Lately I haven’t had much time, and on top of that the new features are full of bugs, so everything’s taking way longer than I expected. Even though it’s just two screenshots, let me give a quick update on what I’m working on right now.
First off, as the preview, Mega Man now has the Rush Adaptor from Mega Man 6, letting him transform on the fly to boost either firepower or mobility. The Power form will probably be a bit more flexible to output damage than in the original game (it’ll improve guard break and impact values, but I still need to tweak it). There’s also going to be a Jet form you can switch into instantly too (no screenshot yet because it’s still bug city and not fixed…).
As for X… yeah… there’s just way too much left to do. The armor alone takes a ton of time to draw and implement, so for now I’ll have him stay in his base form for a while. But I still rushed a small feature in the second screenshot just to make testing easier.
Zero is in a similar situation—his to-do list is insanely long (just thinking about it makes me feel lazy already…). I’ll probably start implementing his core features after I finish Spark Mandrill. His special moves alone take a huge amount of time just for the animations, and the code has to be carefully synced with the frame data to work properly.
Proto Man has been completely reworked system-wise. In the previous version, I made him work like the Ultimate Buster in Mega Man X5/X6—fire once and wait for cooldown—but that ended up being pretty boring. Now he has a weapon energy gauge: each shot consumes some energy, but you can also spam shots and drain it completely. The energy recovers over time, and there’s a secondary attack button that fires normal uncharged buster—hitting enemies with those speeds up the recovery (it probably sounds complicated, I’ll upload a video once the Jet form is fixed).
Bass already has his basic functionality done (dash and double jump like in Mega Man & Bass). Just like Mega Man, he’s planned to have a fusion ability with Treble, but progress on that is still at zero… I didn’t expect the Rush Adaptor to take so much time.
There are actually a lot more characters from other Capcom games on my to-do list, like Leon S. Kennedy from Resident Evil, Arthur from Ghosts 'n Goblins, and Ryu from Street Fighter. I also have some custom mechanics planned specifically for Mega Man (I’ll explain those in detail once the visuals are ready). But yeah… the to-do list is just massive, and on top of that I still need to build stages and refactor code. Right now I can only hope to wrap up Spark Mandrill and deal with some urgent issues as quickly as possible.
Lastly, here’s a small preview video of X’s latest update—hope you enjoy it!
https://youtu.be/Tkg789zM_tQ?si=xU9IYdeHUmML_6Mk