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[shaowebb]

You can really see the Shatterhand influence on this. Was very pleased when their influences were screenshotted and it was included.

 

[SuomiDude]

Not really interested in this type of game, but the backround knowledge and explanation of how things work with NES graphics is very interesting to read. So while I won't spend money on this, I'll still want to say great work guys.

 

[SAB CA]

I wish I could contribute to this, but the only funds I get to spend on gaming for a few months are the ones tucked away as credit at specific retailers!

But I love how lovingly crafted the art of your game is, SriK! While I'd love to see 16 bit pixel work more often in Indie games, I think authentic late-stage 8 bit is also just as precious, if not more so at times.

Also, it's not like most fantastic-looking 16-bit games came out of nowhere. Those creators had NES and Arcade level 8 bit to work out their talent on for years, and even the early 16 bit games looked like 8.bit works with a few more colors and effects. It takes time to get to those Treasure-level spriteworks, especially to make a game worth of assets of that level!

ANYWHO, if I could make a suggestion on one of the things that sticks out as a missing elements of this KS; exactly who is the player character? One of the things that helps in really identifying a game is some type of hooking, iconic character, Icon, logo, etc. Even if your game focuses on the powered suit, and less the guy within it, I'm sure there's SOMETHING about it that could be worthy of promoting.

It was great watching how people instantly were attracted to and promoting things like the Skullgirls Indie Go-Go, or Mighty No.9 and Shovel Knight Kickstarters, though loads of art tributes. I'm sure that had a large hand in how successful they were; they wormed into social media of all types, from Tumblr to Miiverse.

Since you've only got a few days left for funding, why not incentivize some last minute fanart? Get your artist to rough up some design sheets / cinematic style pixel art or animations / handdrawn stuff, so people have something to work from. And then give those who make something based off it Alpha access or something worthy of value (that hopefully "cost" you little). It might help get your game show up in front of people that have never heard of it.

I might not be able to support you monetarily at the moment, but hopefully that idea is worth something!

 

[UncleSporky]

It seems like Batman must move each tile by two pixels then? The effect on a real NES appears to operate at half the refresh rate (looks like 30 fps while the game scrolls at 60).

Probably. Well, it's not really moving the tiles. As was said earlier, the NES background is like a flat sheet of paper, there's no foreground and background. Basically wherever you see those clouds, the game is playing an animated GIF in those tiles. I'd guess that they're moving so quickly so that you don't notice the slight weirdness that they move along at the same speed as everything else when the background scrolls.

Battletoads does a similar thing. This is what its full set of background graphics for level 2 looks like in action:

In the example of Sword Master, you can see that the far background area that scrolls is actually quite small, only 32x32 pixels, but nonetheless it's a lot of space when it comes to NES tiles.

If I remember correctly, Sword Master does its mountain animation by swapping out a whole bank of tiles, which is faster and easier than writing to graphics RAM but also wasteful, since they're using whole banks on that one scroll animation.

Additionally, notice that the places where the mountains are, there are no knobby bits that stick outward that would overlap, as there are above and below the mountains:

If they wanted to overlap the parallax effect with anything, they would need to use sprites synced up with the background, which I believe a couple of games do.

In any case I'm a little skeptical that this effect could actually be done on a NES:

You wouldn't do it like tiles of an animated gif. There is simply too much background there to animate within the NES's limited graphic memory.

If you wanted to do that kind of full screen parallax on a real NES, you would do it like you see in Shatterhand:

This isn't accomplished via the "animated gif" method mentioned above. This is done by timing the rendering of the image very carefully, waiting until you've drawn a certain chunk of the screen from the top down, and then suddenly adjusting the scroll of the image. Imagine you draw a scene like that on paper, and then you cut the paper into three strips, and move the three strips independently of each other so that the bottom part moves the fastest etc.

And the way the NES works, when tiles scroll off one edge of the screen, they immediately scroll back in on the other edge, unless you replace them with new ones. In fact you can see this happening in the Shatterhand gif, that big building scrolls off the left side and comes back in on the right. Meanwhile, with all the interactive stuff at the bottom of the screen, the engine is very quickly replacing stuff that scrolls off on the left with new stuff to come in on the right.

If you wanted to transition to a new parallax background, you could do so, just like with those "foreground" bits. You change them to something else when they scroll just off screen. But the transition would move at the same speed that this chunk of the background is scrolling! It would be really slow, not quick like the end of the tunnel in Steel Assault is. And with the other parallax at the very top, assuming they'd use the same strip method, the transition would follow the speed of those strips as well and be really uneven and weird.

A lot of these NES games with parallax don't really try to transition to anything else. Shatterhand for example just fades out and fades back in on an interior scene.

One way I can think of to try an effect like that on the NES would be to have a full screen vertical stripe of sprites representing the end of the tunnel, and move that along the screen, covering up the fact that you are quickly changing the background tiles behind it as it moves. But that's a lot of sprites, and a lot of tile replacement going on every frame.

Some NES games actually do use a "vertical stripe" method like that to cover up tile replacement artifacts, but they're always there and not used as transitions. I believe Alfred Chicken is one. Notice how in the transition from title screen to gameplay, there is suddenly a black bar on the right side, except for a very tiny strip visible at the top of the screen. But that is super wasteful of a limited sprite budget, since you only have 64 available, and can only display 8 horizontally before you need to start flickering them.

While we're at it, another problematic part of this mythical NES Steel Assault would be this bit:

Like I said, you'd be doing parallax by scrolling each strip of the screen independently, but at this point there are actually TWO strips - the fast moving train and the slow moving background, and the train has transparency over the top of the background. Basically the only way you could do that on the NES is if the whole train was a massive sprite, which is not possible.

However, after leaving the tunnel, it's totally doable, because there is just solid black behind the train part. The black part would be moving at the same speed as the train but you have no way of telling that, because it's just black.

Finally, the HUD at the top wouldn't be able to exist as it does, floating over the background. It would all have to be sprites, and it would just use up too many of them. You can see in all of the other examples, Shatterhand, Little Sampson, and Batman, that the floating HUD is extremely minimal. Same with the Mega Man games. All sprite HUDs, and they count against your drawing limit so you want to use them sparingly. Games like Sword Master, Mario 3, and Castlevania 1 and 3 have that solid black HUD at the top or bottom.

Actually the solid HUD is itself a parallax effect! It's scrolling at a different speed than the rest of the screen. That is, a speed of 0.

Anyway this is not a criticism of Steel Assault at all, they've been very clear about how they're not following the NES specifications exactly, but I just wanted to try to clarify on some stuff.

 

[Vagabundo]

Maybe the Master System could have??

 

[Ninja Dom]

What would be amazing is if they could actually get this game running on a NES, much like what NEO Dev Team do with their games and get them running on actual Neo Geo hardware.

Can Steel Assault run on NES hardware?

I can't back this though. Game and details look fantastic but I would need to play this on a Nintendo console. I don't have a Gaming PC.

 

[Wreck-It Ralph]

I don't have a Gaming PC.

If your computer isn't 20 years old, it can probably run a game like this.

 

[Ninja Dom]

If your computer isn't 20 years old, it can probably run a game like this.

Mac user that isn't running Windows.

 

[SriK]

ANYWHO, if I could make a suggestion on one of the things that sticks out as a missing elements of this KS; exactly who is the player character? One of the things that helps in really identifying a game is some type of hooking, iconic character, Icon, logo, etc. Even if your game focuses on the powered suit, and less the guy within it, I'm sure there's SOMETHING about it that could be worthy of promoting.

...

Hey SAB CA, that's a good idea! I haven't thought too much about the game's characters yet, but we might be able to whip up something.

What would be even more bad-ass.. would be a legit nes version that runs on an actual cartridge!

What would be amazing is if they could actually get this game running on a NES, much like what NEO Dev Team do with their games and get them running on actual Neo Geo hardware.

Can Steel Assault run on NES hardware?

I can't back this though. Game and details look fantastic but I would need to play this on a Nintendo console. I don't have a Gaming PC.

I'm not sure about an actual NES port but you shouldn't need a gaming PC to play this at all hahah.

[awesome post]

I'll probably respond more in depth to this in a bit. One thing I want to note though is that, in my hypothetical vision of that metro background on the NES, I would be swapping ROM banks out rather than manually animating the tiles in code (like Battletoads does, which takes a lot of processing time so it can only be done for a small amount of tiles). And the train wouldn't overlap the green metro background (it'd be overlayed over pure black instead). It's true that the train moving away would present a problem still, but maybe I could also have shifted versions of the "pillar" tiles to hide that? And some NES games have vertical parallax, so maybe it isn't that big of a deal. The HUD is a good point as well, this would need to be retooled entirely.

 

[Ninja Dom]

Hey SriK, nice to see you in the thread.

Would the Steel Assault code run through a NES emulator? That would be pretty cool if it did and another way of distributing the game. You could distribute the game as a paid NES ROM image that people could then load into their NES emulator of choice, regardless of what machine the NES emulator was running on. You would still have a Steam standalone version, of course.

EDIT: Just thought about it further - piracy would be a bitch!!

 

[Cronox]

Hope this kickstarter succeeds.

 

[breakfastchampion]

ANYWHO, if I could make a suggestion on one of the things that sticks out as a missing elements of this KS; exactly who is the player character? One of the things that helps in really identifying a game is some type of hooking, iconic character, Icon, logo, etc. Even if your game focuses on the powered suit, and less the guy within it, I'm sure there's SOMETHING about it that could be worthy of promoting.

Yeah, I like this idea. There are plenty of games with excellent gameplay and relatively obscure/unknown protagonists like Ninja Five-O or Bionic Commando, but having an iconic lead character is a definite boon to the recognizability of the game. I think of the Metal Slug playable characters, or even Solid Snake and how their personalities lend themselves well to the overall experience.

 

[GnawtyDog]

Looks damn good.

 

[SriK]

Thanks Cronox and GnawtyDog!

Also, we're now a Kickstarter staff pick!

Hey SriK, nice to see you in the thread.

Would the Steel Assault code run through a NES emulator? That would be pretty cool if it did and another way of distributing the game. You could distribute the game as a paid NES ROM image that people could then load into their NES emulator of choice, regardless of what machine the NES emulator was running on. You would still have a Steam standalone version, of course.

EDIT: Just thought about it further - piracy would be a bitch!!

The game isn't a NES ROM, so probably not. Honestly, I'm not sure if I'd want to put in the effort to actually make a NES "demake" of Steel Assault (unless it was really limited scope). NES homebrew is incredibly hard, especially when you're pushing and breaking the limitations of the game like we are here. Even really experienced devs like Brad Smith (rainwarrior), who's been in the scene for like 10+ years, aren't attempting to make a huge seamless sidescroller game (Lizard is built on single screens, with no scrolling, and not too much technical flair). We're talking about a "port" (really a complete rewrite) that could take years here, on top of the time required to develop the original PC version of the game.

However, Mac and Linux ports should be possible, since SFML is a cross-platform library (I've tested an earlier build of the game on Linux, but not done anything with Mac yet). This was originally going to be a stretch goal at $10,000, but it seems like we're going to barely reach our goal so I might as well come out and talk about it now. Mac/Linux ports will definitely be a consideration during development, though the PC version is initially being given higher priority. (I've also thought about an iPhone "endless runner" game using the same assets, in the vein of Chelnov, but that's just a pipe dream for now.)

Another pipe dream: I wonder how a Sega Genesis version of the game would run. I spent a significant portion of my late childhood and early-mid teen years tinkering with Sonic ROM hacking and 68K assembly (eventually I made a ROM hack turning Sonic 1 into a Megaman game, complete with aesthetics based off the Sonic Retro Internet forum circa 2009 lol). It's actually how I got introduced to classic game systems and emulation in the first place... lots of nostalgia for me there.

Anyway, I should finish the damn game first before daydreaming about stuff like this! lol

 

[Psxphile]

Taking up that Sunsoft/Taxan/Jaleco spirit... nice. Can't believe this is the first time I'm hearing about this. Backed.

 

[Shaneus]

Thanks Cronox and GnawtyDog!

Also, we're now a Kickstarter staff pick!

Sweet! I'm sure that'll bring in a LOT, actually. Hope it helps enough to get it done.

 

[Tain]

Congrats on the staff pick!

c'mon 8k

 

[UncleSporky]

I'll probably respond more in depth to this in a bit. One thing I want to note though is that, in my hypothetical vision of that metro background on the NES, I would be swapping ROM banks out rather than manually animating the tiles in code (like Battletoads does, which takes a lot of processing time so it can only be done for a small amount of tiles). And the train wouldn't overlap the green metro background (it'd be overlayed over pure black instead). It's true that the train moving away would present a problem still, but maybe I could also have shifted versions of the "pillar" tiles to hide that? And some NES games have vertical parallax, so maybe it isn't that big of a deal. The HUD is a good point as well, this would need to be retooled entirely.

I don't think it's possible to do vertical parallax on the NES in the same style as the Shatterhand example. You can't do "vertical strips of paper," but you can do "animated gif," which is what Battletoads does.

The explanation is a little complicated.

NES software typically alternates between periods where the screen is being drawn and what is known as vblank.

Old CRT TVs (and probably new TVs too?) draw the screen from left to right, top to bottom. When the electron gun reaches the right side of the screen, it has to re-aim itself down one row and at the far left side of the screen again. The short time it takes the gun to aim over there when it is not actively drawing is called hblank. When the gun reaches the end of the screen at the bottom right and has to re-aim itself at the top left, that's a significantly longer period of time and is known as vblank. In NES software this is your big chance to make lots of changes to what the NES is doing graphically before it starts rendering another frame.

The time that the screen is being drawn is your opportunity to do physics calculations, mess with variables, AI states etc. It's dangerous to mess with anything graphics related as a frame is being drawn, it can lead to all kinds of weird glitches. So when you're done with the physics, you send the program into a loop and wait for the NES to tell you "ok, the TV is in vblank, quick go go go make your modifications to tiles and sprites!" And then you do that very quickly, and go back to the physics and such when you're done.

To do a horizontal parallax screen split, you need to do something a little more dangerous. You wait until the screen is being drawn and is X number of lines down the screen, and during the very short time of an hblank you adjust the screen scroll position, so that everything drawn after that point is scrolled differently, horizontally. It takes some precise calculation to be sure that you're changing the scroll at the exact right time. Without using a built in method called "sprite 0 hit" or having timers that later cartridges included as a feature, you have to know how long every CPU instruction takes and count them until you're at a safe point to scroll the screen. Additionally, with all the time it takes to determine this and do it right, you don't have time to do other things like your physics calculations etc. The farther down the screen you are doing a parallax split, the less remaining time you have for the engine before the next vblank occurs and you have to start it all over again. This is one reason why games like Sword Master tend to have really simple gameplay, it can be hard to do a lot of screen split parallax and have a CPU intensive engine at the same time, because all your code has to dance around those points when you have to time things exactly right.

So as hard as it is to do a horizontal screen split, I think it would be about impossible to time a vertical split and have it be consistently at the same pixel all the way down the screen. It may have been done in nesdev demos, I can't remember, but it's not practical for a real game. I don't even know if a NES would do it without throwing a fit and puking all over the screen.

Vertical parallax on the NES is all complex trickery. For example, in the intro of Mega Man 2, you know that big building that seems to move quicker in the foreground? It's actually moving at the same speed as the town in the background. The whole building is nothing but vertical lines, so you don't notice. The windows and ledges are all sprites, faking the effect of scrolling the building at a faster speed!

Again, I hope you don't take this as anything against Steel Assault because it isn't, I just enjoy talking about the way the NES works under the hood. It's fascinating, all the trickery they had to do to make even simple scenes look the way they do.

 

[SriK]

No offense taken at all, I'm really interested in reading about this stuff as well. I'm pretty new to real NES hardware and programming, those FMV demos a year ago are still the only actual coding I've done on the system.

I think Crisis Force had vertical parallax through switching out CHR-ROM banks (the "animated GIF" method), which is what I was thinking of (switching out ROM banks, plus a ridiculously huge cartridge). The MMC5 cartridge mapper also natively supported vertical parallax, but I'm not sure if any games actually used it in a notable way. (MMC5 and VRC6 also both support firing "notifications" on certain vertical scanlines automatically, which seems to make getting a parallax effect a lot less CPU-intensive since you don't have to time anything yourself.) It's all hypothetical anyway since I'm not actually making a NES game, but maybe I'll try to put together some simple effect demos at some point and see how far I can get.

That Mega Man 2 example is really interesting! Really smart effect.

 

[UncleSporky]

Ah, I'm not as well versed in what later mappers were able to do, because my focus was to be able to make something that didn't require anything fancy, doable without any mapper or on the earlier ones that just give you CHR-RAM or SRAM. I knew later mappers included timers to make this sort of thing easier but I missed that it extended even to vertical screen splitting. That's pretty cool that it actually did support vertical parallax, even if it wasn't utilized in that many games. Actually I can't find much documentation on the subject. The people at nesdev might know more.

 

[SriK]

Yeah, I just posted a topic about the game on NESDev (don't know why I didn't earlier). I'm also starting to e-mail new game journalists and Youtube channels with a pre-alpha build of the game, so hopefully that'll result in some new exposure.

Out of curiosity, UncleSporky, what kind of demos/games did you make for the NES?

 

[UncleSporky]

Yeah, I just posted a topic about the game on NESDev (don't know why I didn't earlier). I'm also starting to e-mail new game journalists and Youtube channels with a pre-alpha build of the game, so hopefully that'll result in some new exposure.

Out of curiosity, UncleSporky, what kind of demos/games did you make for the NES?

Quite a few small tests and such, nothing substantial. The thing that got the furthest was the demo I linked here, which was just an attempt at starting a side scroller with good physics. Placeholder character from Knytt Stories and background from La Mulana.

I've done a lot of test artwork and such. This was an experiment in using darkness/negative space to represent a forest:

I was also a tester for Miau on his Super Bat Puncher game which is still kinda sorta in development. The demo ROM he made is still awesome and alongside the Battle Kid games is probably the best community-made thing on the NES. And I started making another game with him that didn't get too far, did all the art for it though.

Making old NES games is one of those things that's fun to work on, but you know it's not going to be profitable, and since then I've been trying to make something for modern platforms instead. I probably wouldn't go the NES graphics route these days since the market is so saturated and you get a lot of people like in this thread who say "isn't everyone sick of this by now?"

 

[UncleSporky]

You posted this at Nesdev regarding the FMV footage used:

The footage is compiled from a variety of sources, and put through a 4-color filter which I programmed based on Bisqwit's pattern dithering article. Off the top of my head, some of the sources are: media footage of citizen riots in France and Iran, building demolitions on Youtube, nuclear test launches from documentaries, and an iPhone video some guy took of a burning car on the highway. I don't have the exact links on hand right now, but if anyone's interested I can get the file where I saved them on my other PC.

Be sure to consider the legality of using this footage in a retail game. I know it's heavily modified and no one would probably be able to place where it's from, but it's good to cover your bases anyway.

 

[SriK]

Daniel just created some new box art for Steel Assault! Check it out:

We have 6 days left on our Kickstarter!

I've done a lot of test artwork and such. This was an experiment in using darkness/negative space to represent a forest:

Oh wow, this was you? I've seen this image before, it's some really inspirational NES artwork.

Be sure to consider the legality of using this footage in a retail game. I know it's heavily modified and no one would probably be able to place where it's from, but it's good to cover your bases anyway.

All of the footage I compiled for the intro was licensed under Creative Commons, I forgot to mention that in the NESDev post. Actually, most amateur news media on Youtube seems to be CC licensed, which makes sense if you think about it.

 

[SriK]

We have 5 days left on our Kickstarter!

Again, anything you can do to spread the word helps. Here are links to our Twitter announcement and our Kickstarter page again:

https://twitter.com/SteelAssault/status/557219343013257216
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/43113410/steel-assault

Also, one thing I haven't talked much about yet is Mac/Linux support. In our last update, we clarified that Mac and Linux versions will be given consideration during development no matter what if the game gets funded (even though the PC version will be given the highest priority initially). We're programming the game using SFML, a cross-platform library, so in a best case scenario we won't even have to rewrite any code at all (though in practice it almost never works out this way). Our original idea was to have Mac/Linux as a stretch goal at $10,000, but it looks like we're going to just scrape by our goal as is -- that extra funding would have just sped up the development and testing process of these ports, not enabled them in the first place.

 

[georgetheplushie]

Daniel just created some new box art for Steel Assault! Check it out:

Jeez, aim a little higher than Data East if you want to imitate logos, especially considering how nice this game looks.

 

[@MUWANdo]

I will not abide any shit-talking against Data East, thank you very much.

 

[Piston Hyundai]

if you really want to go for it, why doesn't someone just make an NES game and port it over to other consoles

"look at how accurate we are" can only go so far when you can't run it on the console you're trying to emulate

 

[georgetheplushie]

I will not abide any shit-talking against Data East, thank you very much.

I have nothing against Data East. They're just not my favorite publisher on NES/Famicom, epsecially if we're talking about the late releases from guys like Natsume and Sunsoft that this game is deriving inspiration from.

 

[Orayn]

Just upped my pledge from $10 to $39, still exhorting my friends on Twitter to back this game. I really hope this does well in the final stretch.

if you really want to go for it, why doesn't someone just make an NES game and port it over to other consoles

"look at how accurate we are" can only go so far when you can't run it on the console you're trying to emulate

What about the fact that it's orders of magnitude easier to emulate the look and feel on modern systems than it is to program a game for hardware from 1983?

 

[@MUWANdo]

if you really want to go for it, why doesn't someone just make an NES game and port it over to other consoles

"look at how accurate we are" can only go so far when you can't run it on the console you're trying to emulate

Short answer: it's fuckin' hard, dude.

Long answer: it'll take way longer to make than the average backer is comfortable with and it limits the pool of additional contractors by an insane degree, as a lot of people don't have the time, patience or inclination to deal with the constraints of older hardware. It also adds a lot more overhead in terms of producing physical carts and so on.

There is at least one KS that's doing an authentic NES game (Lizard), if that's what you really want.

Someone mentioned Super Bat Puncher earlier; that game's been in the works for what seems like decades now, but I fully expect it to show up on KS sooner or later.

 

[SriK]

Thanks, Orayn!

if you really want to go for it, why doesn't someone just make an NES game and port it over to other consoles

"look at how accurate we are" can only go so far when you can't run it on the console you're trying to emulate

@MUWANdo basically covered it. Most modern NES homebrew games are extremely small-scale compared to ones during the system's lifespan. You're usually getting stuff like puzzle games or single-screen platformers, not huge seamless sidescrolling action games with tons of setpieces. The NES isn't easy to develop for because it's an outdated platform, in fact it's far harder to develop for than a modern PC for this exact reason. There are also several design elements I want in Steel Assault which are extremely hard or impossible to implement on an actual NES (like I said earlier, the aesthetic is both an artistic choice and a budget/time choice).

If you're interested in modern NES homebrew, though, you can probably check out the NESDev forums and search for cool stuff. You might be surprised at some of the things they're making the system do! (Even though most of it wouldn't be practical at all for a game.)

 

[SriK]

We have 5 days left for Steel Assault's Kickstarter!

We also just posted a project update talking more about Steel Assault's $399 tier, where I create an 8-bit cover of a song of your choice. All covers are going to be created in Famitracker from the ground up, so they'll be fully authentic (i.e. they'll sound true to the original song and be able to run on an actual NES).

I also provided a few sample covers on the update post, from Taxi Driver, Lord of the Rings, and Raiden II respectively. Here they are:

• Taxi Driver - Main Themes. (Original song) A condensed version of the Taxi Driver theme. This cover uses the Namco N163 expansion for the NES, which can add up to eight additional channels of expanded sound! (Five are used here.) It also uses heavy DPCM sampling. This is part of the reason why it sounds so much more advanced than a typical "8-bit" cover, even though it can still play on an NES.
• Lord of the Rings - Concerning Hobbits. (Original song) This song uses the Nintendo MMC5 expansion chip, which adds 2 additional square wave channels. It also uses DPCM to sample string ensembles at several points.
• Raiden II - Stage 2. (Original song) This song is barebones NES; it doesn't even use any DPCM. Just three melody channels and one noise channel. When you think of 8-bit music, this is probably the closest to what you're picturing (or hearing, I guess).

These are just some samples of what the song covers on this tier might sound like. I hope you enjoyed listening to these, and if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to let me know!

 

[Santerestil]

I registered on Kickstarter just to pledge this game.

Good luck, boys.

 

[AcceptableGhost]

I registered on Kickstarter just to pledge this game.

Good luck, boys.

Same here.

 

[epmode]

Come on, GAF. $3000 in three days is doable, right?

 

[@MUWANdo]

Come on, GAF. $3000 in three days is doable, right?

I don't see it happening without a push from Best Friends or someone equally big, honestly.

 

[SriK]

It's going to be down to the wire, definitely.

On the one hand, since we've reached $5000 and over 60% funded, statistically we have a 98% chance of making it (and more advanced analytic tools seem to agree also). On the other hand, we have 3 days and 5 hours left, and that $3,000 has to come from somewhere. I'm still talking to Matt from Two Best Friends (there's been some problems getting the build to run on his PC), but I have a feeling that most of the remaining money is going to come in the last 48 hours, once the users who clicked "Remind me" start getting notification e-mails.

So, I don't think we're going to go down without a fight.

 

[HellBlazer]

I've been trying to get some people to pledge, but apparently I only know poor people.

 

[Shaneus]

I think you're right SriK, I haven't backed yet but I'll be going in when I get the reminder for the KS. Don't ask me why, but I'm definitely going for it (and I'm guessing there's a decent number of people who will, too).

If anything, I suspect the somewhat distant completion date might be putting some people off? However, it looks like there's been around $1000 in the last two days or so, I think you'll make it

 

[SriK]

Just saw this right before I was going to sleep:



Hopefully this should help a bit!

 

[Usobuko]

Damn, this still hasn't hit the target yet? I'll up my pledge at the last hour if this continues.

 

[HellBlazer]

Holy shit, the 48-hour boost is real. :O Nearly there, hopefully this keeps up for just a little more.

 

[Shaneus]

I just noticed it then, too... now past $6.5k!

Edit: Shit, was there a fake bid or something? I just looked again and it's back down to $5.5k :/

 

[SriK]

We're now in the last 48 hours!

I just noticed it then, too... now past $6.5k!

Edit: Shit, was there a fake bid or something? I just looked again and it's back down to $5.5k :/

My uncle donated $1,111. I panicked and called him up about it immediately, and he noticed that he made a typo: it was actually $111. lol

Still, we've gotten 10 backers in the past hour, so it seems like the 48-hour surge is indeed starting!

 

[Shaneus]

My uncle donated $1,111. I panicked and called him up about it immediately, and he noticed that he made a typo: it was actually $111. lol

Still, we've gotten 10 backers in the past hour, so it seems like the 48-hour surge is indeed starting!

Yeah, one was me I've just posted it on my FB as well, I have a few retro gaming friends on there who might dig it. Will also cross-post in the AusGAF thread.

 

[Falk]

I really like it when developers creating "retro" styled games actually do work with retro limitations.

A far cry from the common paradigm of having blown-up 16x16 pixel 8-color character sprites walking around in 1 pixel increments on a 1080p screen with a true color background.

Chiptune with honest-to-God 20 simultaneous voices.

 

[HellBlazer]

My uncle donated $1,111. I panicked and called him up about it immediately, and he noticed that he made a typo: it was actually $111. lol

Oh... damn.

 

[SriK]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/43113410/steel-assault

In fact, as of now there are just 44 hours left! We're entering the very last stretch, and again, we need all the support we can get. We have less than $2,500 left to raise, and we can make it. But we're going to need some help.

Even if you can't back our project, share our project page on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc.). Tell your friends, your family, your co-workers about us. Print out flyers and make your dog deliver them to the neighbors. Anything and everything helps.

It's been real, GAF. Again, thanks so much for all your support! You guys are the #2 source of pledges on Steel Assault's Kickstarter. Thirty-eight GAFers contributed directly from this thread. Thirty-eight! You guys make up almost 20% of our total funds up to this point! I didn't remotely expect this kind of response. So again, I'm really grateful for everything you guys have done for us. Here's to NeoGAF!

 

[HellBlazer]

You guys are the #2 source of pledges on Steel Assault's Kickstarter.

What! Who beat us? This is unacceptable.