CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Zuma Blitz Remake

If you would like to contribute to the project, please contact me on Discord: Shambles#3117. You can also join the Sphere Matchers Discord server, verify yourself, and find the "Zuma Blitz Remake" thread.

Cloning

If you are new to Git, or are uncomfortable with command-line, it is recommended to download GitHub Desktop.

1. Fork the repository.
2. Clone your fork.
3. Start testing, or editing code/assets.

Code

Since ZBR will be implementing features from Zuma Blitz that OpenSMCE does not have, you may want to edit the codebase in order for things to, well... work!

As this project is based on OpenSMCE, please look at OpenSMCE's contribution guidelines.

Keep in mind that you should mark any code that is only useful for Zuma Blitz Remake, like so:

-- FORK-SPECIFIC CODE: My code that only makes sense on this fork.
_Game:getCurrentProfile():getPowerLevel("sands_of_time")

Assets

See also: ZumaBlitzRemake/ZumaBlitzAssetRetrieval

This will be argurably the hardest part of contributing to the project. While we have found the initial release SWF of Kroakatoa Island, there is still much to be found...

Asset Lists

List of assets that we currently have in possession:

• These board backgrounds in particular have been found, edited and/or upscaled:
  • Journey to Kroakatoa
  • Journey to Kroakatoa (Easter variant)
  • Zulu Bravado
  • Crab Board
  • Bronze Board
  • Clockwork Board
  • Octupus Board
  • Splish Splash
  • Christmas Kroakatoa Creeper Copse
  • Smooth Creamy
  • Summer Solstice
  • FALLing Skies
  • Life's A Beach
  • Major Mouthful
  • Mine Board
  • Platter Board
  • Reef Madness
  • Sea Queen
  • Sea Turtles Board
  • Snakes Board
• In-game HUD
• Spirit Animals (only from Customer Support page; bar their Hot Frog & hot frog transition states and eyeblinks)
• Shooter eyeblink images; these differ from the Frogatar, the Spirit Animal, Cannons powerup state, and Hot Frog state.
• Sound effects
• Majority of UI assets (buttons, dialog boxes...)
• Release/scrapped frogatars

List of assets we are in need of are the following:

• Raw Spirit Animal assets
• These board backgrounds in particular have been found either only with balls/UI/frogs blocking the image, no edits done for them yet and/or low-quality:
  • Many boards, both Kroakatoa and Beta, including but not limited to:
    • One Giant Leap
    • Valentine's Day
    • Sweet Shot
    • Eagle Wings
    • Progressive Board
    • Shamrock Board
    • Trailblazer
    • Inward Falls
    • Hot Springs
    • Kroakatoa Lava Board
    • Thanksgiving Board
    • Spiral Gateway
    • These boards will be ported and edited accordingly in order to be playable, if they are from the Beta/Pre-Kroakatoa version.
• Other lost assets
  • Lost SWF files
    • Congrats
    • DailySpin
    • ExchangeDialog
    • LockedPowers
    • Migration SWFs (Arriving, Packing, Splash, Travelling)
    • Promotion
    • PurchaseDialog
    • Shop
    • Shrines
    • SkillClass
    • Splash
    • Stats
  • Frogatars (Cobalt Frog, Werefrog, Pink Frog, etc.) were added circa 2014 and was loaded from their servers, assumedly directly instead of dedicated SWF files.
  • Boards were loaded server-side and not as SWF files. Likely because a Fiddler session from March 2011 revealed that the level files (and levels.xml) were outside SWF files.

If you have any doubts or questions regarding the status of a specific asset, please contact us.

Regarding AI Tools & Asset Recreation

While AI upscalers are accepted, such as Waifu2x and ESRGAN, please refrain from using inpainters or outpainters. The model you may have used may have sampled from works that was taken without permission.

Regardless, manually outpainting via using the Photoshop brush strokes and the Content Aware tools (fill, healing brush, patch, etc) may be more of an appropriate and "accurate" approach since the AI won't get much context around what should be outpainted, beyond prompts and the image source. Furthermore, the resulting images may have unwanted artifacts and may be of lower resolution, assuming you are using a site that hosts the AI tool and not a powerful computer that you own.

Gameplay Mechanics

These have been researched mostly on Brendan Chan's Zuma Blitz blog and PopCap's ZB Customer Support page.

You are free to refine what we currently have right now via these and gameplay footage on YouTube.

We will be following the mechanics from Kroakatoa, so if you are going to suggest something such as crits or Mastery, forget about it.