Castlevania Flash

Not game art per say but game development. For years I kept this to myself and never bothered uploading it. Well I finally put it up. Something like a 4 year ongoing project, an engine for the classic NES Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse, made entirely in Flash.

http://www.firebell.org/guardiansoft/castleflash/

I started with just a simple character animation and collision detection in 2005 and ended up coding the entire final stage and half the previous stage. My humble goal: to remake the entire game except similar to Metroid where you can go back and explore areas you previously visited and solve puzzles in order to progress. This explains why you can go back and fourth through doors in my version. My idea was that it would be a sequel, that you started after you defeat Dracula, and realize that his curse has not been lifted. You would have to go back and find his missing body parts (like in Castlevania 2, another great non-linear "vania") and make your way back to the beginning. Of course the original Castlevania 3 isn't made to be freely explorable in this way. Some areas have drops that are impossible to climb back. Which is why I programmed Alucard with his powerful but incredibly cheap power to turn into a flying bat. He was the perfect character to help debug my game.

Sounds overambitious enough? Well I had the entire map drawn out in Excel with new mansion areas where you would recover Dracula's missing body parts. The final confrontation would take place in front of the church where you started originally. Yep. I wonder what I was thinking. So why Dracula's Curse? Seriously, I don't know if many people realize how amazing that game was for the time: It was non-linear, had 3 hidden characters, around 15 stages all with boss battles and an amazing sound score. The only better game of the time I can think of is Mario 3.

Here's a short list of features I had to build:
- two playable characters
- collision detection
- side-scrolling
- horizontal scrolling
- enemies generation
- spikes (instant kill)
- breakable blocks
- stairs
- water animation
- one incredibly easy boss
- text parser

The thing I'm most proud of: size. In true NES-era fashion, this side-scroller is only 130kb without sound.