Metroid Moon
Travel the universe to keep the aliens in check.
Summary
Metroid Moon is a multi-part project that is concerned with showcasing the Metroid titles in new ways with higher resolutions, upscaled textures, new visuals that digitize the presence of older consoles, and tons more! Some of the titles featured within this project include NES Metroid, Metroid Zero Mission (a remake of NES Metroid), and Metroid Prime. The goal of this project was to dive into render creation, viewport architecture, and visual FX design. All of the components of this project can be viewed through the Metroid Moon YouTube Playlist where Arcmaevotix is home to the original versions and Nehrpsyznet is home to the remade versions.
Process
The development of this project was somewhat of a mixed bag in terms of difficulty because several of the components such as the showcase of Metroid PrimeHack vs Metroid Prime Remastered were relatively straightforward while others such as the custom overlay design projects had a much more involved research and development process. This is largely because of the fact that I had to not only figure out what NES Metroid and Metroid Zero Mission looked like across different platforms, but I also had to come up with a way to design a visual experience that mimicked those pieces of hardware. The most challenging console / console peripheral to visually replicate was the Game Boy Player, an attachment for the Nintendo GameCube that allowed GameCube owners to play their Game Boy Advance cartridges on the big screen. This is because the GameCube had pretty specific anti-aliasing in combination with the scan-line filtering of older CRT screens. In addition, the letterbox borders that the GameCube sported had to be stitched back together in an unconventional way since I was re-designing them for an aspect ratio that the GameCube never displayed at (in most titles of course).
Reflection
Metroid Moon was crucial in sharpening my understanding of viewport design, video filters, and resolution scaling for various devices in a virtual environment. It also helped reinforce parts of my graphic design skillset, most notably mockup rendering of products or hardware. While there was consideration to create virtual representations of other Metroid games on different pieces of hardware such as Metroid Prime, it was done only with Metroid and Metroid Zero Mission since titles such as Metroid Prime look largely the same across the platforms that it has been released on.