THE MAKING OF METROID DREAD
I decided to write a bit about the making of
Metroid Dread, the April Fools' Day joke for
VGMaps.com this year. For those of you who may be unfamiliar, my site hosts a number of
video
game
maps, most of them being
screenshot maps, i.e. maps constructed from actual in-game graphics. Every month, a well-made and complete map set from a particular game is chosen to be featured as the "
Maps Of The Month". However, as an April Fools' joke, April's
Maps Of The Month features a complete map set of a
non-existent game, meant to confuse and amuse fellow gamers. This year's joke is a map set of the (still?) non-existent
Metroid Dread.
See the joke
HERE.
(I will mention the jokes for the previous four years at the end of this article.)
Basically, "
Metroid Dread" is the supposed name of a often-rumoured DS game in Nintendo's
Metroid series. Despite rumours that have continued on since as early as June 2005, Nintendo has denied its existence. For whatever reason, the rumour hasn't died, and each year, fans expect to see
Metroid Dread unveiled at video game trade shows such as E3. Fuel was certainly added to the fire with a "clue" in the 2007 Wii game
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption that reads "
Experiment status report update. Metroid project "Dread" is nearing the final stages of completion." Retro Studios has officially stated that this was a coincidence and denied that this refers to a
Metroid Dread game, but this hasn't stopped
Metroid fans from continuing to speculate. Since "
Metroid Dread" has become rather infamous despite not actually existing, it became a viable for a joke. (As it turns out, a rather elaborate joke, probably between 250-300 hours in the making!)
[img width= height=]http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/491/photo1e.jpg[/img]
On May 16, 2008, a hidden topic on the
VGMaps.com forums was made, with which only a few selected regulars had access to, and the brainstorming process began for what the 2009 April Fools' joke should be. A user by the name of
marioman made the first suggestion, which was for maps of
Metroid Dread. A few other suggestions followed, but to me, the idea of
Metroid Dread always seemed to be the most enticing, due to the infamy it had garnered over the years. The problem was that, at the time, we did not yet have maps of
Super Metroid (Super NES),
Metroid Fusion (GBA), or
Metroid: Zero Mission (GBA). Considering that it was believed
Metroid Dread would be in the classic 2D style and on the DS, it was likely that it should somewhat resemble any or all of those particular
Metroid games. If only we had maps of them, we could, as I have described in simple terms, "cut them up into little pieces, recolour or modify them, and
Frankenstein them back together into another game."
On June 7, 2008, mappers named
rocktyt and
zerofighter contributed full map sets of
Metroid Fusion and
Metroid: Zero Mission, further increasing the likeliness that a believable
Metroid Dread might be possible. Eventually it was clear that this was the project to do. But we all knew it wouldn't be easy. For the sake of consistency, only one person would work on it, and as I profit the most from such a venture, and like three of the past four April Fools' jokes, it would all come down to me. Which was fine, as I wanted to do it, but it was by no means going to be a walk in the park.
On December 1, 2008, it was time to get serious, seeing as how there were only four months to go. I played around with the title logo of
Metroid Fusion (and despite an extremely minor touch-up done on the final day) I pretty much had the
Metroid Dread logo done by the second day. A title is typically a good place to start, with the story being the logical next step, however, I didn't actually have a story at this point. Considering the colour scheme I used in the recolouring of the
Fusion title to make the
Dread title, I figured it would mean a return of the eponymous Metroids. But I figured I would work out the story details as I go.
[img width= height=]http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/2961/photo2qh.jpg[/img]
Before I bore anyone with the specific details of the individual areas, I'd like to at least show you the general construction process. Here's an animation showing an area being constructed from start to finish:
[img width= height=]http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/880/erisspacecolonyconstruc.gif[/img]
What I stared at for most of those four months were essentially bright green squares against a pink background. The construction consisted of two phases per area, which I called the "tiling phase" and the "texturing phase".
The
tiling phase was where I laid out "rooms" (which were rectangles of pink empty space bordered with green tiles) and then hand-placed individual green tiles to fill each room. Since I was making this all up as I went, there was no real overall design I meant to follow. Sometimes I stared at the green-and-pink canvas, contemplating what sorts of obstacles would have to be placed, and what would be feasible keeping in mind what equipment Samus should have, especially upon the first time she would be in that room. Considering the "retraversal" gameplay of the series, where Samus's exploration is limited by the tools she has on hand, and the obtaining of new items meant being able to access new areas, even from previously visited ones, I was constantly thinking about the expected route she would have to take if this was a real game that was meant to be played. It just wouldn't be believable otherwise. By the end of the tiling phase, I would have a green-tiled maze, that structurally, but not visually, resembled cavern tunnels.
[img width= height=]https://img43.imageshack.us/img43/2599/photo3vp.jpg[/img]
The
texturing phase involved taking tiles from the other
Metroid games, recolouring and/or modifying them (or sometimes not), and then placing the tiles, often by hand, on top of all the green squares. Occasionally, perhaps due to the nature of the tileset I was using, curves, slopes and corners might not look right, or I would just encounter other oddities, so I would have to tweak the "blueprint" along the way. (Texturing certainly required a different thought process than the initial tiling; I had to select a good tileset, colour it correctly, and fit it properly. If tiling is about function/shape, then texturing is about fashion/style, in a way.) Texturing sometimes took a long time; even after preparing the tiles to use, it would still take a long time to manually hand-place every tile, since there was considerable variety unlike the tiling phase which only dealt with underlying green tiles. In some areas, under the floor or above the ceiling, there would be random tiles, and though they were chosen and placed by hand in the first two areas, I would use the method suggested by user
Maxim, to make an image with random noise, then reduce the number of colours to the number of tiles I wanted in the random pool, and then I would increase the image by 16 times in both height and width, and then use the Tile Slicer/Splicer program created by
Revned to replace the tiles with the chosen tileset. (Revned's Slicer/Splicer comes in handy as a tile replacer, which was actually created in response to the
first April Fools' joke, after he learned I did the tile replacement solely by hand.) Anyway, at the end of the texturing phase, I would have something that more resembled a Metroidish area, just without a real background.
[img width= height=]http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/2995/photo4nl.jpg[/img]
For whatever reason I didn't really set aside individual "
background phases" as I worked through the areas roughly chronologically, but instead left it all for the end - like the last weekend of March. I figured that shouldn't take too long - it did take a while but not as long as the tiling or texturing phases by far. I made copies of each of the fully textured areas with reduced palettes, then pasted the extracted and recoloured backgrounds from the GBA
Metroid games directly on top. What I ended up with was an image of just a bunch of backgrounds, which looks rather disjointed when the room boundaries disappear.
[img width= height=]https://img43.imageshack.us/img43/4734/photo5de.jpg[/img]
When everything was finalized, I would take the foreground, copy it (excluding the pink colour which signified empty space), then paste it on top of the background. The later areas had either water or lava so a third layer of half-transparent water or lava tiles was then pasted on top of that. Oddly, I used Paint Shop Pro for most of the tiling and texturing phases, then I used GIMP to copy and paste the foreground, then I used Photoshop to copy and paste the semi-transparent water and lava.
[img width= height=]http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/2561/photo6g.jpg[/img]
As you can see, with seven areas totalling 789 rooms, all that tiling and texturing would be a lot of work. When it got toward the end of January, and I only had the first two areas done, I knew I had to pick up the pace, so I made this schedule. (And yes, I know I spelled "February" incorrectly...)
[img width= height=]https://img215.imageshack.us/img215/628/photo7q.jpg[/img]
Since the first area, the "Eris Space Colony", wasn't meant to be revisitable in my vision of the game, I referred to it as "Area 0". So when I started trying to follow this timetable, I was working on Area 2, which was really the third area. So as you can see, I intended it to go up to eight areas, but that didn't last very long as I didn't see any point in one-upping
Super Metroid's seven. But I intended to stick to the schedule since I figured I could use the ten days allocated for Area 7 to instead be catch-up days or to have more time for the final touches. With only five days for each tiling or texturing phase, I soon fell behind more and more, so it became more of a reminder to work harder than the actually rigid timetable it originally meant to be. I also made this image hung up near my computer, which you might get a kick out of:
[img width= height=]http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/593/photo8ra.jpg[/img]
So yes, it required quite some dedication. I hope that whether you "get" the joke or not, that you can see the effort involved in it.
And now for the individual areas' details - this will either be the least interesting or the most interesting part, depending on your familiarity with
Metroid or games in general. (Most of you non-gamers should maybe just skip down to the "Past April Fools' Jokes" or "Special Thanks To" section.)
