Dev Diary 2: Creating a Sega Genesis style Starport for Starflight Heroes of Arth

[Blake00]

I'm helping out John a bit on his awesome Starflight Heroes of Arth project similar to how I help out Marvin on his Starflight Remaking of a Legend project. I'm a big fan of the original Starflight games (in particular the SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive version) and am passionate about the many fan projects out there. So much so that I recently made a video series trying out every single Starflight fan game out there digging up private demos and content the world has never seen before! One of my absolute favourite fan projects is Starflight The Lost Colony which at this point in time is still the only finished SF fan game in existence. For many years I've dreamed of modding SF-TLC to have Genesis graphics but lacked the time, talent and patience lol! Thankfully John has those qualities so when I found out about his project I knew I just had to help him!

I recently helped John make a cool Genesis style title screen (covered in dev diary 1). So the second thing I wanted to help John tackle was the scrolling starport background.

I knew it wouldn't be easy trying to mount low resolution 90s graphics over the top of a big high resolution TLC starport background image but I was determined to get it done haha! Here's the results so far..



- The robot walks on the upper bit of the floor so I stuck in the genesis bottom floor bit to start off as i knew I could get away with it haha.
- There's way more upper area in TLC! So I had a choice of either extending the wall up or lowering the ceiling. I decided on the latter as hopefully it will increase the scrolling 3D effect! Although nothing can beat that lovely parallax scrolling 3D room trick of the original.
- The spaces between the doors all seem uneven in TLC so it was a bit of nightmare to try and line up the genesis walls around the doors but I did the best I could lol.
- I thought about keeping the TLC space windows & posters but John didn't want them there, plus the art style and resolution are very different so it would have looked weird sticking them over the top of the blocky genesis walls.
- I wanted to keep the Glush Cola poster though so John suggested I lower its pixel count to better match the blocky genesis stuff so hell it I went for it haha. Also made a good blank wall space filler now that the science window is gone.

Then I extracted the spaceman frames out of the Genesis game and gave them to John. He replaced the robot animations with each Genesis spaceman frame as also raised him up a bit to help him fit above my raised floor.



Here's a video of the finished result. Hope you guys like!

We're looking at making a better ceiling and John hopes to recreate the 3D parallax foreground floor/ceiling scrolling effect from the Genesis version one day too.
This will probably be my last dev diary as this is the point where my talent runs out and only John can continue the work haha. Next dev diaries will probably be from him!