimes interrupted by the ring asking "what do you hope for?"
- Special 1: Ring Blast (bigger beam; replaces Ring Strike)
- Special 2: TBA (replaces Emerald Swordsman)
- Hyper: Ion Wave (a la Magnetic Shockwave; replaces Ion Force)
Indigo Lantern (palette 11)
- stance: both arms forward
- intro: walk on screen with Indigo staff, which then fades away
- win: teleport away
- passive enhancement: defense stats are slightly higher, so he'll take a bit less damage than normal
- quirk: unblocked projectile attacks decrease both health and power bar
- Special 1: Teleport (replaces Charging Ram)
- Special 2: Nek Ler Klok (Energy Redirect) (replaces Plasma Sphere)
- Hyper: Enforced Empathy (replaces Emerald Knight)
Black Lantern (palette 12)
- stance: like normal, but with an evil grin and without breathing
- intro: "Hal Jordan of Earth... DIE!"
- win: bump up ring charge by 10%
- passive enhancement: super-robust healing factor (can only be KO'ed by a level-3 hyper)
- passive enhancement (2): specials cost no power bar to use
- quirk: power bar only increases with every KO'ed opponent (persists between rounds)
- Special 1: Piercing Strike (replaces Ring Strike)
- Special 2: TBD (replaces Buzzcut)
- Hyper: Black Ring Swarm (replaces Ring Slinging)
So, yeah. That's the revised plan. Tonight I'm defragging my laptop's hard drive(looooong overdue), or I'd be working on the stance for Yellow Lantern. Hopefully I'll be able to show that off later this week.
Labels: Green Lantern
"I'm packing your 'angry eyes'... just in case"
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Favorite Toy Story quote ever = great way to start a blog update. :)
A couple of days ago, I posted a preview of the custom stances for Hal Jordan's Red and Orange Lantern modes. In the comments, my friend and fellow ScruffyDragon creator ArmageddoN mentioned that he thought the faces should show more emotion, and that he'd be glad to whip up something to give me an idea. He did, and when I saw it, I knew he was on to something that I had to share with y'all immediately:
My original stances
Arma's edit
Yeah, way better. Thanks, buddy!
Labels: Green Lantern
Forks are Evil
Sunday, August 08, 2010
Since I finally finished grad school, I've started getting back into my MUGEN projects, picking up what I'd more or less dropped a few months ago. Part of that effort (well, right now all of it) is going towards the Blackest Night edition of Hal Jordan, Green/Red/Orange/Yellow/Blue/Indigo/Black Lantern.
A while back, at the tail end of ScruffyVersary, I released a private "preview" beta of Red Lantern Hal as a contest prize. That version was a brand-new character (RLHal), created mostly from my old GLHal but with some sprites and code from Seth's play-balanced version and some new sprites added for the new Red-specific moves. So now that I'm creating Blackest Night Hal, I have FOUR forks—four separate versions of Hal that all came from the original source—on my machine: GLHal (the original), Seth_GL (play-balanced with additions), RLHal (Red-only moves), and HalJordan (the beginnings of the new release).
Yuck!
Each of the three older versions of the character contain stuff that the other two don't have, all of which I want to put into the new one. I've got the code more or less harmonized (still a few tweaks from Seth I'd like to adapt, but he changed animation numbers to suit his own programming style, so it's a little tricky), but building the unified sprite file is going to take longer. I've been at it for several hours tonight, and am just barely making a dent. Slow going, but ultimately once this part is done, the only other mouse-required part will be implementing the smart palette sprites that my buddy Jet the Phoenix did for me. Everything else, I can do on my netbook, on the commute to and from work. So there's a lot of incentive for me to get the sprite work done ASAP.
To leave you on a high note, here's the work-in-progress character with the custom stances for Red and Orange modes:
Orange Lantern Hal vs Red Lantern Hal (Elseworlds, maybe...?)
See you next week!
Labels: Green Lantern
Vlog #2: On Hard Drives and Master's Theses
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Data on the thought-dead hard drives has been recovered. Whew! Oh, and I'm a day or two away from being done with my grad school work. So, Hal's finally being worked on again. :)
MAGNETIC Screwdriver? Oooooops...
Friday, July 16, 2010
So last weekend I was moving my main PC's hard drives into a new case (the old processor fan died), and couldn't figure out why none of the drives would boot up when I got them installed. After an hour or two of fiddling with them over and over, I realized that my computer toolkit's screwdriver had somehow become magnetized... and my guess is that putting it up close to those magnetic hard drive platters had a, shall we say, negative effect. Hoping my MUGEN work wasn't lost, because it's been a while since I've backed anything up. :( I'll know more in a week or so, and will post here when I know the extent of the damage (if any).Labels: _meta_