Mega Man (1) version 1.0 for 3DNes 1.0
General thoughts:
The Mega Man franchise lends itself well to 3DNes. It's got a very cartoony but intricate style that benefits from 3D projection that makes characters look like pencil toppers. Mega Man (the original) was the first game I ever played from the franchise, and one of the first NES games I ever played, so I reserve a special place for it in my heart.
Scrutinizing and customizing the game for 3D gave me the chance to truly appreciate the detail that went into inconsequential assets I had taken for granted, like the backgrounds and platform textures.
Design notes:
First to note is that the file unzips to 15Mb. I know that 3DNes compiles information you assign to each asset, but I'm surprised that so much memory is required. Does the game store the specific voxel arrangement for each object? Who knows.
On the Robot Master select screen: I really wanted to have the RMs inset within the cursor, but since those objects are the actual bosses and since the blue is used as a background elsewhere, this was impossible. Guts Man and Dr. Wily have custom sprites for the level select so It's impossible to get them to look like the rest.
Because of a graphic glitch (#2 in this post), I had to change certain player/boss sprites to "Char" where I would otherwise have liked to have a cylinder projection. So Mega Man sometimes looks like an eraser. In keeping in the spirit of this style, I've opted not to apply the AS checkbox to any Robot Master sprites, so you'll see the black "outline" on the sprite's left and right. It's a design direction forced by flaws in the current emulator version.
There's only one place in the whole game where spikes are able to look like the glorious, conical spires they're depicted as. If 3DNes ever gets an option to manually make a sprite color transparent, this might get fixed everywhere.
Lots of backgrounds use black as part of their design, but 3DNes interprets it as "transparent." To counteract Moirée patterns, I reduced some background depths.
Because of glitch #3 in the above post, there are many walls, floors, and ceilings (especially in Elec Man's and Ice Man's stages) that aren't cubed off properly. Whenever I fix them, they just revert back. Oh well.
Surprisingly, the ending took as long to set as the rest of the game. There are hundreds of assets related to partial-rendering of the background that had to be set to the back layer, so I had to manually click through the ending frame-by-frame. I did this three times to try to catch stuff I missed. I seriously can't wait for a save/load feature.
Finally:
I love the NES Megaman series. I plan to set all six.