Vitimin did u ever finish this

[King Piranha Plant]

MFGG phpBB Message Boards Archive • View topic - Mario's Mansion 3

It'd be so fun and cute to play a fan-finished MM3! Did Fanguy ever respond way back when you were working on it?

[Vitiman]

Buckle up, boys: this is a long one.

Let ol' Vitiman tell you the story about how I once used a program meant to open up certain old .tgf and .cca source files and successfully cracked into the Mario's Mansion 3 demo, went out of my way to try and finish it, got frustratingly close, and then had an application update ruin all my hard work.

The projeKct initially began in early early 2013. I'm talking like... January. So it wasn't too long after I even made that original thread. I had already gotten pretty far in making some more of the story (although if I were to pick this project back up, I would handle it a lot better than I did here) and I was very happy with the results. Development continued, on-and-off, for about two years. Yes, I dragged this out in my spare time until 2015, which was a year I wasn't even on MFGG anymore. I just kind of liked toying around with such an old fangame and trying to rightfully finish it.

There was one issue from the get go: the program I used to un-protect the sources wasn't perfect. It couldn't remove the protection from any .tgf source and could be rather picky. Furthermore, the resulting file could only be opened in MMF1.5 or higher, unfortunately. So I had to continue development of the game in Multimedia Fusion 2. Luckily, at the time, the version of MMF2 I was using demonstrated pretty remarkable backwards compatibility with the old default platform engine and all of its predictable quirks. This... was not meant to last.

Fast forward to near the end of development. I was kind of making the story up as I went along (which is in the spirit of one of these old fangames, no?), and I knew I was in the final stretch. But something felt a bit off... some of the text boxes felt a bit inauthentic. The text anti-aliasing, mainly. I found out that one way to resolve that was to set the application to a lower color resolution. Bad idea. It permanently altered the graphics to be a lower resolution and made the palette lower, which affected semi-transparent objects and backdrops. Strike one.

In the year 2016, I was gifted a copy of Clickteam Fusion 2.5, which is what I use to this day. By this version of the software, the compatibility with some older event quirks and especially the default platform movement (really, all the old movements) were changed and there wasn't a toggle to make them behave the way they used to. Some of the game's coding broke and I had no immediate way to fix this for every single frame. Strike two.

Finally, by this point, the whole thing felt like a fan fiction of a fan fiction of a mess. I had diverged a fair bit from what FanGuy probably intended for his old game, and I no longer viewed it as something that people nowadays could play and enjoy. It had absurdly frustrating moments, and while some of the charm was still there, it wasn't nearly as prominent. The story took a few shocking swerves for no reason. I could have handled it better. Strike three, yer out!

So is that the end of this story? Well... actually, not quite! Just this year, I had the itch to try it again. Re-build what I had done, but better. More authentic. Closer to the original Mario's Mansion games in charm and in their storytelling. They were pretty fresh in my memory, having re-played both of them last year. I could do it! I could give it an honest-to-god revamp. But I knew I had to make sure that the platform movement would work properly. I didn't have that old copy of MMF2 anymore, so I would have to work in MMF1.5. Luckily, I somehow did have a copy of that, in spite of any copies of it online disappearing basically permanently. I installed it and gave it a whirl!

I was heartbroken.

MMF1.5 does not play nice on Windows 10 at all. I'd have to rig it up in a virtual machine. I was not prepared to do all of this work for such a small little revival project - one I technically did not have permission for to begin with! Not that it mattered, I guess. It's all fan projects from the start.

Maybe I'll come back to it. Yoshiman gave me the blessing on behalf of FanGuy. So I guess I do have something vaguely resembling permission. I'd either keep it as authentic as possible or at the very least revamp the platform engine and give it a slight coat of polish while trying to maintain some of that quirky old fangame goodness. I think that'd be fun for anyone to play. Show them what old fangames can be with a little bit of care.

But that'll be for another day, friends. Until then, cheers!

[King Piranha Plant]

Holy hell

Why does making games always have to be such a nightmare?

But damn I admire how long you've stuck with this project! I'd say only work on it if you still have fun doing so. Maybe someday Fanguy himself would end up playing it! (even though, like, 10 years ago he said he isn't into fangaming anymore, so probably not, but you never know?)

And man I seriously feel you on the Clickteam struggles. A lot of my oldest fangames use extentions for MMF2 that aren't even available anymore, and thus won't open in my current version, let alone the new Fusion 2.5. It's a shame companies always have to be so cruel to their oldest devoted fans D: