Fans of, well, fan games should take notice of the Mega Man riff, Mega Maker, launching next week. Not just a straight platformer, this lets you create your own Mega levels, more than a bit like Nintendo’s Super Mario Maker (Wii U, 3DS). The trailer below shows the variety of assets used to make those levels, taken from the first six Mega Man games, original chiptune music tracks, and community level sharing.
According to the official website, the creator WreckingPrograms has been working on the project since September 2016, beginning as a one-man show and gradually growing in scale and team size. It’s been made in the custom Mega Engine for Game Maker, which allows for gradual bug patches and additional content down the road.
Mega Maker will not require payment to download, so as to avoid infringing on Capcom’s intellectual properties (of which the graphical assets do), but it will have a Patreon with a $15 a month goal to upkeep its servers.
There have been several releases to let fans make Mega Man levels in the past, from PSP’s Mega Man: Powered Up‘s side mode to the cancelled Mega Man Universe that died in 2011 before it could release. As this new title is a fan game, one may worry about it incurring Capcom’s wrath, as such games have been treated unkindly of late (as seen with Nintendo pulling the plug on many fan games in the last year). Capcom has a kinder stance on fan games, as Mega Man 2.5D survives and it officially sanctioned the fan-made Street Fighter X Mega Man five years ago.
