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[laserghost]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1829034266/volgarr-the-viking

Crazy Viking studios is a small indie developer composed of industry veterans ready to make a game on their own terms. Volgarr is a classic hack'n'slash style PC game with hand-made pixel art. Check it out!

[ANtY]

I'm quite surprised, this is one of thousands retro pixel games on ks that I really like and I'd happily pledge some money if I'd have any. Good luck with the kickstarter, looks like you'll reach your goal without any problems.

 

[alastair]

This looks great, one of the few 2D games I'm looking forward to.

[laserghost]

I should mention that I don't work for this company or anything, I just know them. Hopefully this isn't coming across as a commercial. I really think this is a cool thing to fund. I added 10 bucks myself.

[Derek]

Looks fun, but putting SGnG and even Rastan next to their game really highlights how much worse their pixel art is.

[phubans]

The gameplay mechanics look very solid, and the PC sprite and animations look good, too... I think it's just the environment tiles that are lacking.

[Cobralad]

Pillow...shading...primar...colors...urghh

[Nix]

The features they're highlighting seem really silly. For example, you can move while attacking.

[louisdeb]

Really like the mechanic where you can jump on to your spears

[ANtY]

The features they're highlighting seem really silly. For example, you can move while attacking.

Didn't they say that they put a lot of work into this single mechanic? 

[Liosan]

I'm betting they'll hit the goal by next Wednesday...

Liosan

[Fallsburg]

Really like the mechanic where you can jump on to your spears

I really liked it more when it was called Fishbane

[moi]

After "working in the industry for years" and "studying the best 16 bit games of the era", I think they could have produced a tilesets that looks better than that.

Also: I think a game like that is too much work for two people

[eyeliner]

Unless they are part of TIGSource. Some people here have better stuff than that.

[Tuba]

The mechanics and viking theme look cool, sprites and animation look good but the backgrounds look too basic, hopefully they are just quickly made placeholders.

[alastair]

These guys should team up with the guys that did the graphics for Trine 2, that way we could get a team that does good graphics + team that does good design.

[Sharkoss]

Really like the mechanic where you can jump on to your spears

I really liked it more when it was called Fishbane

Nobody remembers Quackshot :(

[ANtY]

Really like the mechanic where you can jump on to your spears

I really liked it more when it was called Fishbane

Nobody remembers Quackshot

Nobody remembers Worms: Armageddon

[nihilocrat]

The features they're highlighting seem really silly. For example, you can move while attacking.

The effect of this one decision on the feel of combat is massive. It only seems trivial if you haven't spent weeks tweaking tiny little rules like this and trying to really understand every single bit of control and physics that affects the feel. To me it says that the team has a very good attention to detail and makes me more confident of their design abilities. Yeah, it's not something to brag about, taking a few moments of coding and some extra animation work, but it's a very significant design decision.

A good example is the combat in Bastion, if you actually study it very carefully you will notice that it's tooled completely (except for a few weapons) for constantly being in motion. You can attack while moving with the Cael hammer and you are not stunlocked or interrupted when hit. Your character is slow, dodging around is a critical skill in combat, so the ability to move while dodging and being able to cancel into an attack improve the feel tremendously. Individually these are super minor things, but ignoring them would have made the combat much worse, and unfortunately a lot of designers who make combat-heavy games don't realize that you need to spend a lot of time perfecting the little details like this.

[Zauron]

In the original video script, we went into detail on why moving while attacking was significant, in addition to many other design decisions that we felt were significant but the reasons may not be obvious at first.

However, that made the video very long and we thought we may lose a lot of the audience.  So, I then had the idea of showing some of the games we were inspired by and talking about the specific mechanics that were similar to elements from those games, stating that we had done something similar.  I figured this way, anyone familiar with those games may understand exactly what the impact of those design choices was, and the video wouldn't be too long for people that don't really care to know that much detail.

So I can see why it might seem silly, but as nihilocrat pointed out, we carefully considered the potential impact of each feature, and I could easily write up a big document of reasons why we did X, Y, or Z and why we thought this or that was important.  I'm just not sure how many people are deeply enough into game design minutia as I am to actually appreciate it instead of falling asleep.

Oh, and it was actually a fair amount of work because of having to split the sprite up so the walk cycle was not interrupted by the attack animation, especially combined with each piece of gear having to be shown (or not) on the character.  Other than Rastan and Terraria I'm not familiar with any other side-scrolling action games where you can walk and swing a weapon at the same time, though if someone can list a few I'd love to study them!