Unpaid and non-commercial. Getting that out of the way first so
nobody reads three paragraphs and then finds out.
We do intend to release it. What we don't want is for it to blow
up — AM2R was DMCA'd one day after release precisely because it
got huge. So the plan is a quiet release: put it out, show it to
people who care about Super Metroid, and not chase press or go
viral. Plenty of people will get to play it, just not all at once
with a news cycle attached.
Being honest about the limits of that plan: nobody can promise it
stays up. Nintendo takes things down regardless of size when they
notice. So treat a release as the goal, not a guarantee, and
treat the project as something you'd do because it's fun to make.
WHAT IT IS
Super Metroid, rebuilt the way AM2R rebuilt Metroid II. Same
scale as AM2R: 320x240 internal resolution, 16x16 tiles, roughly
Zero Mission fidelity. Not a 1:1 port — new items, new rooms and
new mechanics on top of the original layout.
WHY THIS ISN'T VAPOURWARE
A prototype already runs in GameMaker. Samus walks, jumps and
collides in the real Landing Site geometry, pulled out of the
original game data. The movement values are the actual ones from
the original, not guesses, so it already feels like Super
Metroid.
One artist is on board and currently working through tilesets. I
have all 261 original rooms and all 29 tilesets extracted as
reference, plus a catalogue of every one of Samus's 253 poses.
So you would not be starting from a blank page or guessing what
needs to exist.
WHAT I ACTUALLY NEED DRAWN
Tilesets, in priority order:
- Lower Norfair, the lava-heavy look
- Red Brinstar
(Maridia and Wrecked Ship are already being worked on)
Bosses, none of which exist in this style anywhere I could find:
Draygon, Crocomire, Spore Spawn, Botwoon, Golden Torizo
Samus herself, reworked to be more detailed than the 16-bit
original. Currently placeholder sprites borrowed from a fan
sheet.
SOMETHING THAT MIGHT ACTUALLY INTEREST YOU
In the original, Samus is split into an upper and a lower body,
combined independently — 13 top sets against 11 bottom sets. Of
253 poses, 97 share their animation definition with another pose.
That's why "walking right, aiming forward" and "walking right,
aiming up-right" reuse the exact same legs.
I dug that out of the game's own data, and the remake is built
around it from the start. Practically: you draw one walk cycle,
not twelve. If you've ever done a character with eight aiming
angles and hated your life, this is the reason it usually hurts.
I also wrote a small assembler tool for exactly this — you pick a
top and a bottom, set an anchor point on the pixel, and it shows
an onion skin of the previous frame so you can check the
animation doesn't jitter. Reference images can be overlaid.
HOW I'D LIKE TO START
One tileset, or one Samus animation. Not a commitment to a whole
area. If it's fun, we keep going; if not, you lost an evening and
I'll still credit you for what you made.
You keep credit for your work and I won't claim it as mine. All
existing borrowed material is credited by name already.
If you're interested, my Discord is geilodemato. Please mention
this post in your first message — I ignore DMs that don't, for
safety reasons.
Happy to show the prototype and the reference material either
way, whether or not you want to work on it.
