First let me apologize for the length of this post, and yeah< I know about romhacking. I've got a thread there too.
As mentioned on the onset of this thread, I don't have rom hacking skills myself; I can only generate mock ups for the original author of this hack and for others who do have hacking skills and proceed forward with that. This is a personal project to help improve the game while it's still in its finished beta phase. The game is done, but minor improvements can still be made.
Originally my sole intention was to contact the Japanese creator and offer up a better English script, but the more I worked on mockups of the better English script the more I began to learn about the spacing and limitations of the script.
There can only be 24 8x8 pixel characters per line, two lines per screen. To add three lines would require considerable code rewriting, and since it'd only be needed for the English script, the Japanese author isn't willing to do that. So that limitation stays the way it is.
Two lines of 24 characters is not much of a problem in punchy Japanese, but words needs to be carefully chosen for an English script to avoid adding hyphens every other line, a practice that irritates the hell out of me as a writer.
So my mockups have keep these limitations in mind, but due the sheer amount of dialogue needed (easily double that of any other Classic series Megaman game) I quickly realized that using the original game's 8x8 capslock font exclusively wasn't exactly ideal.
I contacted the author asking about free space for additional characters, and was given this:
I gave him a revised font with lowercase characters and a few special characters and of course asked for an example.
This is what I got:
He didn't send me the rom, but he did tell me he would implement the new font in the next beta. However, while he does understand some English, communicating with him is difficult. That's why I try to avoid asking him highly specific questions.
Having played through the game several times specifically seeking for ways it can be improved, that's also lead me to take a hundred thousands screenshots, and although I lack specific romhacking skills, I do also processes considerable knowledge of NES and GameBoy sprites, am an enthusiast when it comes specifically to Rockman classic series sprites.
Therefore, I've become interested in helping to slightly improve some of the sprites in the game as well. There's not a whole lot that needs doing, but there have been a few examples I've noticed.
For one, some characters have a "talking" sprite where they open their mouth during dialogue, while others remain static. I'd like to add a single frame of an open mouth to the faces of the characters that talk - Megaman, Protoman, Copy Roll, Dr. Wily, and Kalinka - Cossack and Light have these sprites already. This is yet to be done.
A slight change to Dr. Light's sprite gives him better hair more fitting his appearances in official art. In the original, he looks almost balding.
A few more slight edits will be done in the future.
Now as for adding in new sprites, I am aware that NES sprites are limited to four colors total, with one of those always being transparency. But starting with the first game, Capcom adopted a novel workaround by using two sprite layers for the main characters in the Megaman games. For example, Megaman himself is two sprites - his black/blue/cyan outfit and the other is his black/white/flesh face. Since the fourth color in both pallets is transparent, this effectively creates the illusion that Megaman isn't two sprites, but one.
By the time Megaman 4 came around, Capcom had expanded this to three sprite layers to create more elaborate bosses. Thi sheet I've compiled shows various bosses from Megaman 4 and 5 that do this.
So based on that, I'd like to improve upon the Roll sprite that's in MI, which is just ripped from the awful sprite used in Megaman 1.
Here's my custom sprites that I'm purposing be added in:
the regular Roll sprite consisting of her skintone and face, a second for her body shape dress and hair, and then an additional third layer for her hair bow. Since this pallet only consists of two colors, a third "dummy" color is used, in this case white.
Assembled, Roll consists of six colors across three sprite layers. There are NES sprites that do this already present in Rockman 4 MI, so I know it can be done.
however, I am not 100% sure it's necessary. Six colors can be done across two sprite pallets if black is eliminated from the face layer and therefore the eyes are moved to the body layer. That would free up one color for the green hair bow. but like I said I'm not 100% sure if the game would allow that, since that would need transparency around both eyes, not just the whole face. Might be a matter of efficiency given the slow clockspeed of the NES? I'm guessing here. I'd need someone with NES sprite knowledge to weigh in on this.
