Part of setting the atmosphere of a cheerful town, desolate ruins, and fierce boss fights is nailing audio design. In older projects, we would often use free sounds online and a mixture of soundfonts for music without much attention to balancing or theming. None of us were experts on audio design and it showed in both the MMLEx and Random Ruins eras of the project.

That instantly changed when Easy93 joined the project. Suddenly we not only had someone who was an expert in sound design, but also was a Foley artist that could create new sounds for whatever scenario we wanted. This lets our sound effects and ambience work alongside our music, and instead of using generic sounds and trying to modify them into what we want, we can  have any sound we want made.

When traveling through the ruins in ASH, you'll hear the grinding of gears, the humming of electric motors, distant bangs, and layers of dynamic atmosphere. And when a deadly Reaverbot is just around the corner, an attentive digger might just be able to hear where they are before it is too late.

The Ruin Themes of Mega Man Legends 1 and 2

The Mega Man Legends series had two very different takes on music in the ruins. Mega Man Legends 1, outside of the Main Gate, had a more minimalistic take on the ruins. They were visceral, with the grinds of machinery looping in the background with occasional melodies of music intermixed. In reality, these were just looping tracks, but they really did add to the danger of the underground labyrinths.

Mega Man Legends 1: Music and Ambience Example

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Ruin Music: 0:00 - 0:14,
Ambience: 0:14 - 0:28

Mega Man Legends 2 went another direction. Every major ruin had a grandiose track alongside it. The music made each ruin more memorable, and within the first few seconds of going down the elevator, you really had an idea of where you were at. Calinca's articulate hums with bells and strings, circling an ominous melody creates a chilling atmosphere that really plays into the raised stakes of the final key ruin of Legends 2.

Mega Man Legends 2: Calinca Ruins Music Example

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Manda Ruins, on the other hand, has a more upbeat groove to it with tribal sounding bongos/instruments and the descending chromatic melody it plays off of gives it an underground forest sort of vibe.

Mega Man Legends 2: Manda Ruins Music Example

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A Dynamic Audio Environment

Deciding between having the moody environments of Legends 1 and the strong themes of Legends 2 was not a decision we were willing to make.  For Project ASH, we were going to have our apricot pie and eat it too!  In order to do that, we've made it so the quiet moments of the game can give you the ambience of Legends 1, while each ruin will still have memorable themes like Legends 2.

This is accomplished through a system that dynamically handles music and ambience in order to match the atmosphere around the player. The ruin has a base music track, but what happens from there depends on what's going on around the player. In a room filled with Reaverbots, additional instruments are added to convey the stress. In combat, the music will amplify itself even further to fit the situation. And, if the player is exploring and inspecting a quiet area as if to solve a puzzle, ambience can take over and truly immerse the player in their surroundings. Some special rooms can also have their own music tracks and ambience, which is especially useful if players are expected to be there a while.

ASH: Music + Ambience/Atmosphere Example

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Base: 0:00 - 0:06,
Tense: 0:06 - 0:14,
Combat: 0:14 - 0:20,
Special Room: 0:20 - 0:31,
Ambience: 0:31 - 0:40

This isn't a new idea; games like Super Mario 64 and others did similar techniques all the way back in 1996. Depending on where you were in a level, it could change and add/subtract instruments. The most obvious area was in Dire Dire Docks, where the music would add percussion when on the land versus when you're swimming to really amp up the song along with the action.

Super Mario 64: Music Example

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Base: 0:00 - 0:15,
Additional Instrumentation: 0:15 - 0:30

But, by taking advantage of these techniques, we plan to create memorable ruin background music that matches the feel of Mega Man Legends 2, while still retaining the visceral feel of the ruins from Mega Man Legends 1.

Apologies for the long delay between articles. I've been working on a lot of writing projects and made a lot of great progress, but unfortunately crashed and burned out before I even realized it. But now it's time to get back into action with one of the most interesting problems facing Mega Man Legends: Special Weapons.

The Special Weapon Design of Mega Man Legends 1 and 2

Using Special Weapons

Mega Man Legends 1 and 2 both employ a similar design to Special Weapons, with a few nuances between the two. Essentially, Special Weapons were powerful tools that you could bring with you into the ruins. Most were offensive weapons, with some having extra utilities for digging, such as breaking walls.

The balance for these weapons is that you could only bring one. As powerful as they were, you'd almost always have a tradeoff by having to pick a single one. And, in Legends 1, with exception for the single use Hyper Cartridge, you had no way of refilling your Special Weapon outside of finding Data, who could recharge life/special weapon energy.

Legends 2 is similar, but now enemies can drop Special Weapon energy when they die, allowing you to recharge your weapon on the fly. You'd think this would make Special Weapons even stronger, as you'd now never have to stop using it as long as you kept destroying things along the way.

To counter this, Legends 2 employs a dual energy bar. You have a bigger "blue" pool of energy and a smaller "green" pool of energy. The green energy bar is immediately usable energy, where as blue energy will be slowly converted into green energy as long as the green energy bar isn't full and the blue energy bar isn't empty.

If that all sounds confusing, think of it as a weird way of reloading with energy weapons. It's main purpose is so that you can't just full-send special weapons constantly, even if they have fully upgraded (sometimes limitless) max energy. Speaking of upgrades...

Finding and Upgrading Special Weapons

Getting Special Weapons in both games is a very simple "find item" system. They gate the stronger weapons from the player by simply putting the items needed to create the weapons later into the game. Some items may need to be examined by Roll before they can be used, such as blueprints.

Items can be obtained while digging the ruins, completing sidequests, or by simply progressing through the story. One notorious sidequest is the 100 question quiz in Mega Man Legends 2, which was incredibly difficult before the proliferation of the internet.

In both games, upgrading Special Weapons is a very simple process. You get money throughout the game, and upgrading weapons in various capacities costs money. No crafting, no story walls, nothing. If you want to grind for zenny and throw it at an early game weapon to make it super strong, you can!

Weapons can be upgraded in varying degrees of Attack, Energy, Range, and Rapid. One last stat,"Special", was a unique stat for some weapons. This allowed you to upgrade the homing abilities of the homing missile and other properties of weapons that would be useful but don't fall into the other categories. Not every weapon could be upgraded in every stat, such as the Grand Grenade which couldn't be upgraded in rapid because only one can be on screen at once.

Regardless of if you're playing Legends 1 or Legends 2, odds are you found a special weapon you liked and ended up using it. In Legends 2, the late game "Shining Laser" is so absurdly powerful that it's hard to imagine using anything else. However, both games have a lot of unique weapons that would be fun to use if you could justify bringing them with you.

ASH's Special Weapon Design

The July 2020 Release

In July 2020, we released a tech demo for ASH showing off the new engine. It included four special weapons and some consumable items. The Special Weapons each shared a single energy bar, but in exchange you could use all four at will by simply swapping weapons as you played. Because the demo only had a single ruin test, there were no upgrades or anything, but you did have to find the special weapons, which were all hidden throughout the ruin in various chests.

The problem with the design is that it didn't really fix what we wanted to fix. We wanted to let players bring multiple weapons into the ruin in a limited capacity so that they could bring favorites, utilities, and powerful weapons. A base limit of four seemed like a good idea to fix it, but the same issues cropped up. Players mostly relied on their buster and a "favorite", not wanting to use precious weapon energy on the weapons they didn't like.

But, we noticed another trend - players were more likely to use the consumable grenades as an optional approach as using those didn't inhibit them from using other weapons.

Adjusting for the Next Release

We've done a few things in order to try to get special weapons to work better for players. Firstly, the special weapon energy bar is no longer shared between weapons. Each weapon gets its own bar, so using a utility weapon like a drill to break a wall won't take up precious energy from your Rocket Launcher which might be needed in an emergency.

We've also adjusted drops in accordance, allowing players to use a mix of weapons and the buster in order to maintain energy for weapons. If your equipped weapon is full of special weapon energy and you pick up a small energy capsule, it will automatically refill your lowest energy weapon.

Currently as we're testing builds now, there are no upgrades to weapons, but we have a few ideas we'd like to detail a bit.

Scavenging and Digging For Upgrades
This is a rather simple concept that fits into the Legends universe pretty well, and draws off of how the weapons are crafted in the Legends games.

Instead of just finding parts to craft the base weapons, we could also use more advanced parts to potentially upgrade a special weapon. Maybe an upgrade to the Machine Buster requires a rapid-fire cannon from a late game Reaverbot. These upgrades would be a one-time cost, but spare parts could go toward replenishing consumables, like grenades.

We also expect to allow players to bypass part requirements by paying large amounts of Zenny, just in case you can't seem to figure out where to find that part you need. Not all parts may be directly from Reaverbots, but also hidden as parts of ruin machinery, or just hidden in chests!

Multiple Upgrade Paths
Something that Vector has been toying with was the idea of multiple upgrade paths for weapons. Imagine being able to take the current Rocket Launcher and have the option of a "three rocket" firing mode that does greater damage and has a bigger damage radius, or going a different route and upgrading it with a homing unit that allows the rocket to seek out the nearest enemy if you're going to miss.

Each of these upgrades might require a specific "important" item or a part from a rare/boss Reaverbot hidden deep in the ruins.  You can create all three of the upgrade paths once you have the necessary items, but you can only bring one per dig as they are modifications to the same weapon.

Reaverbot Tiers and "Special Drops"
Because most overworld technology is based on the technology of Reaverbots, that means that technology comes from Reaverbots. Sometimes blowing up a Reaverbot may not be the best way to get pristine parts. Managing to destroy a Reaverbot without blowing it up may yield more parts or rarer parts.

As well, stronger Reaverbots would have better rewards. While it's obviously a "cost" saving measure to use multiple tiers of the same Reaverbot class, we plan to integrate it into gameplay on multiple facets. Just note that these aren't just recolors with more health, each tier of Reaverbot will have unique behaviors, armor classes, and attacks.

Utilities Versus Weapons
It sucks playing Mega Man Legends 1/2 and finding a wall you can't go through because you chose to bring the Ground Crawler instead of Drill Arm.

While increasing the number of slots does help the situation, another option is to simply separate utilities and weapons completely. Have a separate slot for utilities so they aren't competing for the same spot. We're also toying with the ability to swap weapons within the ruin itself in various "safe rooms" that would allow for healing as well.

In Conclusion

In the end, we're not as worried about things like balance or making sure that the players are playing the game the way we intend right now. We want to make sure that the game is fun and that the player has options. Nothing we wrote here is finalized, and we're going to be listening to feedback on the current and future test builds we release.

As development continues, we'll be adding more special weapons and filling out the rest of the upgrade/procurement systems. Future demos should have more to play with, so please keep tuned!

Mega Man Legends, and especially Mega Man Legends 2, were designed right before the era of the modern third person shooter. As such, the combat in the games still feel fairly unique, if not a bit dated due to being replaced soon after. Mega Man Legends 2 even has a proto dual stick shooter setup with Control Type D that would be perfected in later third person shooters.

Simply ignoring what Mega Man Legends 1 and 2 did and designing a modern Third Person Shooter wouldn't do justice for the games. At their core, Mega Man Legends 1 and 2 were lock-on shooters on a console where one of the primary controllers that most people used only had a directional pad. Meanwhile, ASH has modern controllers, motion controllers, and Keyboard/Mouse to worry about. Creating a design that satisfies all needs has been, and is going to be a challenge throughout development.

An Ordinary Digger

Mega Man sort of blasted through Reaverbots with ease, especially in Legends 2 where he was an older, more experienced digger that was possibly superhuman due to his creation as a Purifier Unit. As such, it's not too absurd to think that Mega Man was not only a great digger, he was beyond anything expected of a carbon digger.

Lexi is not Mega Man. She won't be lifting up Gorubeshus with one hand and tossing them halfway across the room. She might not have the best armor, equipment, and her island. Combat with individual Reaverbots should be a bit more thoughtful and interesting, rather than just being cannonfodder - at least at first.

These are some of the ideas that has pushed ASH's combat in the direction of manual aim, and making Reaverbots and their behaviors more complex in general. They will stalk you, they will chase you, and they will attack relentlessly once disturbed.

Once you've engaged with a Reaverbot, you're expected to make your shots count or potentially perish.

Breaking Through

With limited tools and tougher Reaverbots, ASH has added more ways for players to take down Reaverbots and gain an advantage. One new addition is the idea of "Armor Classes".

Essentially, different Reaverbots (and even different parts of Reaverbots!) can have thicker/weaker armor compared to other Reaverbots. If you have a strong enough buster, you can not only damage the Reaverbot, but also damage the armor in that area.

If you damage the armor enough, eventually you can expose a weakspot that can deal tremendous bonus damage to the Reaverbot!

On a Zakobon in the current game, a shot that hits these spots does triple damage! Using these spots can help you take down Reaverbots before they can strike back.

Note that not all weakness require piercing armor. Mirocs take bonus damage from head shots. Also, some armor classes can't be pierced with normal weapons no matter what, like a Gorubeshu's shield.

Parts Have Functionality Too!

Trying to shoot a Reaverbot is now a bit more complicated thanks to armor classes and damaging armor. However, there's another system going on underneath this - Part Functionality.

Take for instance our Zakobon. Zakobons are fairly simple Reaverbots, but they have a few different attacks and functionality. Zakobons also use their antenna to communicate to other Reaverbots, and with a well placed shot to the top of their head, you can cut off their ability to call for help!

Our 2nd Tier Zakobon has a new behavior not present in the classic green Zakobon. If it's hit when not doing another action, it will immediately do an evasive spin to prevent further damage and reflect shots. This makes quick takedowns incredibly difficult and will often allow other Reaverbots to join the battle. But, if you can damage their legs enough, you can take away their ability to spin and slow down their overall movement speed!

Every Reaverbot will have unique interactions with armor and internal damage. Some parts might be so important that damaging them can shut down the Reaverbot outright. If you shoot a Reaverbot in their eye, you can temporarily blind them to make a speedy escape. Some reaverbots can even be taken down in one precise shot!

Lock-On or Not?

With all of this talk of precision shooting and aiming, another question comes up. What happens to the series' lock-on? In our current demo, there is no lock-on functionality. However, that has caused a rather annoying situation - Keyboard and Mouse has much higher precision than a dual stick controller.

A lot of players prefer using a controller, and we don't want controller players to feel like they're at a disadvantage. Right now, we're considering a few things, which might be unique to when a player is using a controller.

• A lock-on system where a player can lock-on to a Reaverbot and then precise aim with the camera stick.
• Gyro aiming for players using Switch Pro Controllers, Dual-Shock 4/5, and other motion supported controllers.
• Aim assistance that helps players make tough shots without being too intrusive.

One or more of these options will likely be present in the future. If any of them are chosen, we'll likely allow for turning them on or off so the player can customize their experience.

Conclusion

In the end, we're very happy with how ASH plays in our demo, but we're also acutely aware that playing well within a short demo doesn't mean it'll work in the full game. We'll continue iterating on our ideas and be open to wholesale changes if necessary. Combat is just one part of the game, and we've got a whole lot of work to do in order to put everything together.

Unlike a lot of modern games, Project ASH uses a custom game engine. That isn't to say that every little thing in ASH is custom - there are a couple of off-the-shelf solutions used for input (such as SDL) and we currently use Steam Audio as our 3D audio solution.

However, a lot of our resources has gone into building our custom game engine, and it's one of the reasons that there has been a lot of time since our last release and we haven't been able to show too much.  We've teased a few screenshots here and there, but due to the incomplete nature of having to build everything we haven't posted too much.

One of the reasons that the License test was so limited was that the engine was solely tailored around accomplishing it. There was so much barely finished, barely started, and barely working that it is a miracle the launch went as smoothly as it did. While a few people had bugs, and a lot of people couldn't run it due to our choice to use Vulkan as our only graphics API, the launch went relatively smoothly for those that did get to play it.

Things are going pretty well overall, and we're happy with the direction of the engine. But a lot of people have asked us in the past: Why use a custom engine? Well, there's a simple answer.  Our coder, Vector025, prefers being able to solve problems instead of work-around them.  By using a custom engine it allows us to be completely in control of everything. There is no problem we can't solve, as we can literally design the engine around solving any issues that come up.

Still, choosing a custom engine has made our development path a lot different, and it makes game development a lot more experimental.

Building From the Ground Up

Building a custom engine has a lot of benefits, but it also brings forth a ton of challenges. There are a lot of things that are simply free when using Unreal or Unity that are instead tremendous efforts for us. All of ASH's physics, rendering, and AI routines are entirely custom. There aren't going to be model exporters for our engine, we instead have to write our own scripts or support existing ones. The entire process of creating assets for ASH is up to us to create and streamline. This is a lot different than something like Unreal or Unity, where importing/exporting models from a variety of editors is just a given.

We're also working on a much lower level than you would need to for most engines. One of the biggest decisions we made with the previous demo was to use the cutting edge Graphics API, Vulkan, rather than the older, more limited OpenGL. This meant that many older graphics cards didn't support ASH, and it turns out a lot of Mega Man Legends fans didn't have cutting edge computers. This misstep resulted in a lot of effort being poured into a second renderer that used OpenGL instead of Vulkan, so that users on older machines at least had a chance to play it.

Something like this is a tremendous maintenance cost, and while we're working on ASH, OpenGL ends up broken a lot of the time. But, when it comes time for our next release, having OpenGL working means we'll be able to support more machines and give people more options.

In terms of graphics, stylization, and rendering, all of the tech powering ASH's engine is essentially custom. We've had to figure out how we want things to look and feel without much for guidelines. Stuff like creating lighting solutions and algorithms, then figuring out how we want to light areas has been a learning experience. What lighting features do we need? Will we need to cel-shade characters/levels? These questions are ongoing in some cases, but we continue to march forward nevertheless!

Learning Yourself

ASH is a throwback to a different era of games. Mega Man Legends is a classically designed game: It's weird, it's built weird, the pacing is weird. But we love it for what it is. It was built in an era where the developers weren't exactly sure what they were doing and had to come up with ideas and solutions as they went. It's very hard to see a game with Mega Man Legends' control scheme releasing in the modern era, as everything has been more-or-less standardized.

As we develop the project, we keep in mind that it's okay to be weird. Our solutions don't have to be normal. We don't want to be a modern game. Whether it be gameplay, graphics, AI, or anything else, we're just kind of winging it and seeing what we find good or fun.

The engine itself is tailored toward how Mega Man Legends plays:

• Designed to handle small, isolated areas with some persistence between rooms.
• Renderer able to dynamically light/shadow moving objects within small rooms without them sticking out. By using realtime Global Illumination, we can seamlessly blend dynamic objects with static geometry.
• Highly detailed collision detection to allow for part destruction and bonus damage on Reaverbots/Mechs
• Ragdoll physics for Reaverbots/characters to introduce a dynamic element to combat.

If you haven't noticed, almost all the engine features are biased toward the ruin. And there's a good reason for that - we haven't done much work on the overworld. In order to handle the bigger areas, stuff like realtime global illumination can be disabled since it won't matter quite as much. While we have done some things to make sure sprawling, open areas can be supported, a lot of the other features needed for the overworld have been put on the back burner.

And that style of development really fits a custom engine. We literally have nothing to work from. No direction an engine is pushing us. Unreal and Unity specialize in certain types of rendering, certain types of games, and certain types of workflow. We're just out here trying to make a game and letting it take us where it will. Is it the most efficient workflow? Absolutely not.

But, we created a fun framework for a Mega Man Legends fangame that we enjoy playing and want to make bigger and better over time. We'll dive into the details of some of the engine features we've worked on and how they affect the game, so stay tuned!

Every game needs a protagonist. Whether you choose a blank slate that the player then personifies with dialogue options, a silent hero, a wild character that causes chaos, or something in-between, the choice you make will shape your game. Making a proper protagonist for Project ASH has been a rather long and arduous process that has gone through many revisions, personalities, and designs.

A question we've been asked a few times is, "Why bother making a Mega Man Legends fangame if you aren't going to play as Mega Man?" That's a valid question. A lot of Legends fans are clamoring for a conclusion to the series and to finally get Mega Man off the moon.

We can't do that, though; any fangame that tries to do that will inevitably be obsolete when Mega Man Legends 3 eventually happens. It has to happen, right?

Either way, I personally find the lore of the Legends series intriguing. On one side you have the mysteries of The System and its enigmatic units bound by ancient logic. Then you have the diggers, prodding at an underground world for fame, fortune, and more. Lastly, there are tons of third parties like pirates plundering treasure and simple civilians trying to live out their lives.

It's hard not to see the potential for more stories within the world, and that's why we're here!

With Project ASH, I want to tell a story that doesn't just exist in the Legends world, but dives into details that were glossed over by the main games and are unlikely to be explored in future titles. I want to tell a story that can stand on its own without having played Legends 1, 2, or Misadventures of Tron Bonne.

However, for those that have played those games, I want them to feel like this game doesn't just have a Legends paint job.  I want it to fee like it exists in that world, with certain events, backdrops, or even scenes having extra meaning knowing how they fit into the other games. I believe that there are stronger stories to be told in that universe than simply getting Mega Man off the moon and taking a wild guess where the story would go next.

That's why Project ASH does not star Mega Man. With that out of the way, let us introduce you to the protagonist of ASH, Lexi.

Note that all designs shown in this series are a work-in-progress, and may change before the final product.

Fruits of a Digging Family

Despite being a teenager, Lexi is already a seasoned digger that as shown her mettle within the machine-filled labyrinths time and time again. With her father being a digger, she got plenty of early exposure to the digging life and it has given her the comfort and confidence to succeed. Though she isn't exactly considered a premiere digger among her cohorts, she is well trusted by the island's Guildmaster to get the job done.

As a veteran, she's trusted by her island's digging guild to handle jobs and has clearance for much of the island's ruins. Her younger brother, Finn, acts as her dedicated spotter that leads her through dangerous areas. While Finn would sometimes prefer a more methodical way of doing things, Lexi will all too often rush into situations and figure out what to do later.

Unlike some of the other diggers that rely on raw strength, Lexi more relies on athleticism and speed to complement her buster. She might not be picking up large reaverbots and tossing them around, but she can confound them with big leaps, long rolls, or bouncing off walls while avoiding their many attacks.

Tragedy Beneath the Surface

What motivates a digger? For Lexi, digging is just natural to her, but she has her own reasons for trying to become a stronger digger.

Nearly one decade ago, Lexi's father disappeared in the ruins... with her by his side. Despite the massive search effort, days became weeks and hope became slim for finding either of them.

Somehow, Lexi was found unharmed in one of the upper floors of the ruin, a place that diggers had been through many times in the early days of the search. This was a miraculous turn of events, but unfortunately her father was never found.

As she grew older, Lexi continued to wonder what happened during that dig and why she survived. She continues to the present day to try and dig deeper and uncover the secrets of the island's massive ruin network. If she's ever going to succeed, she's going to have to have to get stronger, upgrade her gear, and earn clearance to the most dangerous areas of the ruin.

Family, Friends, and Foes

Becoming a legendary digger alone would be near impossible, so Lexi often relies on her friends and family for additional help. While her mother isn't thrilled about Lexi following in her father's footsteps, she knows that there is little she can do to stop her daughter.

A digger also needs upgrades, and for that she has her friend Mally. Adopted by the Guildmaster, Mally spends pretty much all her time around the Junk Shop and has become a formidable mechanic. Lexi, Finn, and Mally make up a small digging crew, and share the rewards of successful digs on occasions.

But not everyone on the island is happy about diggers and how they treat the underground world. A sect of the island known as The Deholonists are against the use of Holon (ruin) technology, and blames Lexi and the other diggers for the increasing reaverbot activity on the surface. Though they rely on inferior man-made technology, they will often skirmish with diggers on the outskirts of the island.

If the Deholonists weren't enough, sometimes even the other diggers can be rivals, too. Lexi often finds herself competing with the Guildmaster's grandson, Rolan, in order to get the premiere jobs. Completing guild jobs, making money, and upgrading her license is the only way forward, so sometimes you can't just be good enough. You have to be better than your contemporaries.

What Makes a Digger?

Standing in the shadow of her father's infamous accomplishments, she has to wonder: what makes a digger great? She isn't the surest shot, she doesn't have the raw strength of older diggers, and her equipment is outdated hardware being pushed to its very limit through numerous upgrades.

If she's ever to reach her goals, she'll have to find a way to break through and become a truly great digger that goes to depths that only one digger has ever traveled before: her father.

Hey everyone!  It's been a while since we updated the website. It hasn't been due to a lack of progress on the game - we've been hard at work getting ready for the next release the past year and a half. Unfortunately, due to issues like Covid and major surgeries to core team members among other things, some responsibilities were left to the wayside. One of those things was the website itself, which we neglected.

As an apology for the long period of radio silence, we're announcing that by the end of the year, we will have our next major release. The focus of this release will be demoing a much more complete game engine, texture work, new models, and giving players a better idea of what the game will look and feel like when it is finished.

2022 Demo Features

• Enhanced Rendering Engine with optional real-time Global Illumination.
• A Fully Textured Ruin Environment
• New character models and portraits
• New animations and gameplay features
• Buster Parts with unique effects
• OpenGL Support
• New Rooms, Puzzles, and Traps
• More Reaverbots

Due to time constraints, some of these features might be subject to change.

Website Upgrades and Updates!

We've recently upgraded our website infrastructure and along with it, we're adding some new pages and articles in the coming weeks. A new "About" page will have general information on the project and team and a FAQ will give some quick answers to common questions.

In the coming weeks, we'll be running new articles detailing the engine upgrades, Project ASH's characters and story, and some of the game elements we're adding or planning to add to the mix to create a modern experience with the same charm of the older games. We'll be starting off the articles with a look at ASH's protagonist - Lexi!

As with any project with ambitious goals, we're not going to be doing it alone. As a fangame, we don't have the budget to pay for a ton of artists, graphics designers or anything like that. In fact, right now most on the people contributing to the project are covering more than a single role!  That's normal, but, for those of you interested in the project, we're looking for help!

The good news?  We have some of the biggest fires put out. Our lead programmer, Vector, has programmed us a custom made engine for ASH that gives us the freedom to do whatever we want without the constraints or bloat of modern plug and play engines. Our audio engineer, Easy93, not only makes sounds but balances the audio so that things will always sound crisp and clear. We also have additional help from longstanding community members that have helped provide modeling, level design, and art advice in order to get us this far. However, in order to make the leap from tech demo to full fledged game, we're going to need to fill a lot of holes and it's going to take some time.

As a bit of a way to tide things over while we build up our next release, we've decided to start putting out some older content.  As such, we've added MMLEx 5.29 to the downloads page.  It's not much, but it can give a glimpse to what was a prototype to the original ASH engine.  Enjoy.

What are we after?

While it's obvious we won't be able to reach our goals with just the people around the project, there are a few areas where we're lacking that are directly impacting development speed and stretching people thin.

Character and Environmental Concept Artists

Making a new game requires a lot of new art. While working from the Mega Man Legends series has given us a leg up over an original project, there's still a lot of work to be done. From characters, to new reaverbots, ruins, buildings, the island, and much, much more, we're going to need a lot of art!

Concept art done for Lexi's brother and her spotter, Finn. Art done by Cafechan.

Right now, an environmental artist could help speed things up greatly, especially when it comes to the visual design of ruins. We haven't even started the 3D work on our above ground world, so there's a ton that needs to be investigated there.

Unlike other kinds of art, concept artists aren't necessarily required to stick to a single style. Sometimes it can even help to get multiple styles. However, consider that the final project is meant to take place in the Mega Man Legends universe, so we have some framework toward how we want the final project to look. Having lots of artwork to work from eases the creative strain on 3D modelers and helps everyone see what something is going to look like before a ton of work is put into making the finished version.

Texture Artists

You might have noticed that we didn't have many textures in our License Test demo. That was intentional - we simply didn't have the resources to texture the whole place. Most of the textures we had were from previous iterations of the project, and we decided it'd be best to make it look incomplete on purpose as not to give off any false promises.

We'll need environmental textures, and textures for models, such as characters and reaverbots. Our engine will continue to evolve and we can add features as necessary to assist artists. Our art style isn't very defined yet and we're probably going to try different directions in order to create a pleasing look that fits the Legends world.

3D Animator

We don't currently have a dedicated 3D animator. In order to add in new movement techniques, enemies, and even various objects, having someone experienced in animation and handling rigs would help a lot.

It would streamline things greatly to have someone handling animation instead of constantly pulling people off of other things to make WIP animations just to get something into the game. There are also some animations that we just don't know how to handle, such as the wall jump.

Models are currently exported from Blender into a custom format for our engine.

3D Object/Environmental Artists

Our ruins were also kept fairly simple in the modeling department. That's because we had an audio engineer doing a majority of the ruins!  Being able to model 3D environments and objects would allow us to make a much more complete look without having to rely on other people to pull double duty.

Our engine currently supports files from Blender using a custom built exporter. It's possible we could support other modeling programs as needed, however.  We would show an example, but we're so lacking there isn't really anything to show!

Level and Puzzle Designers

Okay, you probably understand by now that our core team may be a little lacking in the art department. Let's actually get to something where you don't have to be a great artist to contribute.

Beyond just looks, in order to bring the world of Mega Man Legends to life, you need to have well designed ruins. We're looking to evolve the gameplay beyond what was explored in the original Playstation titles, with more devious puzzles and an intricate ruin network more akin to modern series, such as Metroid Prime. We want tons of hidden secrets and paths for players to keep finding as they explore the ruins and make it their home.

A look ahead

If you're looking to assist ASH and we didn't list something you're good at, still message us.  This is just a quick overview of a couple of positions we know we need.  Our next demo is going try to expand things in every direction

With our next demo, we plan to try to give players a more complete look at ASH. There may not be a tremendous amount of content, but we plan to finish more of the gameplay concepts and push forward with the visual design and engine. We want to give a real glimpse of the project with more polish that you'd expect from a completed game and less of that tech demo feel. If you want to be a part of our team, you can message us on our twitter or join our Discord Server!

After a very long, arduous road, we're proud to announce our first public release of the ASH project: The License Test!

We know it's been a while and this may not seem like much, but the project went on a long hiatus  and we've only recently brought things back up to speed.  Compared to our videos from nearly a decade ago, ASH runs on a new Vulkan powered custom engine.

Download it here and enjoy! Can you get the legendary SSS License Rating?

Minimum Requirements:

• Windows 7 64-bit or newer or Wine for support on Linux
• Vulkan-Capable Graphics Card
• x86-64 Processor
• At least 1 GB of Free Hard Disk Space
• 2 GB of RAM
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 x86 Runtime. Most computers will have this already from other software.

The game executable is in bin/release/ASH.exe.

While the game is not very demanding overall, due to the engine still being in development there are a few bottlenecks. Notably, if an enemy ragdoll physics can cause extreme slowdown when knocked into tight spaces. The smoke rendering is a source of GPU slowdown and gets much worse at higher resolutions. The more powerful your computer, the less likely these are to cause issues.

These issues will be resolved in later releases as things are optimized.

Special thanks to anyone and everyone that has stuck with the project throughout these years.  We hope you enjoy this small slice of the game we're making.

Things might look a bit barren for a while as we set things up.  Our initial focus has been on getting the game itself up and running and a lot of things like Social Media, Website Infrastructure, and just about everything else was put on the backburner.  Now that we feel confident about the game itself, we've started putting everything together.

Be patient and we'll get things looking nice!