I've finished up screenshot maps for the Genesis game Sub-Terrania:
I got into this from correspondence with the illustrious speedrunner Mike Uyama, who is practicing for a speedrun/speedrun marathon of this game along with Revenge of Shinobi.
Sub-Terrania, released in 1993 by Euro-American developer Zyrinx, is sort of a 2D flight sim in close quarters. It's divided into nine or ten missions with objectives ranging from rescuing miners to boss-killing to simply reaching an exit. If it sounds like 1994's much more famous Descent, there's one problem: Sub-Terrania is a miserable game, thanks to poor controls and generally hateful design. This kind of thing could work with a flight stick and throttle, or a mouse and keyboard, but fails pretty hard with the Megadrive's primitive gamepad.
Much of the player's effort is spent just worrying about fuel and fighting gravity, which is even worse while towing something and gets stronger on mission 7. The actual enemies are relatively impotent compared to the biggest threat: walls. While walls can easily bump the ship off course and damage the shields, just grazing at the wrong angle can unexpectedly trap and kill you. The game is just "so good". It also doesn't help that you can only see less than a screen's distance in front of you.
Sub-Terrania was about as much fun to map as it is to play. The camera is difficult to manipulate directly and is constantly trying to move, even if you place the ship in the middle of the camera's view. If the ship is placed in the edge of a wall the camera freaks out even more, and the ship quickly dies—even before the shield can be drained. I was planning on placing all enemies at their initial positions and orientations after the stage loads, but they don't all get drawn on the same frame, and apparently have some time to react to the player's position before they get drawn, so that idea didn't work out. I used this Lua script (local copy) to help control the camera but in the end it was only marginally useful.
I used paint.NET as my primary tool for pixel-pushing and Imagemagick for simple operations like appending and resizing. The latest paint requires SP3 with XP. Since I'm using XP x64, which doesn't have an SP3 (and isn't even XP, really) I had to dig up an old version. It still requires the hugenormous Microsoft .NET 3.5 library to install though.
There are several pickups hidden behind destroyable stuff, such as the horizontal deflector behind the junk in stage 3. These objects are hard to see, so I inserted a layer with radial gradient transparency between the foreground and the objects to make them stand out. Similarly, destroyable walls like the one blocking the objective in mission 2 are overlaid with a semitransparent pastel layer for visibility.
Thanks to Gens's layer control I was able to filter out unwanted graphics like the HUD and the ship sprite relatively easily, but the non-interactive foreground objects, like the flowers in mission 7-9, share the same layer as the HUD and had to be manually added.
The biggest trouble was the backgrounds. 2D games with parallax scrolling have a fast-moving foreground and one or more slower backgrounds. Captured separately, and spanning from one end of a stage to another, the foreground layer is naturally going to be bigger than the background, pixelwise. A map has to have all the layers the same size, so this usually entails appending multiple units of the background in order to make up the difference in size with the foreground.
The thing with Sub-Terrania is, the backgrounds don't wrap nicely. Appending the units horizontally or vertically leaves jarring seams. In fact, there's no discernible pattern even within the background units. To make things look nice I had to get creative. Missions 4-6 looked OK by just tiling normally and removing some bits at the edge. I kind of staggered the tiling for missions 1-3 and 7-9, copying units sort of diagonally, and pasting in snippets from other parts of the BG to fill out the rest. The Svin stage was handled similarly but the background peters out before reaching the boss, so the tiling had to be finite.
Missions 7-9 were made more difficult by the water. Underwater, the palette changes from green to red and there's this horizontal wavy effect that makes it hard to get a consistent capture of a given section. Plus, the water level crests and troughs, and there's a strip at the surface that has yet another palette. The thickness of the strip increases as the camera moves farther from the surface, and its color depends on if the camera is above or below—this was intended to simulate the effect of seeing the air/water interface at an angle rather than in cross section.
First thing that had to happen was getting rid of the water so I could capture without the waviness. I found out how to force the water level below the bottom of the stage for this. Then I decided on an arbitrary thickness for the surface strip for each stage and placed it where the rocks change color. The palette within and below the strip could then be easily changed to match the in-game colors with the magic wand tool.
Something I did differently for this set of maps is place them under the "Attribution-NoDerivs" Creative Commons license. I never did feel comfortable putting "(c)" in works that I create from other people's IP, even though I am legally entitled. This way is less hostile to users downstream while protecting my modest interests in the work.
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