Super Saiya Densetsu remake project

[ThunderPX]

I've always been a big fan of Super Saiya Densetsu; the card battle system is cool, and I like the way you can go off the story rails and do things like keep most of the cast alive through the Saiyan fights. That said, it does have its downsides; the game is a huge grindfest, the music inevitably gets on your nerves and those of everyone within earshot, and the graphics are clearly a case of "We haven't quite figured out this newfangled 16-bit machine yet".

One of my dream projects for a long time has been to do a fan remake/upgrade of this game that retains all the good stuff and the original spirit, but has big QoL improvements and a boost in the audiovisual department (I also want to do one of Super Butoden but I'm NOT a good enough programmer to do a fighting game, heh.)

Here's what I've got so far:

Graphics:
My main focus right now is to improve the map and battle sprites by beefing up the color palette a bit, reducing the black outlines and giving characters actual eyes instead of looking like they've been mimicked by a Ditto. I'm also experimenting with some motion blur frames to add a bit more impact to hits.
http://rosiero.com/misc/ssdr/ssdr_goku.gif
^ Goku's battle sprites.
http://rosiero.com/misc/ssdr/map_goku_02.gif
^ Goku's map sprite.
http://rosiero.com/misc/ssdr/ssdr_prev_bat.png
^ Battle sprite idle poses for the other playable characters.

Music:
I'm not 100% sure what I'll do yet, but here is a proof of concept of a remixed battle theme:
http://rosiero.com/misc/ssdr/ssdr_battle1.mp3
It uses samples from the Super Goku Den games. This was made in FL Studio with the C700 VST, which mimicks the SNES's music chip, so this should sound faithful to the hardware, but I'm not an expert in that regard.
In general, I intend to remix all of the existing songs from SSD, extending the very short ones in the process, as well as add a bunch of new tunes to create more variety. Battles especially need more music; expect boss music as well as varied tunes for random encounters depending on the type of enemy you're facing, a la EarthBound.

Programming:
It's still early days, since a lot of backend stuff needs to be done before you can get anything on screen. I'm programming this in Game Maker, since I'm already familiar with it and I'm fairly certain this type of game won't run into the engine's limitations.
http://rosiero.com/misc/ssdr/ssdr_teaser.png
Right now I've got a test battle screen that looks like this; I've got a few of the battle animations implemented.

Thanks to Fionordequestor's big thread on how to speedrun the game, I can use the original damage formula, but other than that I kind of have to guess at how the game's internal math and RNG works. It's probably more important to make sure it's fun rather than 100% accurate to the original, but I tend to worry a lot about these things.

Planned QoL Improvements:
I want battles to be MUCH faster than they were originally. Not only speeding up the animations a bit, but making everything flow by using less on-screen text when visuals can convey the same thing and having the animations be as continuous as possible, instead of everything resetting after each exchange.
Meanwhile, on the map the controls will have some basic simplifications; a single button can be used to fly and land, and one button handles both the "look" and "talk" commands. The encounter rate will also be lowered and checked in such a way that you can't immediately get into a battle the instant you move, which was a frequent occurrence in the original game.

Planned new content:
Once the original game is fully implemented, I want to add a bunch of new content; the NES games that SSD sort of remakes had a bunch of extra stuff, like the Earthlings going off to find the Dragon Balls to wish Goku back and fighting Garlic Jr. along the way. It would also be super cool to adapt the Cell arc, since I can think of a ton of possibilities for the player to alter the story there.

Of course, this is all going to take a REALLY long time to do. I've got a full time job and another, original game project I'm working on with some folks, while this is a free-time project I'm doing on my own. I'm also not the greatest programmer, so I fully expect to get stuck on something stupid for a while. Still, I'm excited enough by what I've cooked up in the past few days that I want to show it off.

What do you guys think? Do you have any suggestions for what I should do? Let me know! ^.^

[TobyS]

I've always been a big fan of Super Saiya Densetsu; the card battle system is cool, and I like the way you can go off the story rails and do things like keep most of the cast alive through the Saiyan fights. That said, it does have its downsides; the game is a huge grindfest, the music inevitably gets on your nerves and those of everyone within earshot, and the graphics are clearly a case of "We haven't quite figured out this newfangled 16-bit machine yet".

One of my dream projects for a long time has been to do a fan remake/upgrade of this game that retains all the good stuff and the original spirit, but has big QoL improvements and a boost in the audiovisual department (I also want to do one of Super Butoden but I'm NOT a good enough programmer to do a fighting game, heh.)

Here's what I've got so far:

Graphics:
My main focus right now is to improve the map and battle sprites by beefing up the color palette a bit, reducing the black outlines and giving characters actual eyes instead of looking like they've been mimicked by a Ditto. I'm also experimenting with some motion blur frames to add a bit more impact to hits.
http://rosiero.com/misc/ssdr/ssdr_goku.gif
^ Goku's battle sprites.
http://rosiero.com/misc/ssdr/map_goku_02.gif
^ Goku's map sprite.
http://rosiero.com/misc/ssdr/ssdr_prev_bat.png
^ Battle sprite idle poses for the other playable characters.

Music:
I'm not 100% sure what I'll do yet, but here is a proof of concept of a remixed battle theme:
http://rosiero.com/misc/ssdr/ssdr_battle1.mp3
It uses samples from the Super Goku Den games. This was made in FL Studio with the C700 VST, which mimicks the SNES's music chip, so this should sound faithful to the hardware, but I'm not an expert in that regard.
In general, I intend to remix all of the existing songs from SSD, extending the very short ones in the process, as well as add a bunch of new tunes to create more variety. Battles especially need more music; expect boss music as well as varied tunes for random encounters depending on the type of enemy you're facing, a la EarthBound.

Programming:
It's still early days, since a lot of backend stuff needs to be done before you can get anything on screen. I'm programming this in Game Maker, since I'm already familiar with it and I'm fairly certain this type of game won't run into the engine's limitations.
http://rosiero.com/misc/ssdr/ssdr_teaser.png
Right now I've got a test battle screen that looks like this; I've got a few of the battle animations implemented.

Thanks to Fionordequestor's big thread on how to speedrun the game, I can use the original damage formula, but other than that I kind of have to guess at how the game's internal math and RNG works. It's probably more important to make sure it's fun rather than 100% accurate to the original, but I tend to worry a lot about these things.

Planned QoL Improvements:
I want battles to be MUCH faster than they were originally. Not only speeding up the animations a bit, but making everything flow by using less on-screen text when visuals can convey the same thing and having the animations be as continuous as possible, instead of everything resetting after each exchange.
Meanwhile, on the map the controls will have some basic simplifications; a single button can be used to fly and land, and one button handles both the "look" and "talk" commands. The encounter rate will also be lowered and checked in such a way that you can't immediately get into a battle the instant you move, which was a frequent occurrence in the original game.

Planned new content:
Once the original game is fully implemented, I want to add a bunch of new content; the NES games that SSD sort of remakes had a bunch of extra stuff, like the Earthlings going off to find the Dragon Balls to wish Goku back and fighting Garlic Jr. along the way. It would also be super cool to adapt the Cell arc, since I can think of a ton of possibilities for the player to alter the story there.

Of course, this is all going to take a REALLY long time to do. I've got a full time job and another, original game project I'm working on with some folks, while this is a free-time project I'm doing on my own. I'm also not the greatest programmer, so I fully expect to get stuck on something stupid for a while. Still, I'm excited enough by what I've cooked up in the past few days that I want to show it off.

What do you guys think? Do you have any suggestions for what I should do? Let me know! ^.^

I heard about an old game that allowed everyone to survive the saiyan saga, it would be good to have an old game rereleased in english or with subs. Kudos to you man, look forward to hearing more!

[ThunderPX]

If all you want is the original game in English, there's actually a fan translation patch for it.

[ThunderPX]

Big bump, because sometimes people find this thread and track me down to ask about the project.

I didn't work on it for a few years because ADHD, but I've picked it up again recently.

(i hope hotlinking this works given that i can't figure out how to make it work on my own freaking website)





A lot of my focus is on the surprisingly complex battle mechanics. This is going to take a while to finish because there are just so many small things that need to be there. But I'm also slowly starting on doing the overworld, mostly so I can plant some NPCs down for debug features.

[pablomaldonado0102]

"It's an excellent project, I would love for us to get in touch so I can help you since I'm a huge fan of this game

[ThunderPX]

Sure, how would you like to help? Programming stuff and understanding some of the more obscure mechanics of the original game are definitely the big bottlenecks for me.

[ThunderPX]

At my current point of progress, I have enough of both the battle and map systems working that I could get pretty far. But there are a few things I want to make sure to get right before I get too far into the weeds, and because I can't figure out exactly how they work in the original, I'm stuck. Heck, I even started learning assembly language so I could try to decipher the original game code, but I can't make heads or tails of it.

Card distribution
I originally assumed that the cards you get are totally random, but apparently, this isn't the case. I can't find the comment anymore, but a Japanese player on some discussion thread somewhere was able to discern that there are actually two built-in rows of cards that are switched between somehow. It becomes somewhat obvious when you use an Oolong card to get a new hand and you'll see the same patterns a lot. Unfortunately, since I can't find the post, I don't know exactly what this person said about how the game selects from the rows. They even linked an image with the full set that they had manually pieced together, but the link was unfortunately broken by the time I got to it.

I might fudge this by coming up with my own system that feels sort of balanced. Up until now, I've had every card element be chosen at complete random, but the results feel totally off, so I should probably weight these in some way so that certain results are more common.

Fight animations
Something I can't figure out at all is how the game selects what fight animation to play when two characters clash. I know that when you get the "attack all enemies" effect, your character just does the single kick move to all of them (which I want to replace with something more exciting), and I have a vague idea that in one-on-one matchups, the kick happens if the attacker has a much more powerful card and the fisticuffs happen when they're more evenly matched... but I have no idea if the fighters' stats also figure into this, much less what causes some of the more particular things like charactes getting hit into mountains or the ground, or the Mode 7 zoom effect that may or may not show up when this happens.

I'd really like to have a concrete idea of the criteria here, because in the original game, it generally "feels right" which animation is played based on what's going on power-wise, so I don't want to just make something up and have it feel totally wrong. Also, since I can't trigger every possible animation on command, it makes it difficult to replicate them in my version.

If anyone has any tips on this at all, or even just thinks they can come up with a good new system, I would really appreciate them! I think this project can move along a lot better if I have people to exchange ideas with.

[Saturnine]

Hey man! Just wanted to drop by and say that Super Saiya Densetsu is still my favorite Dragon Ball Game (with Legacy of Goku 2 being second), so I wish you all the best on this endeavor.

This game was the most immersive experience for me - especially since how desperate the boss fights can be if someone's not prepared (meaning leveled up enough). That plus the best and most mechanically correct and rewarding implementation of power levels in any game before or since (not entirely faithful figures to the manga, but often close), great music, immersion etc...

I always hoped someone would manage to create a fan extension of this game that covers the Cell and Buu arcs, but a remake is definitely a good start.

[ThunderPX]

I planned from the start to extend the game to the Cell arc. However, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to make it its own campaign or even a sequel using the remake as a base. If I put it all together, I'd have to alter or remove a lot of stuff from the end of the original game, like Piccolo merging with Dende, the Super Saiyan Vegeta fight, or even the option not to have Goku go Super Saiyan at all. I would rather have a clean slate.

In the meantime, I've been doing a deep dive on the game's inner workings. Initially, I recorded a playthrough and painstakingly recorded every drawn card, attack animations, damage, item drops, etc. etc. But even after all that, there were too many quirks unaccounted for and things I couldn't deduce. So I started digging into the actual game code, which is a slow and painful process because assembly language is just the worst to deal with. Slowly but surely, I've been labeling what a lot of the code does so I can find the things that control battle-related stuff and RNG, and so create a faithful remake (apart from intentional alterations, of course).

By the way, did you know the existing fan translation actually has a mostly made up script? I dumped the text from the game to do my own translation, especially because there's a *ton* of interesting unused text hidden in the data, and quickly realized while referencing the fan translation that only a few parts of it are legitimately translated from Japanese, with the rest either being adapted from the FUNimation dub or made up out of whole cloth. I'm actually kind of tempted to do my own, better translation patch, since I already have to translate all the text and learn a ton about the game code anyway.

[ThunderPX]

Card distribution
I originally assumed that the cards you get are totally random, but apparently, this isn't the case. I can't find the comment anymore, but a Japanese player on some discussion thread somewhere was able to discern that there are actually two built-in rows of cards that are switched between somehow. It becomes somewhat obvious when you use an Oolong card to get a new hand and you'll see the same patterns a lot. Unfortunately, since I can't find the post, I don't know exactly what this person said about how the game selects from the rows. They even linked an image with the full set that they had manually pieced together, but the link was unfortunately broken by the time I got to it.

I might fudge this by coming up with my own system that feels sort of balanced. Up until now, I've had every card element be chosen at complete random, but the results feel totally off, so I should probably weight these in some way so that certain results are more common.

Okay, so this isn't quite true, but I can see how someone would come to this conclusion (especially since I fell victim to another symptom of the same issue until I figured it out). It's not that there's a set table of cards in the ROM or anything, it's just that the primitive, inexpensive RNG implementation creates very static results, especially over the course of a long play session since the seed is never changed. This actually resulted in me drawing a bunch of conclusions about the frequency of cards that just aren't universally true; they were arbitrary and exclusive to my playthrough because I was using save states instead of saving and resetting.

Now the trick is going to be having an RNG setup that doesn't completely change the feel of the game, but also doesn't have that issue of being so static.

Something I can't figure out at all is how the game selects what fight animation to play when two characters clash. I know that when you get the "attack all enemies" effect, your character just does the single kick move to all of them (which I want to replace with something more exciting), and I have a vague idea that in one-on-one matchups, the kick happens if the attacker has a much more powerful card and the fisticuffs happen when they're more evenly matched... but I have no idea if the fighters' stats also figure into this, much less what causes some of the more particular things like charactes getting hit into mountains or the ground, or the Mode 7 zoom effect that may or may not show up when this happens.

I'd really like to have a concrete idea of the criteria here, because in the original game, it generally "feels right" which animation is played based on what's going on power-wise, so I don't want to just make something up and have it feel totally wrong. Also, since I can't trigger every possible animation on command, it makes it difficult to replicate them in my version.

I've figured out how this works now thanks to my reverse engineering efforts. A character's level and their card's ATK value are used to calculate an offset to retrieve a predetermined value from a table. Then that value is altered based on whether you're on the ground or in the air, whether you're flying over land or sea, and a 50% RNG chance. That then creates an offset for a second table, which gives you the actual ID of the animation that will play.

I've also started figuring out stuff like dodge/counterattack/followup attack rates. This is all super important for creating a good remake, there just wasn't any pre-existing documentation like there was for the damage formula.

At any rate, with that stuff I should be able to make a significant amount of progress. I think the first big milestone should be having all the necessary content and mechanics implementation to recreate the "first chapter" (i.e. up to the fight against Raditz). When I get to that point, I'll release a demo so I can gather player feedback and proceed from there.

[ThunderPX]

I've started properly implementing the regular attack animations. I've had to do a lot of refactoring since the previous work I did on this was under a bunch of mistaken assumptions, but now that I've got the foundation, it should be smooth sailing for the rest of this bit!

Here's a quick work-in-progress clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpKRdPqYfM0

[ThunderPX]

I wanted to escape from battle screen hell, so I made a bunch of map and menu-related stuff.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b3GTj5KXLI

I figured out how the original game stores its maps, which was very helpful in recreating this overworld. As you can see, I've made some changes to UI stuff, like a snazzier "item get" screen (this should have a cool animation later) and a different character status screen. What do y'all think?

Maps are loaded from external files. Eventually I want as much stuff as possible to be external, so that custom content becomes a possibility.

[llennac]

Hey man, looks sick. Still love that game to this day and cant wait for your progress

[DemonJr]

Yo!

I was just looking for rom hacks on this game (and the sequels) obviously, nothing really comes up other than fan translations. Then I stumbled on this post. I have to say I'm very stoked for this. I'm not sure what's possible for a project like this. As much as I would like a faithful adaption (in terms of it's story, core gameplay and aesthetic), I would also like to see it modernised or revamped in various ways.

The RPG elements are extremely basic. Perhaps a better card management system, with each card being linked to different animations and techniques could be a way to add some variability to a characters build, and beating tough opponents can reveal new cards? The card system, although fun for 1989, was obviously basic due to the limitations of it's time. But this is where the battle system could truly shine if you use some imagination.

Don't be afraid of doing things your own way or finding your own solutions, I saw you posting about when certain actions happen like when a character is blasted into a mountain. Things like that seem intuitive, like say if a characters BP is 50% above another's. Though I'm unsure how you would then balance that against the battle rating of the card 1 to 7 star). But my point isn't really about the details, but to say that you shouldn't be afraid of working out your own balancing and ideas.

I'm not really here to try and tell you what to do. But seeing your obvious skill and talent, and passion for retro DBZ games, it seems like it'd be better to instead of focusing on what the game was, think of what it could be now that we have 2026 technology, game design and philosophy.

You could really be sitting on a bit of a cult gem here if you do this right. A simple remake with some QoL is great but will likely fly under the radar. But a total revamp with expanded content and new mechanics and systems etc? That would cause quite the stir in the DBZ community. Your idea of having custom creations (from the community I guess?) is an insanely good idea, but please don't stop there!

I am involved in a couple DBZ game development servers and the people there may have a lot of info and ideas to pass on, if you'd like an invite just DM me on here.

But please finish this! This is amazing work so far, well done!

[ThunderPX]

Thanks for your insight! The reason I want to get certain things to work like the original game is because I've played plenty of fan remake projects where the feel is just totally off. SSD may have some questionable balance, but every action you take feels like it has the "correct" outcome without you even thinking about the mechanics behind it, and that's not something I want to mess up.

As for expanding on the battle mechanics, there are some ideas I've been mulling over. I think it'd be cool if characters didn't exchange one school for another, but just added it as an option, so you could choose how you want to spread out your party over the different schools. It would be cool if each school was linked to something more specific like you said, but I'm worried about upsetting the balance, so I'm not too hasty about implementing that.

Something I think would be really cool would be a skill tree system to let you build up your characters in different ways and give everyone their own niche, so that there's actually a point to having everyone around for Namek beyond "Heheh, isn't it funny to have Yamcha around" and "let's have Freeza kill Chaozu instead of Kuririn". The crazy wildcard stuff Vegeta can do is fun, so it'd be cool if other characters could earn special effects like that, get a wider list of special moves, etc. If I can get that working, then maybe that could feed into giving each school certain effects. Like maybe Kame could boost certain melee things, but Kami could let you better resist ki blasts or dodge things, and so on.

Something I'm *definitely* doing is expanding on scenarios, though. The original game really skips through a lot of stuff, and there's a whole lot of unused text I found in the ROM that suggests a bigger, more varied game was planned. I'm really looking forward to getting to that; for example, I wanna have Snake Way and space maps with the board game style from the NES games, because it'd be a cool way to switch up how the player interfaces with the world and give opportunities for weird side events.

[DemonJr]

I know what you mean, some "remakes" seem to miss the point of the original. So I'm not suggesting to make it too different from what it was, just evolve what is already there to something more modern.

For instance, if the combat is going to be based around a card draw mechanic, maybe expand on that and introduce a slightly better card deck system. It doesn't have to be super complicated, maybe 60 cards tops. But each one reflects new actions, techniques and animations. Maybe each character can have a deck of 15 and you can customise this with new cards as you go. (The strength and defence stats can just be random on each battle like it seems to be originally). As it stands in the OG version, its like what 7 cards? Most are standard attacks, the blue one is Ki attack, one of the yellow ones is an attack all card, and another is a school card where if you share the same school symbol you do more damage or something (my memory is a bit hazy). It's pretty limited.

I'm kind of taking some inspiration from games like Slay the Spire. Not that it has to be as complex or have as many cards, but just something interesting that makes the game feel familiar yet fresh.

As for balancing, I think you're possibly overthinking that. For anything you add, you can bench it against the balancing that is already there. It seems fairly intuitive to me, but I'm not a developer so I could just be talking out of my ass on that one haha

But basically, I'm just talking about enhancing what is good about the game to make it better, not necessarily to make it into a new game or change mechanics entirely.

But hey at the end of the day it's your project and you know your limitations. So I respect that. But I just see a lot of potential to bring this title to a more modern audience of younger fans and breathe some new life into it. So I just thought it was worth putting my two cents in haha