MM8BDM Concepts and unused Assets [MASSIVE SPOILERS]

[CutmanMike]

Greetings. In this thread I will be posting details around the development and conception of MM8BDM's story campaign. It's interesting to see how things developed over time, and how well things have aligned to my vision of the final game. The team did a great job at adapting what I had in mind and  I am 100% satisfied with how things turned out. However, everyone is different and I'm sure some of you will find interest in some of the unused things for the game, and maybe even disappointment some of these didn't make it in. Enjoy. 

Here be spoilers! You've been warned

Final Boss concept (2016)

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Look. Not everyone can be a graphic artist. Some people just don't have the patience for making things look good. However I find images are always the best way to convey ideas to people, so when the time calls for it even I have to bust out MSPAINT.exe to get the job done.

So believe it or not, the idea for Eclipse was conceived back in 2016. We knew we wanted MMV to be the big finale of the game, and the idea of having a city-sized epic fight always appealed to me. Funnily enough, Korby also had a similar idea of piloting gamma to fight a giant boss, so I knew I wasn't so crazy to want it in the game. I knew the logistics of it would have been a challenge, but as I got better at making big over the top battles, the less impossible it seemed to do. The hardest part would be the sprites, but Pegg, Medal and BatteryBlack blew out of the park. Eclipse is large, and made up of lots of little bits, and isn't just your average 8-bit Mega Man skin sprite. Even now it seems unreal that this is actually in the game!

Anyway, as you can see by my masterpiece artwork above, most of the concept has remained the same. Though he ended up a lot less tentacley than I intended, it's probably for the best. He eyeball laser ended up getting moved to his chest. The only thing that was fully cut was the evil minions, which were at one point going to be Evil Robot fusions of the Mega Man Killers. This was scrapped because they would be tiny in scale, and having to deal with gnats flying at your face probably wouldn't be fun.

MM10 Final Boss

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Very early on I knew I wanted Wily Golem in the game somewhere, as did a lot of people. This boss on the gameboy was always a favorite. But we already had a giant robot fight with the original V1 Gamma boss. I opted for a traditional "head with hands" boss fight for this one. After all, that's how you fight him in the game.

Art by Pegg




Once again I knew sprites were going to be a problem with this fight. How do you even render an Arm in Doom without the use of models or voxels? Well, by some miracle we managed to get it looking pretty good. Possibly could be even better, but I'm happy with the result. The trickiest part for the artists was the hands, as they needed full sprite rotations (no mirroring allowed!). Pegg, Molly and BatteryBlack did a great job with all the annoying segments that had to be made for him. The code is honestly a mess and I don't know how I got away with it, but it's functional! Oh and this is the last time I'm doing a "3d model" of a character in a Doom level I swear. The shark was awful but trying to model out the torso with sectors wasn't fun either.

Anyway, I had a lot of ideas for arm and hand attacks but a lot of them had to be scaled back mainly due to the way the arm code works. It's not very flexible. An idea was to have the arms attack individually (the code is still in there to allow for that), but I figured it was already difficult enough keeping track of the arms plus the torso laser. The hand flamethrower was originally going to be a laser, but having it aim at the character was odd looking. Finally the "grind" attack was going to have unique frames for the hands as you can see in the artwork above, but I figured it was ok to just use the fist instead of sprite up another 8 rotations for that one attack.



Most of phase 2 I came up with on the spot. Originally Duo and King were going to help you fight off two Machinegun Joes with Roboenza effects, but after playing with the idea for a while and realizing it would just be a lot to take in for the player, it was scrapped.

MMV Final Boss

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Not much to say about Sunstar. Most attacks I wanted I got in. Making the nova beam look decent was a pain, but other than that I'm quite proud of this boss. Probably my favourite one. His fusion with Evil Robot however, went through quite a few iterations.



Here was my take on it, again another image dating back to 2016! I wanted to convey the idea of ER being a parasite and corrupting Sunstar, changing his solar energy into evil energy. The tentacles were mainly to show the corruption, but I thought of a few ideas for attacks that I wanted to do with the tentacle arm.

Regardless, Pegg and BlackBattery went to town on making a bunch of concepts for this guy.

Pegg:

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BlackBattery:

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While a all of these are amazing, I didn't like the idea of Sunstar's fusion dramatically morphing his body into something different. I still wanted it to feel like it was Sunstar's body, just taken control of by ER. I do have to lament the loss of the Evil Energy ghost hand though. It looks cool I don't think it would have been easy to show that with an 8-bit sprite without using some partial transparency or something. He (code named Baby Eclipse, by the way) ended up looking mostly what I envisioned originally, for better or worse. He lost the terminator eye though, apparently that was overkill.

MM8BDM Final Boss (Player)

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Pegg:


It didn't come around until later that Gamma 2.0 would get a drastic design change. As I didn't have anything in mind, I let the artists just go with whatever they thought was best. I did however want Gamma's mouth piece in tact, so it still had that "gutsman" look to him. Pegg and BatteryBlack came up with a bunch of different designs. I actually brought BatteryBlack on the team specifically to help us design these final two characters, and I'm glad I did. 

BatteryBlack:

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MM8BDM Final Boss (Boss)

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Lots of designs came up while trying to decide on a look for eclipse. I had a few criteria that had to be met: Evil Robot's face had to be punchable, had had to have legs to stand on and he had to have arms to punch/slash/swipe back with. With that in mind you can see why some designs were rejected, but they're still awesome!

BatteryBlack:

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Once we finalized his look, his animations had to be concepted and translated into sprites. BatteryBlack again provided the rough sketches, Pegg and Medal did the rest.

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Eclipse mostly came out how I envisioned it, but a lot of things were better. He was originally going to have tentacles come out of the ground that you had to shoot, but they ended up getting replaced by gravity wells. Manly because making generic energy attacks is way easier than animating tentacles! Finally, he was going to have a fancy map card sort of like Quint's unique one. However I thought it was a bit too crazy.

Pegg:

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Hidden Boss:

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Ra Thor/Devil was always going to be the "puzzle" boss, which I handled mostly myself. But I had no idea what to do for Ra Thor, so Pegg helped concept some attacks and... well, the image speaks for itself. Russel started an attempt at this boss too, but never finished it. I picked up where he left off and stole the teleport and fire shield attacks. I actually coded his lightning attack in, but it was cut due to it mainly being a little bit boring and I just wanted to get this boss over and done with.

By the way, this boss was never intended to be as painful as Quint. If you have the right gear and know what to do, he's actually very easy, which is intended!

Other:

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Here's some unused launcher art concepts by Pegg. I think the first one was actually completed, but we decided not to use it. They're very busy!

Pegg:

Older version of Maestro's awakening.


I used mspaint again to explain how I wanted the ending graphic to look. Yup.

I will post more should anything I've missed come up.

Here's full galleries of Pegg and BatteryBlack's artworks, some I omitted from this post:
https://imgur.com/a/PhN3AnT
https://imgur.com/a/LNkmXCz

[CutmanMike]

Some work in progress screenshots that show unused stuff. Again, spoilers here.

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An unused Mars map that the author wasn't satisfied with.


Some experiments trying to make Sunstar's laser look good. Screenshot makes it look neat but in practice, not so much.


Work in progress arm/hand segments.


These were never going to go in, but this is the first attempt at putting Eclipse into the game.


I badgered the artists to come up with a HUD for gamma as I thought it would make you feel like you were in a mech. I still think that holds true, but it covers just way to much of the screen so it was scrapped. It's actually still in the v6 build.


Inky icky black tentacles were used before they were made purple to match Eclipse.

Molly:


An early concept of Deep Digger was to have it change properties depending on what surface you "dug" from. I still think this a neat idea, but it would require giving every surface texture in the game a property of what "type" it is, which isn't very viable in this engine. Especially if you consider custom maps with new textures.