A quick mockup screenshot I made about Multitoid. Yes, I know the HUD is missing and stuff. But meh, who doesn’t want to see Samus vs Samus, Super Metroid-style, online?
This is basicly what I’m building. Super Metroid, online. Maybe I’ll make a few more (proper) mockups later. If you like to request a mockup or anything, drop me a line on the forums (see menu)! I’ll see what I can do. 
Optimizing and cleaning up code atm, so that we’ll have a clean base when we can really start working on the player physics and networking code after. At the moment, there’s some duplicate code which I’m stuffing away (properly, mind you) in the existing classes. Also for time being, I’m kind of busy with IRL stuff, so I haven’t got a whole lot of time to properly work on anything at the moment.
I also might add more tilesets soon to give people more freedom with map design. Don’t hesitate to fire up the level editor and show me some of your work.
The engine has been rewritten from scratch successfully, and is now more stable and clean than ever!
Back on the level editor, I’m working on the collisions engine. At first we decided to use a vector-based collision engine, but today we felt that pixel based collisions are enough. The former was too much work to get it functional and the latter is more precise, especially seeing we’re basicly (re)creating a pixel based game.
Optional default collisions for a tileset are now stored on the filesystem as image as a black-white mask, containing tiled collisions. The full-solid tile and blank tiles are hardcoded, so this way collision masks are optional. But they can be used to add stuff like slopes, half-tiles, etc to the collision maps. 
Here’s a screenshot. Top right image is the tileset, bottom right image is the optional tileset collision mask, and the application itself (top left) shows all the unique tiles in the tileset collision mask. ^^ I know a few tiles are incorrect on that mask (slopes, for example), but I’ll fix that later.
Now to add a substate in the Level Editor to actually view, place & remove them (collisions per tile), and to save and load them. After that I can start working on the basic player physics with pixel collisions! Rawr.
About 3 years ago, I started working on a multiplayer Metroid fangame in GameMaker® 6. It featured Metroid: Zero Mission graphics and gameplay alike(ish). That fangame was called: Metroid Kombat (cheesy, I know).
It was mostly a game I developed when I hadn’t had !@#$ to do at my school back then, and it was purely made for LAN (bad networking code, etc). It was fun while it lasted, I enjoyed some good time in not only making it but also playing it with classmates and friends. Unfortunatly, I lost(these two words are you going to hear a lot at my blog) the GameMaker project files, including backups.
Back then, I was starting to hang around Metroid: Fan Mission, a Metroid fangaming community. We created a team of a few people (notable me, ‘Chucky’, ‘wild8900′, ‘Metro’ and ‘Dragon’) who were to recreate a multiplayer Metroid fangame, but this time with custommade graphics (latter persons all being excellent pixel artists).
The game to be made was called Metroid Tournament (also cheesy, I know). Progress went slow but steady. The engine was slowly developed, a lot of sprites, artwork and concepts were made. Months of dedication went in the project, notably on the graphical goods.
Ofcourse, I’m not me if disaster not struck again. Two years ago, I lost litterally everything from the project, and the project was cancelled. The loss was too great, and we couldn’t be !@#$ed to recreate everything. Besides, the engine wasn’t near multiplayer support yet, at all.
But somehow, because of a miracle, all that was lost from Metroid Tournament is recovered recently! All sprites, tiles, hud concepts, 16 worked out map concepts, menu screens, logo’s, icons, everything! Everything is recovered!
I’m not going to cancel Multitroid because of this, or merge anything Metroid Tournament related into Multitroid, but I do expect to start working on a second branch in the same engine I’m using for Multitroid in the near future.
Here, have some teaser screenshots to keep you happy. This is actual in-game rendered stuff. Screenshots are resized down a bit to not clog up the whole space that much.
One of our projects is Multitroid. It will be a Super Metroid fangame written from scratch, but with (eventually) added online multiplayer gameplay. The game is in development for 2,5 months now, and is still nowhere near finished or playable even (we do have a working map editor though), but progress is steady.
This blog will be the main source for information, updates, progress reports and downloads about Multitroid from now on (previous source was on Metroid: Fan Mission).
