Been reading a little about this project every now and then, but it was first today I decided to check out the latest tech demo. While most fan made games or remakes usually have a really lacking engine (not mentioning any names, especially since even if some people do a somewhat bad job, they’re still doing their best, which I admire!), I must say that this engine feels really solid. Not to mention that the visuals are actually stunning, I wasn’t expecting anything half this beautiful when I downloaded the tech demo. Keep this great work up, and please don’t lose interest in the project!
I do have a little suggestion though, and also a little question you might want to ask yourselves. I’ll go for the suggestion first. When you start running and hit the shooting button, Samus will go into a unique spriteset where she holds her arm canon outwards. Looks awesome, however this might look a little lacking in case you ever run a longer area without jumping or stopping. Not really a problem, but I think there wouldn’t be an awful lot of coding (do correct me if I’m wrong) to make her go back to her ordinary running sprite if she ran ~5 seconds after shooting without reseting her spriteset. It’s little things like these that truly make a final product feel so immense and awesome, methinks ^_^x It gives you a feeling of just how well polished the whole project is, which I doubt is something you’d dislike to have people feel when playing around with your releases, right?
As for the little question you might want to ask yourselves, this is no biggie. In the current tech demo, there is a significant difference between assuming morph ball position on the ground aside from doing it in the air. Going morph ball in the air doesn’t cut down your speed in the slightest (unless you do it in an upwards slope - this is one of those fine polished things I mentioned earlier that I think rocks! gotta love how the morph ball reacts to both kinds of slopes) while doing it from a grounded position stops any movement temporarily since you have to actually crouch first.
In the same manner, the fastest way to get up from morph ball mode currently is to hit the Jump button which will rise Samus to walking position without losing any speed at all. This may or may not have been intentional, I just wanted to make sure you knew about this little quirk in the current engine. Then again, this might’ve been changed in the later WIPs, what do I know? Heh heh.
Your artists (both audio and visual artists!) can also pat themselves on their backs a lot. I was especially impressed by the trail the morph ball leaves after itself, it looks fabulous and it was a graphical feature I wasn’t ready to see in this 2D remake at all!
Moreover, all I found were a few glitches which I’ve seen from reading around here have already been fixed. I’m going to keep myself updated on this project for sure, it looks fabulous ^^x Many thanks for working on this project, and I hope you’re having a great time working on it! The cheer creativity I can smell when I run your tech demo here is inspiring, to say the least. ^^x