It’s this consistency that helps players understand clearly what’s happening. The same red was used ensure it was clear when the player is doing damage. I worked with senior design to pick the particular red color, whether hitting blocks, bosses or enemies in the game. My shots are reflected when I’m not doing any damage, but there’s a red glow on the Sheegoth when I’m hitting the right area to damage it. 2/4Īs you can see in the clip below as I’m fighting the Baby Sheegoth. I realized we needed a consistent design for the color blends. The GameCube didn’t have shaders as we know them now, it has a TEV (TExture enVironment unit) that could blend colors. Objects and creatures are often only vulnerable to particular types of damage. One of the design goals in Prime is to make sure the player immediately knows if they are doing damage or not. Turns out machine code is sufficiently random to work great as a static noise texture! When you see Samus’s visor affected by electrical “noise” in game, you’re actually seeing the bits and bytes of the Metroid Prime software code itself being rendered on the screen. One engineer on the team came up with a great idea: what if we just use the memory holding the Metroid Prime code itself! We quickly tried it out and it looked amazing. If we used a low resolution texture (64×64) to save memory the “static” would be blurry and not crisp. The Gamecube only has 24MB of RAM, so every texture has to be carefully considered. As we worked on this a big issue is the memory use of the noise texture. In this clip as Samus approaches the Bombu, the screen fills with static to show interference with her visor. ![]() Sorry, but you gotta wait for the disc to load I’m afraid! Most times the room should be already loaded by the time you get to the door, but things like the morphball make it so you the player can get there much faster and beat the load times. ![]() We went with the design of the blue force field on the doors that fades when shot to indicate the door is “ready” to open, but has to wait until the room behind is loaded. This is why in rooms with multiple exits, only one door can be open at a time. In Metroid Prime, you may have noticed that doors can sometimes take a long time to open–that’s because the room behind the door is still loading! There is at most two “rooms” loaded at once–the one you’re in and the one you’re going to. ![]() Each day until then I’m going to tweet out a little story about its development. Zoid Kirsch Metroid Prime’s 20th release date anniversary is on November 18th. These are amazing, behind the scenes stories that have been compiled here for posterity and easy reading. In honor of Metroid Prime’s 20th Anniverary, we have compiled the Metroid Prime development stories that Zoid Kirsch & Jack Mathews shared on Twitter.
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