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Shang Mu Architect

General Information




Premise


Shang Mu Architect is an unofficial stage builder fan game, set after the events of the first Freedom Planet. To train a new generation of warriors for future invasions of Avalice, Savvy Marigold is tasked with expanding Shang Mu Academy's battle arenas and facilities.

She later recruits Lilac, Carol, and Milla, to assist in testing the safety (and fairness) of the challenges would-be warriors might face in the newly upgraded academy.

Hey, where do you think you're going?! You landed the job too! That's right! As Ms. Marigold's assistant architect in training, it is your responsibility to design new acrobatic challenges and simulated combat scenarios for Shang Mu Academy's students. The fate of Avalice depends on it!

Screenshot 2021-8-7 18-34-51-0.png


Shang Mu Architect is a full-featured simulation of Freedom Planet 1's game engine, lovingly rebuilt from scratch over the past four years, and expanded on in entirely new ways! This was all done in the name of enabling people to make their own Freedom Planet levels, which was a frequently-discussed daydream of the GalaxyTrail community. A dream that's being realized, piece-by-piece!

SMA is still actively receiving updates as it reaches its 1.1 milestone goal. This fan game's milestones include all new original mini-bosses, multi-map stages, more tile sets, original enemies, and many more features yet to come!

If you discover any bugs and would like to report them, as well as feature-requests, please visit our GitHub issue tracker for the game! Our community members will label your bug reports by severity/priority as the main developer addresses them.


Want to keep up-to-date on upcoming updates for Shang Mu Architect? Follow the main developer on Twitter!


Want to talk about Shang Mu Architect with other players, and share your stages with everyone? We have an actively growing Discord community, and we are more than happy to see what you create!

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Beyond getting stuck in the ceiling in various corners, I was struck that all the levels included with the game felt more like engine tests or kaizo levels than proper Freedom Planet levels. Neither really appealed to someone like me who hasn't played Freedom Planet in years but just wanted to be dazzled by some new possibilities. Some important pieces looked present, but it was hard to know from looking at that whether the editor could scale properly and make full size levels with proper layouts/gameplay. Without that initial lure, it was hard for me to motivate myself to put in the effort to seek out other levels that other people might hypothetically have made--the game not providing any direct way of finding them--or to try using the editor myself, to discover what unknown limitations there might be.
 
Beyond getting stuck in the ceiling in various corners, I was struck that all the levels included with the game felt more like engine tests or kaizo levels than proper Freedom Planet levels. Neither really appealed to someone like me who hasn't played Freedom Planet in years but just wanted to be dazzled by some new possibilities. Some important pieces looked present, but it was hard to know from looking at that whether the editor could scale properly and make full size levels with proper layouts/gameplay. Without that initial lure, it was hard for me to motivate myself to put in the effort to seek out other levels that other people might hypothetically have made--the game not providing any direct way of finding them--or to try using the editor myself, to discover what unknown limitations there might be.
It's really hard to gauge the game's identity as it is now, yes. Even as the main fan developer, I agree with this post.

In a way, you could see its current public distribution as "early access", because it's been in dev for so long that I got tired of keeping it to myself. And I've benefited so much from the extra feedback that releasing it has provided! People have been so kind with their suggestions and even contributions. (Our main composer, benjistring, approached me after our public reveal, for instance!)

The reason I say that is because our 1.1 milestone is where the game will be what I want it to be: A full-fledged Freedom Planet stage builder with a short-and-sweet story mode, complete with FP1-styled hub areas and NPCs to talk to.

This means a proper built-in package of levels that put all of SMA's various gimmicks on display through fun, engaging levels that follow FP's stage design conventions, and consequentially, shows users what is possible with the editor. (As well as exciting event-based sequences within the stages exclusive to story mode. Think of all the times Serpentine appearead in-game in FP1! Things like this.)

As the package stands for now, there's plenty of potential for good, fun levels to be made with this thing already, and there's a lot of appeal in tasting the cookie dough for many people, but that's not going to be for everyone, and that's okay.

So, if more people would rather wait for the final 1.1 version of the game, I totally understand that. You're not wrong to feel this way about the current iteration of the game, which despite all of its functionality, may as well count for a demo of what it will become.
 

Don't attack upwards here, I guess.
This is an unfortunate consequence of the game, from the earliest point in the project, having a distinction between flat surfaces and sloped surfaces. There are three ways I'm currently prototyping to unify the two surface types, so that the game's collisions are more robust, and thus, have less bust, like the edge case in your screenshot.

Refactoring the flat surfaces will dramatically improve Lilac's interactions with terrain overall, as well, because of all three characters, she make the in-fighting between the two surface types the most evident!

Slope-based surfaces are very hard to program in games like this, especially if your knowledge of trig is as limited as mine. But, I've learned a lot since I started working on SMA, and I do plan on hitting the math books again now that we've got the game this far.

I will desperately need that knowledge if I ever give 3D game dev a try anyway; it would be nonsensical to not take advantage of all of these free online resources available to me, especially when my current project could stand to benefit so much from it!
 
I have always wanted a way to play Freedom Planet in 4:3 aspect ratio. Is this a tool that might make that possible? Or open up the door to making that possible down the line?
 
I have always wanted a way to play Freedom Planet in 4:3 aspect ratio. Is this a tool that might make that possible? Or open up the door to making that possible down the line?
This is a brand new fan game separate from Freedom Planet 1! It's not a mod, nor was it possible to make Shang Mu Architect as a mod; it's why I spent four years rebuilding FP1's engine from scratch.

You may need to look into other tools like Cheat Engine, to modify the positions of FP1's HUD elements so that it looks correct in 4:3, such as centering all of the HUD elements closer together, as well as possibly hacking the camera's "seek ahead" mechanic to compensate for the narrower horizontal space of 4:3.
 
Hell, this game is amazing.
It's include,
- Well-made, Almost as Offical Characters Arts
- Beautiful Soundtracks
- Like the title/desc., Its a stage creators games




i love it
 

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