Crater Creator wrote:I suggest taking note of the purpose and feeling of each part of the level. In this example, the room has windows. Seeing the starfield outside makes it clear the player is on a spaceship, even if they just hit play knowing nothing about the game. It's also important that the hangar behind the player be visible, but inaccessible: the story dictates an emergency evacuation from the Mirata, so you can't go back the way you came. So long as these qualities are maintained or represented on the level, I think modifications will still be well received.
Actually, reading the manual text again... if Marathon were made in 2015 with a full dev team, it would make a lot of sense to show the events in the manual text in game, as a cutscene or ideally as actual gameplay.
Think about it: you get the player interested with Durandal's insanity, and then a moment of panic when the ship malfunctions. The player gets a timed objective: get your battle armor and open the door to the maneuvering pod, moving in microgravity, before the ship decompresses. The cabin window is positioned such that it's impossible to miss the alien ship warping in. Holy cow, aliens! The player reaches the pod, which ejects, and then has time to watch the Mirata explode spectacularly through a porthole. Cue title card.
I would ~LOVE~ this. When my mind wanders away from "I'm still learning all of this, and some very basic things may be very difficult for me and my boyfriend" and into "This is going to be SO AWESOME" territory, this cut-scene is part of the game.
This is a special case, but I guess it just emphasizes my point, that a remake would ideally capture the feeling of the original, and bring it to life. I might go through one of M1's levels and note the parts I personally think are important to represent in a remake.
I've been watching a Let's Play on Youtube of M1A1, so I can quickly see the content and get the feel for it all again while I'm otherwise occupied at work... and I was having the exact same thoughts. A lot of Marathon's levels and architecture feels very "maze puzzle" and not very "colony ship." Chief on my list of levels that evoke this feeling is - aptly enough -
Colony Ship for Sale : Cheap. If this project goes beyond just
Arrival, that level's getting axed outright. Nothing important happens in the plot, and it's tedious and unrealistically "puzzle-y".
The style in those screenshots strike me as cool, clean, and muted. It's a fine sci-fi look, but it's not Marathon-esque to me. Marathon's textures have more color, often trending towards warmer colors. They have lots of hazard stripes and other markings. The textures aren't smooth; they have lots of grooves and rivets and pitted surfaces. Also the lighting is usually hard, with sharp shadows.
I was less showing those images for any color or texture, and more for simply the geometry... compare the geometry of that hallway, for instance, to the straight vertical walls / floor / ceiling of M1. Obviously I'll be putting more rivits and caution striping to bring it back around to Marathon's style, but if that geometry had Marathon's color palate / grunge / caution striping, would you find it more acceptable?
Things are progressing slowly but surely with the project. Right now I'm working on blocking out the rough geometry for Arrival, as I learn to navigate UE4's map mapker. My boyfriend is working on learning how to integrate his image editing tools to Blender to quickly make UV and texture maps. We're also exploring some software options that will be both affordable and increase our productivity
Okay, hear me out on this... you're looking at a lot of work.
Agreed.
The pragmatist in me anticipates there will be areas of your remake that are hard to create. For instance, you may not have access to the software, talent, and time you need to animate all the enemies.
Disagreed, respectfully. Between Blender, Photoshop, and UE4, we can cover 95% of everything we need, and we're looking into one or two more cheap tools that help with streamlining Normal Maps and texturing. The only thing really stopping us is the talent and knowledge... and I'm reasonably sure we have the talent. That leaves knowledge....
Marathon: Resurrection is a complete remake of Marathon 1 in UE1. I know it's not the same as what you're doing. But it could be a starting point. If you imported the content into UE4, you'd have a working game on which you can build and swap in your own stuff. I suggest you get in touch with Wail of Suicide and ask about using M:R as a starting point for certain parts of your remake.
... which brings me to this point. As enthusiastic as I am about making a really GREAT version of M1 that can stand up as a respectable remake of the original classic, I can't lose scope of the fact that this is a learning project for us, and the only way we're going to learn asset creation, texture creation, modeling, animation, and game environment creation is by DOING it.
We can't make any money off of Marathon. This project is a labor of love, but it won't pay our bills. We would very much like to end up making games that CAN make us money, in the long run, so skipping steps in learning doesn't do either of us any favors. Once we're in a comfortable spot, I'd love to open the project up to collaboration, so we can have the manpower to actually FINISH the game, using the assets / materials / animations we've created. I'd LOVE to see an end result that had cut scenes, multiplayer, voice acting, etc. that compares to many of the big box titles we see nowadays. But we can't lose sight of what this project actually is for us, and if we have the choice between making a major game that can earn us revenue or a game that we cannot legally make a single penny off of, we'll probably opt for the revenue stream.
Once we reach the point where we feel comfortable enough that we can make a GOOD game, and we don't have much more to learn from the project, I'll reach out for help. Until then, this is basically school, and I don't want to cheat on my homework.
