Messages

1

Maps In Progress / Re: eishiya's Maps.

« on: September 08, 2024, 02:00:27 pm »

According to the in-game map, I'm about 2/3 done, but I probably missed some collectibles, I'll have to go smash some more crates and lamps later. Since I prefer to include all the destructibles in my maps, I avoid breaking them normally, and often forget to go back and grab everything after getting my screenshots.

I've reached the fifth area, which has some rooms where every or nearly every part of the screen has a moving sandstorm effect, so it's not possible to get the backgrounds (and in some cases even the foregrounds) from screenshots. To map these, I have to take and arrange the screenshots as normal, and then use them as guides to rebuild the storm-covered layers from the source tiles. Normally I only have to do this to fill in the gaps left by UI where the map doesn't contain other usable instances of those tiles; doing it for the entire map is very time-consuming, especially since the sand effect makes it hard to even make out which tile is meant to be there in some cases.

Here's an example of one such room:

The colours aren't quite a match for the in-game ones since I don't know the colour and blending parameters the game uses, but it gets the idea across, at least.
Bonus, the room without the sandstorm layers:

To place so many tiles in an image editor is too much work, so I did this reconstruction in Tiled (except for the distant background layers and storm effect).
If you spot some weirdly misaligned tiles near the ground: Don't blame me, they're like that in the game xP

Hopefully there won't be many rooms like this, they take ages! I think this room took about four hours. If I didn't have access to the tilesets, I'd have given up here for sure.

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Maps In Progress / Re: eishiya's Maps.

« on: August 25, 2024, 08:30:55 pm »

I don't need help finding a guide, search engines aren't *that* bad yet xP If I ever feel like replaying Magical Starsign, I'll find it. The problem is that I probably won't be playing it again in the near future.

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Maps In Progress / Re: eishiya's Maps.

« on: August 25, 2024, 04:41:17 pm »

I'm not sure I should be responding since your post sounds rather bot-like, but just in case you're a person: I uploaded the larger images to a different host because they were too large for Imgur, but that host died. I still have the originals.

I never finished the maps - I would need to replay the game with a guide to get the secret treasure chests (and to know which chests are secret and which are always there), and I just don't like the game enough for that ): If you'd like, you could do that, and post screenshots of the secret chests' exact locations and contents, and I could incorporate them into the map.

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Maps In Progress / Re: eishiya's Maps.

« on: August 24, 2024, 04:36:33 pm »

Started mapping The Mummy Demastered. I'm doing the unwise thing and grabbing screenshots on my first playthrough.

Progress is slow as I'm busy with other things, but progress is progress.

Intro area (I died there ._.)

First area

I didn't bother polishing up the final room of the intro area, I'm hoping that perhaps we'll get to come back there so I can get more/better screenshots. If not, it's right at the start, I can get it on the next go.
I was able to grab the tilesheets from the game files, which helps with the parallax layers and reconstructing HUD-obscured bits a lot, but unfortunately the game does a lot of in-engine tinting and blending that I can't accurately reproduce, so there's been a lot of manual recolouring to match the screenshots, and with the fog I've been mostly not bothering to get it game-accurate. In addition to all the in-game recolouring, there are also a lot of glow effects on platforms and such that complicate things. The universe decided Blasphemous wasn't enough of a challenge to map, apparently.

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Maps In Progress / Re: eishiya's Maps.

« on: September 21, 2023, 09:17:57 am »

All the non-NG+ stuff is done\o/ Maps updated, labels verified, area transition labels added. Just the NG+ parts left now. As far as I can tell, it's just three areas: top of the Ferrous Tree, behind the rosary spirit, and Petrous interior, and that one is through a door, so I probably don't even need to map it.

Unfortunately all the Blaspheming has taken a toll on my hands (I did the true ending on my NG run to screenshot the relevant item locations, had to fight a few tough bosses), so I should take a few days to rest before I continue on to grab the NG+ areas. Bleh, I want to get this done!

Edit: The rocks behind the rosary spirit are apparently decorative. The interior of Petrous is indeed one room behind a door, so I won't be mapping it. This means I only need to map the Ferrous Tree area, but I'm not sure it's worth the trouble to map it, as it's not so much an area as a boss arena with a save point attached. Thoughts? I've started adding the NG+ content (Jibrael and Amanecida locations) to the map, but maybe I should remove those and keep the map strictly non-NG+ so as not to distract from the main part of the game.

Edit 2: Done and submitted! Ended up including the NG+ stuff.

Edit 3: And they're up! https://vgmaps.com/Atlas/PC/index.htm#Blasphemous

6

Maps In Progress / Re: eishiya's Maps.

« on: September 18, 2023, 11:12:42 am »

Same! The difficulty is rather inconsistent.
The main reason I map games is so I can have a way to look at the pretties without having to play the game again.


Progress update: Doing my New Game playthrough now to check/update all the item locations, I've just finished the first half of the game and crossed the Bridge. Doing my best to do the new ending route, which I hope/fear will reveal some new rooms to map. Playing the game almost normally has been more enjoyable than I anticipated!
Apparently the dried flowers from Gemino's quest no longer spawn in the Convent, so I guess you have to get his quest done "in time" to get those directly from him. I'll have to give it a look in NG+ and update my map accordingly. For now I've just removed the dried flowers item location.

Have another teaser, the updated Wasteland of the Buried Churches:

This one isn't as drastically different as some of the others, but still needed to be redone almost entirely because so many different bits were touched up. I also accidentally forgot to screenshot two of the upright logs on my new game run, but fortunately Blinkey from my Discord server saved the day by screenshotting them for me.
I've been adding labels for the different area transitions, similar to the ones on my Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight maps, I think they help. Also similar to my Momo maps, I'm adding the shop contents.

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Maps In Progress / Re: eishiya's Maps.

« on: September 15, 2023, 10:02:00 pm »

Update on the Blasphemous remap: I've got the first pass maps done. However, as some content is locked behind NG+, and since I need a plain new game to double-check all the items, it'll require two more playthroughs (well, more like 1.5 - I don't have to 100% or even finish NG+) to finish the maps, not just one. This is going to take time.

Before I tackle that, I've been detouring and mapping the Miriam challenge rooms. I have three of the five done. I'm not actually sure they're worth mapping, considering that they're isolated rooms and just how miserable the process is. I guess since regular platformers have single-level maps, these sort of make sense to include. Here's one I did today:

If it wasn't for the developer console mod, I'd not even entertain the idea of doing these. Dying in these timed challenges while invincible stops the timer, so at least I don't have to start over every 1-2 minutes or every time I have to jump into spikes to screenshot a distant corner.

Edit: I've given up on doing the Miriam rooms. I did the first four and hated them, but the fifth broke me completely. I mapped up to the big fireball descent (like 3 mini-rooms away from the end?), but then then the game decided it was done being nice, and invincible mode now makes spike deaths lock the game, and I simply do not have the patience to map this room if I have to redo the entire thing for every 3rd screenshot (I don't even want to play it normally, nevermind mapping it). I considered reconstructing it based on videos, but those don't visit every part of the room, and it's just not worth the effort IMO.

Edit2: Blinkey finished the fifth challenge room map for me I've incorporated their map into mine and submitted the set.

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Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: Annotating screenshot maps

« on: September 12, 2023, 07:06:28 am »

Every game is different and calls for different annotation approaches, so just like there isn't a program for mapping most games automatically, there isn't one for annotating them. It's theoretically possible to write such programs on a per-game (or, in some cases, per-engine) basis, but generally it's easier and faster to do it manually.

The manual process is generally to screenshot items/NPCs/etc in situ and add them to the map, typically using the same image editor you used to arrange the map. Some people type out their labels (item names, shops, etc) themselves, but I generally screenshot them from the game, it looks nice and is usually quick to do. I usually keep all this stuff on separate layers, so I can make unlabeled maps easily by hiding those annotation layers.
If you're using an emulator for your screenshots, you may be able to avoid the need to manually remove the backgrounds from the item/etc sprites by using the emulator's VRAM viewer to view the sprites and backgrounds in isolation from one another.

For door and button connections in games where it's not obvious from the map you'll generally want to add some lines showing the connections. The style of these will depend greatly on what you're trying to communicate, and the game's structure and visual style. For example, compare VGCartography's tidy connectors on Vagrant Story, to the letter indicators on this Magical Starshine map (which I apparently never submitted to VGMaps, oops), or to the chaos of my Casper maps. For Casper, I initially roughly hand-drew the connections in different colours as I mapped, and as I finalised the map, I replaced them with vector paths that I applied different brush strokes to.

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Map Requests / Re: SNES Bishōjo Senshi Sailor Moon: Another Story Maps

« on: September 11, 2023, 01:24:20 pm »

The game has already been mapped here: https://fantasyanime.com/sailor-moon-rpg/maps

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Maps In Progress / Re: eishiya's Maps.

« on: September 10, 2023, 08:18:45 am »

It's a nightmare scenario for me too. Of course it happened to the biggest and most difficult game I've mapped =_=
Fortunately, some of the areas have had only minor changes (e.g. highlights added to the edges of platforms), those don't require a lot of work and make for a nice respite from the difficult areas. Blasphemous has rays of light from most doors and some ceiling holes and those are hard to reconstruct because the game blends them differently from how my image editor does it, so I have to try to get clean screenshots of those and align the parallax backgrounds to those screenshots somehow. In some cases, getting clean screenshots is impossible because of the HUD* :/

I've also decided to add the various projectile environmental hazards to the maps instead of leaving them out, I think they form part of the identity of those rooms.
I'm also wondering if I should include the enemies that control other hazards (the Cistern bell-ringers that summon exploding lads, the Convent cauldron chain-pullers) - they're not so important for each room's identity, but it's useful to know where the are. On the other hand: it's more spoilery, and I don't want to include enemies in general.

The part I'm looking forward to the least is replaying the entire game from the beginning to screenshot the items and locked gates; I'm currently mapping on my old save, which has everything collected and all the gates open. I'm terrible at Blasphemous, some of the bosses are bullshit, and I doubt they made them any easier.

* ...I just did some googling and apparently it's possible to enable a developer console with a mod and turn off the HUD. If I can manage to get that to work, that would save me so much work! Thanks for accidentally causing me to look this up.
Edit: It works! This is great.

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Maps In Progress / Re: eishiya's Maps.

« on: September 08, 2023, 10:52:57 pm »

Just a heads up: I'm working on updating the Blasphemous maps to incorporate the new art and areas that were added in updates. Even for areas with only minor art updates, this often means remapping the entire area, and many areas were updated quite significantly, so this might take a while.

For example, here's a room from Mercy Dreams in the current map (featuring some leggies I apparently neglected to remove):


And this is what it looks like now:


I am about 1/3 done with the raw maps, but I'll need to double-check all the item, cherub, etc locations after I'm done, as those may also have changed. I know at least some have been shifted over a little to accommodate room layout changes.

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Maps Of The Month / Re: 2022/11: God Of War (PS2) - VGCartography

« on: November 13, 2022, 07:20:57 am »

You did a great job, not just with capturing the levels, but with presenting them clearly - not an easy task for a 3D game like this.

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Map Requests / Re: I'm not gonna finish Metal Gear Solid (GBC)

« on: July 24, 2022, 06:54:03 pm »

Oh, it didn't even occur to me to check whether you were still working on this game, I don't know why I just assumed you weren't working on them anymore, oops! Looks like it worked out though.

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Maps Of The Month / Re: 2022/02: Barbie: Magic Genie Adventure (GBC) - Eishiya

« on: February 15, 2022, 01:36:31 pm »

Never expected my maps of this dinky Barbie game to get any attention. Thank you!

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Maps In Progress / Re: eishiya's Maps.

« on: January 04, 2021, 09:57:17 am »

During the last few months, I mapped Barbie: Magic Genie Adventure and Momodora 0: Day of Birth (fangame), both for Gameboy Color.

I didn't mean to go on a GBC spree, but at a friend's request, I'm now mapping Metal Gear: Ghost Babel, aka Metal Gear Solid for the GBC. The first two stages (of 13) were previously mapped by Marscaleb, but I've started over from scratch so that all my maps can be consistent with each other, though I took some layout pointers from their maps, and I'm probably going to make seamless unlabelled versions similar to theirs.

Current progress: DONE and posted!

Here's a sample, stages 3 and 4:


These two stages share a building, but some bits inaccessible in stage 3 are accessible in stage 4 and vice versa, hence the slight differences.

Since I'm making the first-pass maps using the Stage Select mode, the pick-ups are currently labelled according to Normal difficulty. I hope to go through and check the pick-ups on other difficulties after I've finished the Normal maps, and then based on what kinds of differences there are, I'll decide whether to make different versions of the maps for different difficulties, or whether to include everything in one map and indicate on the labels which difficulties have which pick-ups. I'm going through all the difficulties to check the pick-ups now. The difficulty-restricted items will have a difficulty level indicator in their labels indicating which difficulties they can be found on.

I will not be mapping the VR missions or the special versions of the stages, I'm not that into this game xP