By the time you read this Metroid Other M should be already on stores. To celebrate this, in this update of Bass Abyss I decided to give Samus a new set of moves. Specifically the ability to aim! Bass can shot in seven directions. Well, Samus now has the full eight directions set, and this applies to all her current weapons.

Aiming doesn’t work exactly like with Bass. Samus doesn’t get stuck while aiming, she’s pretty agile, she can run, duck, jump while aiming. I didn’t want to dumb her down so the only way to solve this was to add yet another keyboard key. I’m always weary about adding keys because the game it gets more complex for the player to play, but oh well, there’ll be always characters with simpler moves that you can use. We have to accept that Samus leans to the direction of more complete but more complex characters to play with. Although I personally find this entertaining, I don’t pretend to make levels were you absolutely need to aim to get through.

So, how do I aim with Samus?

On land or air press SPACE BAR to aim up.

On air you can hold SPACE BAR or DOWN to aim in any eight directions.

While running, if you hold SPACE BAR or DOWN, you’ll aim up forward or down forward respectively.

If you are standing or ducking, you have to hold Z to aim. By default she’ll aim up forward. Then you can switch by pressing DOWN or SPACE BAR. This essentially is the same control scheme she had in her Game Boy Advance games (Zero Mission and Fusion).

I’ll be honest, this Z key is the move that I find the most difficult to handle, but as usual you can map the keys to the layout of your preference. I really hope this to be the very last key I add.

The level editor has also been upgraded. On request I’ve added a good batch of enemies since the last time. I’m not going to spoil the full list but thanks to Scorpion there 4 new maps where you can check them all. The levels are very well designed and entertaining. To access them just go to the Custom Level section of the game’s main menu. They are the first four ones at the top of the list.

• Factor 2 – Scavenger Hunt
• Factor 3 – Floor S
• Factor 4 – Sector 0
• Factor 6 – Ground Zero

Here are some pics for Samus in one of the new custom levels!

Although I’m still more focused in code clean up and reorganization, the next update shouldn’t take this long. That FIFA World Cup sure was distracting.

Have fun!

I pretty much revealed the mayor features of this update in the previous post, but here is more info.

Proto Man mode

Time for some 8-bit Proto Man goodness. All the features you expect from him are here. Ridiculous strong shield that rejects enemy attacks. Also a slightly improved buster based a bit on the one from Mega Man X4. If you have played with him or seen videos of him there’s not pretty much I can add.

New Bass attack mode

Well, Bass needs a little more explanation. If you are used to play with Samus or Doom Guy that require weapon change, that’s exactly how you switch attack mode while playing with Bass, by pressing (by default) DELETE or NEXT PAGE. As usual you can set these keys to anything of your liking.

There’s a little purple icon under the energy bar that tells you what mode you’re using.

How do you shot up? You press the SPACE key while shooting. This was a usability concern and I found no other solution but set a new key for this. The UP key is already used to jump so it was an awkward decision, but functional in the end. You can set the keys any way you want anyway but all the demo gameplay of my previous video was recorded using the keyboard with the default settings, so I don’t think it will take you too much time to get used to it, I found the default configuration pretty playable.

Just as in Mega Man & Bass, you can’t move while shooting. But at least your shots do go through walls.

Yeah, these updates are based on Capcom’s Mega Man 10.

Some other changes:
Player – Map collision detection has been vastly improved and most bugs and annoyances must be gone. Items fall correctly on floor, platform react correctly to wind. It’s a real joy and actual the real deal of this update for me.

For ease of use I’ve altered slightly the form where you change the window resolution and scale. Now these options are separated in two lists. I’ve added 640×480 and 320×320, but as I’ve said in the past you can pretty much try any resolution you want. Of course everything will break in crazy configurations, so I can only realistically support normal and widescreen modes.

All the levels are unlocked. Game has no plot so there’s no point to lock them. You can have a taste of any level you want.

Doom Guy starts with all the weapons.

Samus missile pickups give her more ammo.

Better run animations for Bass, Samus, Mega Man and Fire Man.

A performance change I had to do to save bandwidth was disable the automatic download of the whole game as a background process. You can turn it on manually on the Advanced tab of the pause menu.

I called this 1.0 beta because I think I’m through the worst part, fixing the collision detection that was terrible in many places.

There were a lot of things left in my to-do list but I had to do a cut somewhere to make this update. Now I can calmly figure out what to tackle next. The big ones of course are new/final levels and bosses/enemies and level editor but I’d rather not state what I’m actually taking on. Last time I ended taking a different direction (this one). All I know the game is my programming playground and I still have many things to experiment and improve as I go along. Hey, at leat this is not Duke Nukem Forever, you’re actually playing the game as I develop and learn from it and other projects I’m working on.

Enjoy!

Here you can watch a video of the upcoming update. I won’t spoil anything so watch it yourself. If you want spoilers then read on.

There are so many changes. Most of them have been bug fixing, but there are two new major features:

- New playable character: Proto Man. He can deflect shots with his shields. Also I gave him a modified buster, X4 style.

- Bass has two attack modes: Bass Buster and Directional Rapid fire. Yes, just like in Mega Man and Bass or Mega Man 10, on Directional mode Bass can shoot at 7 directions. That is a HUGE advantage over the other characters considering he already has double jump, but it’s too much fun so I really liked this feature even if it makes too easy to play with him.

The core of this update has been bug fixing, and the results are huge. Months ago I was afraid that I had to live with some bugs but with new knowledge I’ve acquired during these months I decided to hunt them down and raise the quality of the engine. Most bugs and annoyances are gone and the games behaves the way you expect

All the major features in this preview are already functional. I just need to fix some little bugs I detected while capturing these clips. Once that is done, I’ll upload the new version!

The moonwalk is off by default. To enable it, got to the options while playing (Samus only). There’ll be two new switches on the right. One to enable Moonwalk, another one to enable Autofire.

Why Autofire? Well, there’s little strategic point to do the Moonwalk if you can’t autofire, since the move is activated when you hold the Shot key. In Super Metroid you had autofire on by default, but in order to not break previous player’s game experiences, like spamming missiles, I prefer to make the autofire optional too. You shouldn’t experience any difference in gameplay if you don’t enable any of the new options.

This was going to be a little maintenance update in order to fix many bugs, with the moonwalk move as a small add on. Although small, it took a considerable amount of time to implement.

Now I’ll focus more on the level editor. I have to be realistic, players make better levels than what I’m able to do, so I better provide them with tools to make their job easier. I would love to make an online version of the level editor, but that would take too much time so it is not an option in the short term. I’ll have to stick with the fla version for a while. The online level editor is not discarded though, just don’t expect it too soon or to have the same richness of the fla version on its first iterations.

Scorpio just submitted a new level called Factor 1-Towers, using new tracks and enemies that even I haven’t used in the main game. To check the latests game features and experiments, remember to check the Custom Level section regularly.

Have fun! I know I am!

Update: You can check a video with the new features here

Let’s enjoy the Bass Abyss levels with new video modes!

Switching to Widescreen

Just access to the venerable Bass Abyss screen as usual. Down there is the combo box were you can select the available video modes. Hit Go and you’re done. A full reload of the page will happen so be sure to not lose any progress mistakenly. For your convenience, you can also switch between the Turbo and Normal speed with the same click.

Switching to Vertical Dual Screen

The process is the same. For a Nintendo DS like experience! If you have a widescreen monitor at 1440×900, I could play at the 2x resolution with Firefox 3. Just hit F11 for fullscreen and the “two vertical screens” will fit in the window.

More crazy video modes

Okay guys I can’t possibly test all the possible video resolutions, that’s why there are listed just a few ‘standard’ ones. Weird stuff might happen, some levels might even break, it’s all part of the fun. Anyway, until I’m done doing some heavy testing and patching, I know you can hack your way easily to try any resolution you want. Just look at the pattern in the address bar, everything is there.

This stuff has been wired in the code base for years, I just didn’t have the time to properly expose it in a friendly interface. You might have seen some demo of the widescreen mode here, but honestly this feature comes from way back. I’d loved to release new levels, but for a quick update to show that I’m alive this will have to do for now. Remeber you saw it here first.

Ugh, the previous update was on July 13 2008. So is this Bass Abyss upgrade the result of 8 months? Of course not. I barely started to work again in this project two weeks ago. As I said to some friends I expected to be free on March 2009 (let’s just not talk about December 2008). Fortunately nothing interrupted me t his time and voilá, the update is here. Enjoy!

Some levels can get very long and exhausting. While the checkpoints are help, it’s still not fair to have to deal with lots of enemies and no way to restore health. This is no longer a problem since I’ve upgraded the engine so now energy/health power ups will be thrown randomly by defeated enemies, Mega Man style.

Some bug fixes
- The scores can be accessed again both through the game and html.

- There was a horrible bug with the music transitions in boss battles. It is now fixed.

- Destroyable rocks weren’t exploding. My bad, I forgot to update some tiles in a past upload.

The road to version 1.0 has begun. I better get started with the final levels of Bass Abyss.

In celebration to Mega Man 9, I decided to add Mega Man to the list of the Bass Abyss characters. Freeze Man was going to be the last character for a good while, and if I ever considered using Mega Man like this, it was going to be as a joke or easter egg, kind of like with Classic Fire Man. But considering that even Capcom can go this retro, I don’t think I’ll get too flamed if I feature this 8 bit version. So, I’m not calling him “Classic Mega Man”, neither “8-bit  Mega Man”. Just Mega Man.

Also as maybe you have noted, I updated Bass Abyss one month ago with a revamped Custom Map section. Now every map I’ve been sent is listed and can be downloaded in game. No need of copy/paste xml code. You can still do that in the proper tab in the same section. This is very beta and had lots of polishing to do. In the midst of all the stuff I had to do back then I didn’t have time to make a proper update post. So far it’s been performing very well so I expect to expand its features in the future. I checked the stats and I know it’s a lot easier now to try every single map.

Now I’m hunting down many bugs neglected after so many host jumps. Have fun!

Checkpoints

Well, this is one that I gave a lot of thought after playing Kid Scorpion’s level. They’re really challenging, but also very frustrating to die mid level after a bad jump. I’ve added checkpoints on some of my longer levels, and hopefully they won’t be so frustrating anymore.

Bloom effect

I guess many of you have heard the joke about next-gen graphics = bloom. Well, this is more like a tech demo, I put on test some of the flash filters and managed to get the effect, only for the detriment of the performance of the game, so you’ll get prettier graphics but the game will slow down a lot, at least under my tests. It’s disabled by default, but if you want to see it, pause the game, got to the Graphics’ tab and press the Bloom toggle.

But fear not. I got excellent results playing the game at 256 x 244. It’s small, but the bloom effect didn’t slow down my PC at all.

I’m rather impressed considering this is still Flash 8 and AS2. The promise of better performance sure encourages me to port my engine to AS3 in the future.

Also, Kid Scorpio brings us a new level. Get them at the Custom Maps section.

Update:

I forgot to mention this yesterday, but I also updated the Bass Abyss level editor to 1.0.1. It includes the checkpoint tile. Also a new stage enemy that I’ve been having on hold since December too. I think I’ll go this route, adding enemies to the level editor, so authors can give them use sooner than me considering my little free time.

Nothing like a freezing themed character for the holiday season, uh? Enter Freeze Man. You know him as the final boss from Fire Man Incoming Storm, and now you can play with him as you make your way in the Bass Abyss sprite fest.

His run mode is similar to Samus’ and Doom Guy’s. Just hold down SHIFT to keep running.

His regular shot spreads when hitting walls. Use that to cover you and attack enemies beyond your direct reach.

His buster shot takes longer to load, but it is somewhat stronger and especially devastating with Imps.

As a plus he can also shot downwards. Maybe useful in very few situations, but I tried to keep his moves as true as they were in Incoming Storm.

No new levels from me, but for those craving for new maps, S.C.O.R.P.I.O.N. have just sent a complete new set of 13 levels for your enjoyment. Get them at the Custom Map section as usual. He usually designs his maps for Bass, and maybe Samus, so keep that in mind before getting frustrated with other characters.

Have fun!

Classic Fireman plays just as Fireman in Incoming Storm, except he has a buster. I find funny to play with him because he’s so small that many enemy projectiles miss him. Use that at your advantage, I suppose.

Also, I’ve got plenty of new levels thanks to S.C.O.R.P.I.O.N. Just copy and paste the code on Bass Abyss’ Custom Level screen to play them. They are a challenge.

I expect to code a new character for the next update. I have already plotted the gameplay so I hope to have a smooth time implementing it.

IRAGINATION is another year old, somewhere this month. I can’t remember how many years, neither the exact date, but I know it happened. Thanks for the support!