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Messages - eishiya

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1
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

2
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 :D 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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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

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Maps In Progress / Re: eishiya's Maps.
« on: July 10, 2020, 05:00:58 pm »
@JonLeung: I saw! I'm really glad they saw and liked it!

...I'm honestly curious to see that full-game single map now :o. Maybe you could share a download link?
Sadly I didn't keep the arranged file since it was big and useless, sorry D: IIRC, it was mainly that Mercy Dreams had a lot of overlaps with surrounding areas, and minor misalignments elsewhere.

----
I haven't been working on any maps recently because I've been working on my own game! Maybe one day someone will want to map it ;D

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Maps Of The Month / Re: 2020/02: Sonic Advance (GBA) - TerraEsperZ
« on: February 12, 2020, 10:08:20 pm »
Thanks for sharing a bit about the process! I don't think I'd even tackle a map like this precisely because of the difficulty of capturing everything in its proper state, it's awesome that you found a way to make it doable, even if it's still not easy.

One is definitely better than nothing!

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Maps In Progress / Re: eishiya's Maps. Current WIP: Blasphemous
« on: February 07, 2020, 12:11:45 pm »
Progress update: Finished the raw maps (except for one missable bit) \o/

The next step is to arrange the area maps into one giant file to make sure things more or less connect (the rooms in this game do not connect cleanly), and then replay the game from the beginning to screenshot all the item locations and the missable area. Here's hoping my PC can handle a file that big.

Edit: No browser I tried could open the full-game PNG (c. 55k x 18k pixels) so I won't bother making that, I'll just make per-area maps.

Feb 11 edit: Done and submitted!

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Maps Of The Month / Re: 2020/02: Sonic Advance (GBA) - TerraEsperZ
« on: February 07, 2020, 11:49:04 am »
I love how polished these maps look! TerraEsperZ always does a good job filling in the inaccessible parts of maps.

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