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HEY PAISANOS

This project was a tribute to the “Super Mario Bros Super Show” that began airing in 1989. Produced by DIC Entertainment, the show is a wonderful cavaclade of live action and cartoon segments starring the Mario Brothers. At the time, the show was very faithful to the game source material ( which was really only three NES games ). Nowadays, the show is hilariously off-model to the Mario everyone is now familiar with…and that’s why I love it! Each episode took the Mario Brothers, along with Princess Toadstool and Toad, into a new cliche to play out ( the Old West, Samurais, Riverboating ). What a wonderful inspiration for a fan videogame!

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EXTENDED UNITY ENGINE

First and foremost, I chose Unity because the Esoteric Spine 2D Rigging Software was compatible with Unity 5. That said, I tried as much as possible to rely on my own implemntations and methods. I didnt want the project to feel “out of the box Unity.” For example, I completly used my own Collision and Physics system. However, I did take advantage of Unity’s Box Collider components and their Trigger Overlap Events.
The following features is what I spent alot of time working on;

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  • Custom Physics and Collision system, uniformly applied to interactable entities

  • Custom Environment and Character Lighting

  • Finite State Machine System

  • Modular Cutscene System

  • Custom Spine Animation and Sprite Flipbook Managers

  • Asynchronously Loading from FrontEnd to Gameplay and back

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SAY NO TO RIGID BODY 2D!

My old co-worker at WayForward ( who worked on Contra 4 and many other 2D games ) felt very strongly on keeping code simple and minimal. For this project, an Orthographic 2D platformer, I considered Unity’s Physics system overkill. And so, I vied to write my own collision system, based on Rects and Triangle. Every interactable in the game derived from the same “BasicPhysics” Class. It felt so good that things just “worked!” Placing a constantly forward moving enemy on a cliff, watching it would fall, and just following the path, made me really realized I made the right choice. Then again, my former co-worker at Sanzaru ( who worked on the Sonic 3DS games ) was adament that I use “modern” physics methods like Unity’s Rigid Boy system, as that knowledge would be transferable to Unreal 4 or any modern videogame. Either way, my system works and Im happy that its fully “mine” and not black boxed by Unity.

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TRY THE 2017 BUILD

Please feel free to download and try the February 2017 build of the SuperShow Project! With a heavy heart, I chose to retire this fan-game to focus on projects that would more sharply challenge my professional programmer growth.  I'm very happy with what I accomplished here between 2015-2017. What could of been though!

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