Magical Fairy Drop

[+Ryan Witmer]

It's time to go back to Fairy Land!

 

So, a little history.  I wrote this weird little 5200 game called Magical Fairy Force.  It was nothing special, but it did use the trakball so that was pretty cool.  Last year, I released Magical Fairy Force: Champion Edition on Steam.  This was a bigger, better, more involved game that was pretty much everything I wished I could've done on the 5200 but couldn't due to system constraints.

 

An idea I've been kicking around for a long time is to do a competitive puzzle drop game, much like Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, which is one of my favorites in the genre.  This game featured a bunch of Street Fighter and Darkstalkers characters in cute fun-sized designs dropping colored gems on each other and just generally being awesome.  After writing my PC game, I was sitting on a whole pile of characters and figured it was time to finally do this.

 

Another fun thing I wanted to do hearkens back to Ratcatcher, my first 5200 game.  Ratcatcher actually began life as a PC project, and at some point in development I realized that I could make this work on the 5200.  So for a time, I was working on both versions at once and I thought that was really awesome.  I wanted to try this sort of set up again, and this seemed like the perfect project for it.

 

With that, Magical Fairy Drop was born.  I'm simultaneously developing PC and 5200 versions of this game, and the 5200 version is going to use a massive 512KB cartridge!  This is the first time I've ventured beyond the standard 32KB and I've had to come up with some new programming techniques to leverage the size of this thing.

 

The very first thing I worked on was the character select screen.  This was one of the most difficult parts of the original Magical Fairy Force to program, and I wanted to see how much better I could do with 512KB at my disposal.  I put together a quick proof-of-concept, and it came out pretty much exactly the way I wanted it to:

 

The way this screen works is simply impossible on a 32KB cart.  One big problem I had with the old game was that I had to decompress and sometimes flip the character faces on the fly as they were selected,  This was very slow and obviously noticeable.  This new screen switches characters instantly and is using some really cool graphics modes that I haven't used until now.

 

As far as the characters go, we have the original eight characters from the 5200 version of Magical Fairy Force:

 

 

The PC version added eight new characters, and I'm excited to bring them back to the 5200, where it all began:

 

 

All of these character graphics are taken from the PC version of Magical Fairy Force and are really just there to demonstrate that my ideas will actually work.  I'm planning to commission all new art for these characters, so these images will all be replaced.

 

The PC version has a similar placeholder character select screen right now:

 

This is all fine and dandy, of course, but what about the game?

 

Well, I have a basic plan for that and a little bit done.  The 5200 version currently looks like this:

 

 

I haven't made any actual graphics for this yet, just these test blocks, but the concept is working.  I have plans to add a lot more to this screen, don't worry.

 

On the PC side, it's a similar story:

 

 

The PC version is bit further along than the Atari version, and I expect that to be true pretty much all the time.  In this shot, there's only one pit, but support for player 1/player 2 pits is there, just not being used.

 

The core gameplay is still being designed, but I have a pretty good idea of how it's going to work.  I'm also starting to put together ideas for how the characters will be different from each other in game terms.  These details will all be revealed later, once I'm happy with them.

 

Here's a brief feature checklist, things I'd like to do.  Of course, I won't necessarily be able to do them all, but these are the goals:

 

1. One player game vs. a CPU opponent, with different difficulty levels.
2. Two player competitive game.
3. Lots of flavor text between the characters.  I've got 512KB to burn, after all.
4. Music.  I don't know if the game will share music with the PC version or have its own soundtrack.  I'll have to discuss this with one of the many talented music people that have helped me in the past.
5. In-game "how to play" demonstration.
6. Support for the trakball.  I don't know how well it will work, but I might do it anyway just for fun.
7. Probably a bunch of other stuff I've forgotten about, but will remember as soon as I post this.

 

Anyway, that's the basic plan.  I have a couple other PC projects right now and a full-time job, so progress on this might be slow.  I would love to have something playable for PRGE but the chances of it are slim.  I'll probably have whatever I have done on an Atarimax cart with me at PRGE so I can show it off on any 5200s I happen to find.

[+DamonicFury]

Very cool to see a sequel to MFF in a totally different game genre.  As always, will be fun to watch you develop it.  🙂

[+cjherr]

Looks excellent! Using Puzzle Fighter as inspiration looks like it will make a great game.

[+Ryan Witmer]

Huzzah!

 

[+Ryan Witmer]

Another quick update.  Slowly we make progress.

 

[phuzaxeman]

Nice work! 

[+Ryan Witmer]

For anyone going to PRGE at the end of the month, I'll be there most of the day on Saturday with the current build of this game on my person.  I haven't had time to do much lately, but it has progressed a bit and I'll be glad to show it off and discuss it with anyone at the show.