Changes from Mega Man1 (3) (Patreon)

The Shorter Screen Layouts of the Early Stages

In order to make the most of Mega Man's unique game system, I needed to reconsider the structure of each stage. In Mega Man1, I became too focused on the number of screens because I was thinking more about play time than about the actual stage structure.

Of course, the target clear time was still about one hour, but what was important was how the player would play within that limited number of screens. The clue to this came from the discovery that “holding your breath makes you sweat.”

When I tried playing while holding my breath, it was more difficult than I had expected, and I could no longer concentrate. If you keep holding your breath, you cannot even concentrate on operating the game.

In reality, it happens intermittently. You hold your breath for a moment when avoiding a bullet, or when moving through a narrow passage. I was surprised again when I realized that I had been doing this unconsciously.

I thought that this limit of concentration caused by “holding your breath” could be used to determine the scale (distance) of the gimmicks placed in each stage.

The reason was that the thing that felt most strange to me about Mega Man1 was the gameplay within the stages. The method of creating various rises and falls in the platforms and then placing enemies there followed the traditional form of side-scrolling action games. However, Mega Man had a greatly increased number of health points, making it harder for the player to get knocked out, and he had also become a very powerful player character who could switch between multiple weapons on the spot. Therefore, with the traditional stage structure, there was not enough tension, and the stages inevitably felt somewhat slow.

In Mega Man2, two more selectable stages were added to the first half. Since the total number of screens was the same as in Mega Man1, the number of screens in each stage became smaller. You could also say that this was the number of screens that had originally been intended.

I decided to set one particularly difficult section in each of those stages. This was based on the new way of thinking about stage structure that I mentioned earlier.

The new concept for the stages was:

The stage itself should be interesting.

It should never be too easy.

The player should be able to reach the boss without unpleasant stress.

The player should want to challenge it again and again.

In addition, I established a common policy:

One stage, one gimmick, one try.

In order to achieve this difficulty level, where the game is difficult but makes the player want to try again and again, the length (distance) of one gimmick (one type of difficult section) was important. If it was too short, it became easy. On the other hand, even if it was interesting, making it too long would make it too difficult and cause the player (user) to give up.

That was where “holding your breath,” which gave us an approximate measure of the limit of concentration, became useful. I thought that if I matched the length of time a player could concentrate in this way with the distance of a difficult section, the player might be able to challenge it repeatedly without losing concentration, even after getting knocked out.

So, how long should that distance be?

People have different playing styles and different levels of technique when playing games. However, I thought that the limit of “holding your breath” would be roughly the same for everyone, so the limit of concentration should not change much depending on whether someone was good or bad at games.

So, with a stopwatch in one hand, I stood next to people playing test games inside the company. I measured the time from the point where I thought a difficult section began until they either got through it or got knocked out. As expected, although there were some differences, the times were roughly the same.

When I returned to my desk, I calculated the distance of the difficult section by matching this limit of concentration with Mega Man's running speed. The result was three screens.

This meant that a difficult gimmick or a continuous enemy attack reached its limit at three screens. It felt much shorter than I had expected.

In this way, the settings for the gimmicks and enemy placements were decided for all the stages. One gimmick, or one type of continuous attack, was basically set to three screens.

Actually, I conducted this research during the development of Mega Man1. I am explaining the events in a more organized order here to make them easier to understand, but I had already been feeling something strange about the stages from around the latter half of Mega Man1's development, and it was also around that time that I came up with the answer.

Because of our lack of experience in game development, the limited development time, and the data capacity, we could not realize this in Mega Man1. But I considered it an essential requirement for Mega Man2.

You can easily see this form in Mega Man2. The section in the Air Man stage where you move across the cloud platforms while defeating the enemies on them (Kaminari Goro), and the final difficult section of the disappearing platforms in the Heat Man stage, are all constructed using three screens.

The same applies to other places where the same enemy appears continuously. This setting was used in various parts of the game.

This three-screen setting was also used for the energy setting of Item 2. Since Item 2 can move horizontally, it can be used to get through difficult sections. Therefore, its usable time (energy amount) was set to the equivalent of three screens.

Because of this, Item 2 gives the impression of being a useful item that can be used in any scene.

The early stages of Mega Man2 were made extremely short. This was not done to make them easy. They were designed this way so that the difficult sections could be set right at the limit, with the goal of creating stages that were difficult but made the player want to try them one more time.

Stage Image Colors and Their Promotional Effect

The backgrounds in Mega Man1 used a unique combination of colors. As I mentioned before, this was because simple gradients made the screen look cheap and ordinary. In Trojan, I used different shades of brown to create the ground and walls, and a gradient of different shades of gray to represent iron. It looked very plain and ordinary.

So, in Mega Man1, instead of creating gradients with different shades of color, I created them with different levels of brightness. I used dark blue or red as shadows against light gray, creating unique backgrounds. This background graphics also became one of the characteristics of Mega Man1. However, I had another idea for the backgrounds in Mega Man2, and returned this unique color arrangement to the original, simple color gradients.

This was triggered by photographs of the game screens that appeared in game magazines before the release of Mega Man1. The background graphics made with various colors were distinctive, but they did not have individuality. Even though several screens from various stages were shown, they all gave more or less the same impression.

At a glance, it was difficult to tell what kind of stage it was or what kind of image it was supposed to have. However, the number of advertisements and articles was limited. For me, who had worked in advertising, it was extremely frustrating that I could not make effective use of those few opportunities to appeal to people.

Therefore, in Mega Man2, I gave each stage its own image color in order to make each stage distinctive. This was only possible because F-kun, who was in charge of the backgrounds (development name: YASUKICHI), had enough ability to overcome the cheap-looking impression. His pixel-art skills had improved considerably. He was not only creating differences through color, but also creating distinctive images through the way the individual pixels themselves were placed.

You may think that I was changing the image of the game just for advertising purposes, but in order to make the most of the capabilities of an 8-bit machine and make the game look beautiful, it was more rational and realistic to work on the colors and pixels rather than trying to develop the character designs in greater detail.

The screen photographs published in game magazines each had clearly different colors. The Famicom images were too unclear to tell exactly what each stage was like, but I think they were still able to express that various distinctive stages were waiting for the player.

Think of the stage colors in Mega Man2. What about the red stage? The light-blue stage? The green stage? You can immediately picture them in your head, can't you?

It is not as if those stages use only those colors. However, the stages are definitely differentiated by color. This is also one of the factors that improved the product quality of Mega Man2.

Creating the Willow Scenario

Although the development process was very short, we had somehow managed to get this far without running into any major problems. However, another project, Willow, was slowly beginning to stagnate. Although we were working on both projects in parallel, the Willow team's staff had reached a point where they could no longer proceed because I was busy with the programming and graphics specifications for Mega Man2.

It finally became necessary for me to seriously start writing the scenario. There was still a huge amount of work left to do on Mega Man2, but since I had strictly determined the development process day by day and hour by hour, it seemed that things would work out as long as I simply followed the schedule.

I had to fit the Willow work into this schedule, but no matter how I looked at it, there was not enough time. Even so, after thinking about it, I decided to write the Willow scenario while giving instructions for the programming and graphics during normal working hours, and then create the Mega Man2 specification and instruction documents after working hours and into the night, so that the team could work on them the following day.

Until then, there had been times when I stayed overnight at work without planning to do so, but from this point on, staying overnight became part of the schedule.

The reason Willow was assigned to the daytime and Mega Man2 to the nighttime was that for the Mega Man2 specifications or instruction documents, I only needed to finish the work for the following day's tasks. They mainly consisted of specifications for things such as one enemy or one type of gimmick, something that could be completed by the programmers in one day. As long as the graphics team had the character specifications for one day's work, their work would not stop either.

But Willow was the first scenario-writing job I had ever done. I had no experience, so I did not know how to divide the work or how long each part of the process would take. Therefore, if I started this endless task at night, knowing my personality, there was a danger that I would keep working even if it meant cutting into my sleeping time. I wanted to make sure that I got at least some sleep, and I wanted to avoid working through the entire night because I was thinking about what would happen later.

At that time, all documents that had to be submitted were handwritten. So I also wrote the scenario on paper with a pencil. However, this was extremely inefficient. Episodes that came to mind and additional scenarios that I wanted to insert somewhere in the middle ended up being written on separate sheets of paper and piling up all over my desk.

Even if I started writing straight through from the beginning, I would soon think of a new scenario to insert somewhere in the middle, and every time that happened I had to rewrite everything from the beginning. At first, this situation continued and I was completely at a loss.

Then I remembered that my parents' home had one of the word processors that had just started appearing at the time, so I borrowed it and brought it to the company.

It was a NEC Bungo MINI7, a huge machine with a form that came before notebook computers. Even when placed on my desk, it was very difficult to handle because of its considerable depth. But it was incredibly capable and solved almost all of the difficult problems I had been struggling with when writing by hand. I could freely insert and rearrange sentences. Things that are taken for granted with computers today felt like a dream in terms of convenience at that time.

With this, I came to believe that even poorly written sentences could become something worthwhile if I kept writing enough of them. I was finally able to continue writing, repeatedly writing and deleting things as I went along.

And before I knew it, the working day was over.

The Mega Man team went home at the regular time every day. In reality, our development process was much shorter than that of any other team, yet the game was taking shape day by day. This surprised M.K.-kun, a planner who had joined the company at the same time as me and was working in the booth next to mine.

But in reality, it was like a water bird gracefully moving across the surface of the water while frantically paddling its feet underneath at incredible speed.

My heart was constantly under tension. If even one thing went wrong, the entire schedule would fall apart. Failure was absolutely not allowed.

There was one important factor that made this seemingly impossible development possible.

It was a rule that I imposed on myself: once something had been decided, I would not change it.

After carefully planning everything, anticipating various situations and deciding on the development process, all that remained was to execute it. No matter what happened, unless something extremely serious occurred, I did not rewrite the schedule.

This was quite revolutionary in its own way. I tried to eliminate as much as possible the process of putting programmed character movements and other elements on the actual screen and then making detailed adjustments afterward.

However, at the very end, this rule was finally broken.

That caused something very serious to happen, but I will talk about that when I get to the stage settings.

(Automatic translation by AI)