Wreck-It Ralph
Member
I've seen this posted in the indie developers thread a few times. Didn't know it had a Kickstarter.
Backed and voted on Steam.
Backed and voted on Steam.
My suggestion: you really need to start talking about (and showing, preferably) the game design a lot more than you have been, The novelty of the "Famicom-style" aesthetic wears off pretty quickly and the more time you spend explaining it or rationalising the parts that stand out, the more people are gonna wanna pick holes in it.
As much as I dig newly-made Famicom-styled titles, I'm still hoping for an MD/Genesis renaissance of the same ilk.
Having said that, this does look badarse.
Is anyone else kind of surprised that there never was a NES game called Steel Assault?
Yeah, that's a good point. We're planning on updates explaining more about the game's mechanics (weapons system, HUD, etc.), as well as eventually releasing a full playthrough video of the first area after we finish some minibosses (we have this video of the metro areahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MROl2nG3KM8 but it's pretty short). A famous Youtuber also contacted us to feature our game on his channel, so we'll see how that goes as well. I'm just really interested in the technical aspects of old game consoles myself (I got into game development through the ROM hacking/fangame community as a kid), so I get hyped explaining this stuff lol.
We just posted an update on our Kickstarter page talking more about Steel Assault's mechanics and design! Hopefully this clarifies some of the questions you guys (and others) had.
In addition, we're aiming to have a playable alpha build of the game ready within the next 1 or 2 weeks! Nothing too huge, just 1 or 2 small areas. We'll see how this goes (and if it doesn't work out, we'll release a more complete playthrough video of the game instead).
There's been a bit of confusion about our "one life" statement on the Kickstarter page, where we said that Steel Assault's player character would have only one life throughout the game. First off, this is only for the hardest difficulty -- lower difficulties will have multiple/infinite lives, with checkpoints sprinkled throughout the game's levels.
Totally can! Maybe not with those specific backgrounds (in a reasonable amount of cartridge space), but it can handle the general effect. Lemme explain how, in as simple terms as I can, and with lots of GIFs. Let's start from the beginning:
A Primer on NES Parallax
Also, a quick question about the controls: It says "Note that the final game will have the option to map individual weapons to keys/controller buttons". Does this mean that I'll be able to, using a 360 controller for example, map melee to X, grenade to B, electricity to Y, and beam to RT? Because it seems like that would be a pretty good layout to make all the weapons immediately accessible.
Also, how do you refill weapon ammo? Is it randomly dropped by enemies, or are there set points where you can collect it?
I'm sure you're working hard on the game right now but you might wanna make an effort to throw up more updates--it's been a while since the last one, and based on the way you're trending right now, you're gonna need to drum up quite a bit more attention if you wanna get funded.
This isn't going to make it, is it?
I like a lot about this game's look.. but...
4 things bother me about this campaign.
1. Low amount of money - makes me think they either aren't taking it seriously or don't need the money. It's really easy to get an $8K loan.
1. Low amount of money - makes me think they either aren't taking it seriously or don't need the money. It's really easy to get an $8K loan.
2. Generic name - like, NES games had great names.
3. Generic character - I'd like to see why I give a fuck about this character. The dudes in Shatterhand or Vice Project Doom (again dope names) were dope looking and had great character art in game too. Same with Bionic Commando.
4. Their aesthetic qualities are skewed. A: They throw in a shot of SMB 3 to represent early primitive graphics, although 3 was a late release that used a lot of technical wizardry, it's just Nintendo didn't want to texture every wall and background with unnecessary details. B: Willow & Ikari 2 aren't necessarily *better* than other games graphically, they are just more busy. More detail does not make things better, as expressionism and impressionism and.. abstract etc. will say against realism.
WTF, GAF. Why haven't you funded this yet? It's awesome.
Is no one else sick to the fucking teeth of all the pixel art based games now?
why dont devs make some mid tier games for a change? Is no one else sick to the fucking teeth of all the pixel art based games now? All side scrolling or some shit game with "crafting"
whats wrong with somewsome low budget 3d games in the vein of Croc or roll cage? It never hurt on ps1 and it never hurt on ps2.
But no it has to be these kind of games every godamn fucking time.
And when it is on small occasion 3d, fucking zombies or some fucking survival bollox.
(no offense to the people who have worked hard on this, i really dont mean to slag you off personally or anything I'm just sick of seejng the same stuff)
Rant over, sorry but I'm tired and got no nicotine in me.
3. Generic character - I'd like to see why I give a fuck about this character. The dudes in Shatterhand or Vice Project Doom (again dope names) were dope looking and had great character art in game too. Same with Bionic Commando.
Is no one else sick to the fucking teeth of all the pixel art based games now?
No because I only play the good ones. Sucks that you have to play all of them There are definitely a lot of them, most of them hideous too (unlike this one).Is no one else sick to the fucking teeth of all the pixel art based games now?
It happens in basically every thread about a low resolution pixel art game, not just 8 bit stuff. My favorite were the people complaining about pixel art in a Hyper Light Drifter thread.I'm more sick of the fact that every time there's a game with an 8-bit aesthetic, somebody has to come in and bitch that it's using an 8-bit aesthetic. You don't see this with any other art style. Just 8-bit graphics, because certain people see them as inferior for whatever stupid reason.
8-bit is a perfectly valid art style. You don't like it? That's fine. There are plenty of other games for you to play.
Go make a game and get back to me. Go ahead. I'll wait.why dont devs make some mid tier games for a change? Is no one else sick to the fucking teeth of all the pixel art based games now? All side scrolling or some shit game with "crafting"
whats wrong with somewsome low budget 3d games in the vein of Croc or roll cage? It never hurt on ps1 and it never hurt on ps2.
But no it has to be these kind of games every godamn fucking time.
And when it is on small occasion 3d, fucking zombies or some fucking survival bollox.
(no offense to the people who have worked hard on this, i really dont mean to slag you off personally or anything I'm just sick of seejng the same stuff)
Rant over, sorry but I'm tired and got no nicotine in me.
why dont devs make some mid tier games for a change? Is no one else sick to the fucking teeth of all the pixel art based games now? All side scrolling or some shit game with "crafting"
whats wrong with somewsome low budget 3d games in the vein of Croc or roll cage? It never hurt on ps1 and it never hurt on ps2.
But no it has to be these kind of games every godamn fucking time.
And when it is on small occasion 3d, fucking zombies or some fucking survival bollox
Ta for the reply considering i sounded a prick.Thanks for all the new pledges and the support, guys!
I think you might be underestimating the leap in budget, time commitment, and development talent required in the jump from 2D to 3D (or even 8-bit 2D to high-res 2D, or modern-pixel-art styled 2D a la Owlboy). Consider that STRAFE, a game with about Doom-level aesthetics, is asking for $185,000 on Kickstarter (that's over 20 times our goal) and probably needs it to finish development. Also consider the $35,000 goal that Hollow Knight had. "Mid-tier" games cost mid-tier money, take mid-tier time, require mid-sized teams. As such, it's completely expected that they'll be less common.
The trend toward retro style in 2D games isn't necessarily based on laziness as much as developers simply being conscious of how much money, time, and overall resources they have. A well-executed simple style is always going to win out over a poorly executed complex one (poorly executed because the developers don't have resources). Of course, the ideal is a well-executed complex style, and I'd love to make a game that looks like the latest Guilty Gear with a live orchestrated post-rock soundtrack (synchronized perfectly to the level design) as much as anyone else... but in the real world this takes TONS of money and TONS of talent, which no one has any real reason to trust me with yet. So this is the graphic style and budget level we're committing to, and I think personally that Daniel's doing a really great job with it.
Zombies are popular because they don't require many varied assets. That's also why they're boring, of course, but it's still a really understandable decision. Similarly, survival requires far less design, time, and money than more sophisticated game models. These aren't reasons to praise these games, and I'm not a huge fan of these things either, but there's a clear reason that smaller-team developers tend to gravitate towards these things.
Go make a game and get back to me. Go ahead. I'll wait.
Better yet, don't. I want you to give me a financial breakdown, project management timeline and write a design doc on an entire game selling everything that makes this game special alongside a marketing strategy and it cannot be longer than 1 printed page.
You seem to know a lot about just how easy game development is. You should have no problem knocking it out of the park.
Oh, I had missed this the first time it came around - definitely interested, gonna see if I eat lunch or not... if not, then I will probably back this title.
I'm pretty sure it's not the developer's problem that you'd prefer a completely different product. Since many of us like these games, it's silly that you think they shouldn't exist.To be fair, as a consumer, none of that is my problem.. You would think it is my problem, but it really is not.
SriK, if you haven't, I'd suggest you also look especially close at the original Batman (not just Return of the Joker), Double Dragon 2, Faxanadu and Shadow of the Ninja as well for good examples of this "film noir"-esque technique, the use of interesting color palets and in some cases (like Batman's sewer level) fuid animations in combination with negative space.
...
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).Here's the corresponding "map", like the above Shatterhand example:
Da fuq? The background and foreground are mixed up all over the place! You can see the sky through the building! How are they doing that?
Because they're not actually scrolling the background, they're scrolling the tiles that make up the background. If you open up a ROM of this game, you'll find dozens of variations of those little sky tiles, all just offsetted 1 or 2 pixel off from each other! Something like this:
And the game is cycling through all of those, changing which tiles are being used every single frame, to give the illusion that the background is scrolling and the NES has multiple image layers. This is basically the Inception-level of NES effects, and as you might expect, it can take up TONS of cartridge space.