Buyog's Lair

Just an Idea I Had Today

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

So we're mostly moved in here in beautiful northern California, and my new job is going well, thanks for asking. Today, on the drive into the office, I was listening to J.B. Blake's awesome soundtrack he made for DC vs Marvel, and I thought (as I often do when I listen to his awesome album) about how I wish we could actually, y'know, finish the game.

(Trolls, start your engines...)

Yeah, I know. I wish we'd gotten it done a long time ago too, back when the fire and the enthusiasm (and the spare time!) were flowing freely. I can't help that now; what's past is water under the bridge. What I can do, though, is try and find a way forward, and another old idea came back to me:

DC Super Heroes

I'm not sure if I've ever publicly talked about this, or if it was always just a topic of private conversation among my fellow Scruffy Dragons. The idea was this: "Marvel Versus Capcom 3" didn't just spring, fully formed, from Capcom's skunkworks. In fact, even the first MvC was the culmination of many years' effort, and many games: X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men vs Street Fighter, and Marvel vs Street Fighter. Not to mention the Capcom fighters! Yes, there were a few new characters and new mechanics introduced in MvC, but a lot of the content was carried over from previous games. So my thought went, why not do the same with our project? DC vs Marvel was always an audacious plan, and history has proven it to be more elusive than Duke Nukem Forever (a game that I never thought I'd mention on this blog, but there you go) -- why not start smaller? Especially given all of the DC-focused work that myself, my fellow Dragons, and others in the MUGEN community have produced over the years, it's actually pretty surprising that nobody's done this yet.

The original Marvel Super Heroes (hereafter MSH) had 10 playable characters (6 heroes and 4 villains), a sub-boss (Dr. Doom), and a main boss (Thanos). If anyone wanted to do this (I'm not sure anyone ever did), you could re-create that game by:

1. creating a screenpack
2. creating (or getting permission to use other creators' versions) the 12 characters
3. creating 12 stages (one per character)
4. making 10 simple game ending animations (one per playable character)
5. modifying the 12 characters to add support for the Infinity Gems mechanic that's unique to the game

Okay, not exactly the work of a lazy Saturday afternoon, but for some reason, that feels a little more doable to me. A DC analogue might look something like this:

Premise:

storyline loosely based on JLA: Rock of Ages

Playable characters (heroes):

Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, & Plastic Man

Playable characters (villains):

Parasite, Etrigan, Lobo, Mongul

Bosses:

Lex Luthor and Darkseid

What's interesting about this roster is that it's almost all done already. The Flash and Plastic Man betas need to be finished, and Parasite needs to be cleaned up (the version for a closed-roster game like this would naturally only include power sets for the other 11 characters on the roster). That just leaves coming up with a good unifying game mechanic to bring these 12 characters together, making a screenpack, then making sure the characters all have stages & logical endings that fit in with the overarching storyline of the game (Grant Morrison's JLA comic had some good world-shattering story arcs that could work. I like Rock of Ages, and it has the benefit of having the bad guys that already exist for MUGEN: Luthor and Darkseid.

Also -- I remember now -- we actually did talk about this as a team a while ago, and DNGR made a screenpack for us and everything. We even had a video showing it off as part of Scruffyversary that year, and had grand plans. Unfortunately, the team was already kind of semi-retiring at the time, so that never went anywhere.

So am I actually going to do this now? What's different this time?

I don't know. I'd need to get buy-in from the creators of the characters that I didn't make (Magus, Alucard, Loganir, Mambojambo, and Wucash), not all of whom are still around anymore, and not all of whom even seem to like each other much anymore. -_- Plus, I'd need to either make my own screenpack, or use DNGR's. Still seems like a lot of work...

But maybe it's a small enough project that it could be done by one person with a vision.

We'll see.

Labels: DC vs Marvel, Meta