About

Project ASH is a Mega Man Legends fangame.  ASH stands for the project's working title "Another Story in Halcyon".  That's because it takes place in the world of Mega Man Legends while not directly dealing with the events of those games. The Mega Man Legends games have a rich world and lore with tons of potential, and we want to tell a story that not only exists in that world, but is enriched by it.

The game intends to be a fully 3D adventure platformer in the same vain as the Mega Man Legends games themselves.  Explore an island world filled with people and secrets, dive deep into the ruins and face off with deadly Reaverbots, and play through a story that deals with the history of the protagonist, her island, and more.

In order to accomplish this, we've put together a team of mostly Legends fans that volunteer on the project. While a lot of people have contributed over the years and many lend a hand here and there, our core team is fairly small and dedicated.

• JMC47 - Writer/Project Lead
• Vector025 - Programmer/Software Engineer
• Easy93 - Sound Engineer/3D Design/Music
• Sh0rtCircuit - Music/Melodies
• pervyTHEshadow - 3D Character Modeling
• Rodss - Texture/UI design
• Phantron0X - Concept Art
• Emeltee - Character Design/Concept Art
• Eric Chiz - Lore Expert/Consultant

While it may seem crazy to embark on a project like this, we're dedicated to making this happen.  If you're interested in talking with us or have general comments about the project, feel free to join us on our discord server. We're always happy to see people interested in the project!

History of the Project

Project ASH actually has ties all the way back to the year 2004, back when a lot of the Mega Man Legends fans gathered on the Legends-Station.com forums. Back then, there were many ideas for Mega Man Legends fangames, including our first endeavor: Mega Man Legends Expansion. The fangame was designed to be a direct sequel to Mega Man Legends 2 that would wrap up the loose ends of the series.

The MMLEx Era

Mega Man Legends Expansion was an ambitious fangame, even compared to Project ASH's lofty goals.  Back then, we were just excited kids with all of the ambition in the world and no awareness for anything.

Excitement pushed the project forward with a fast start, but the realities of development landed soon afterwards.  We had no idea what we were doing and ended up doing all kinds of pointless tasks like animating cutscenes before we even had a basic movement engine!

After several iterations, we did eventually get a twisted, broken, yet technically functioning product that we tested between friends.

Thanks to one particularly organized member of the project, pretty much all of the development builds of MMLEx survive today.  However, while MMLEx was a pretty much abject failure in terms of producing a game, it did drum up a lot of excitement in the community and allowed us to meet tons of cool and talented people.

While MMLEx was essentially dead for quite a while, eventually a very talented game programmer, Vector025, showed up and decided to help with the project. While MMLEx was highly stagnant at this point, a few of us pooled together accumulated resources and with a much stronger core gameplay engine, a very simple test demo was finally released 2007.  We currently distribute that build on the download page for those curious.

Early ASH/Random Ruins

Toward the end of MMLEx, we started relying on a randomly generated ruin in order to test things. This idea would be taken to the extreme as our itch to make a Mega Man Legends fangame reignited.  In 2008, roughly a year after MMLEx was officially scrapped, we started over with a custom made engine and tried a different take.

This era of ASH is called "Random Ruins" within the team, because we heavily relied on a randomly generated ruin network in order to test the game engine. Unlike MMLEx, which was under-engineered, Random Ruins was over-engineered in pretty much every way. We targeted as high of a graphical tech as we could with current technology, with realtime reflections, global illumination, parallax depth on textures, and much, much more.

But, all the smoke and mirrors hid something from the public.  The game didn't play well at all, and was unintentionally very difficult to complete because we were using ourselves to test it.  Movement was also clunky and the gameplay was unforgiving to an unreasonable degree.  Players were free to "mash" buster shots, but doing so would overload the buster, causing it to power down for crucial seconds.

This was a problem because the Reaverbots were incredibly deadly.  Zakobons would fire bombs that would roll toward the players.  Fooroos were faster than the player could run and would eventually catch you unless you could pepper them with shots to slow them down.  And four direct hits was more than enough to kill the player.

By the time we realized the mistakes we were making, the Random Ruins engine had so much technical debt that it was impossible to change course.  By 2012, the project was essentially dead despite many attempts to retool it.

Modern ASH

With the failure to launch of Capcom's Mega Man Legends 3 efforts, there was still a desire for something, anything in the Mega Man Legends universe.  As such, in early 2019, Easy93 reached out to me to see if there was any desire to revive the project.

And that's how the project rose from the ashes once again.  This time with a much more realistic perspective on what we need to be doing, having learned from both the MMLEx era and Random Ruins era.