Samus Entering the Realm

This post deals with a pose that you only see when you start the game or enter/exit an elevator situation. I'm talking about the front-facing pose we are all quite familiar with. I have an image that should give you an idea what needs to happen here.

Yes, you are seeing correctly. M1's Samus is 16 pixels shorter than M3's Samus. If you look into the deeper layers of these two games it actually makes sense since the doors in M3 are 4 tiles while the doors in M1 are 3 tiles.

Well, If Samus is so big in M3, then surely we can easily see the difference. Let us look at that. Now, I just took some slices of what I'm flipping through because it's late and I'm not willing to really work towards something super accurate (I don't know how tall she stands when she faces left or right) but this should give us a size description.

See? She cannot even fit through the walls there. So we have a serious problem on our hands. I can think of a few things to do. Both ideas require a considerable amount of work but either should work as far as I've thought it out.

First, we just resize all Super Metroid Samus sprites (including all creature sprites etc) to fit into the dimensions of M1. Second, we divide the screen in half and add an extra tile. We take every tile below that dividing mark and duplicate it on that line (pillars rise and blank spaces stay blank) and then we extend the door sprite to be the same size as it is in Super Metroid which is 4 tiles.

As I said, both of these require a lot of work. Resizing Samus requires touch-ups on all pixel art of her so that it looks proper and I'm not even sure that part's possible. I may have to actually rework the sprite entirely and I do not want to do that. If I resize every room to compensate for Samus' new size, then I will need to do considerable planning in terms of layout. I will have to make sure this idea will actually work.

Regardless of what happens, the project must go on.