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[mforslind]

The graphics, while excellent, are a bit beyond the capabilities of the NES. If it's simply "NES-inspired", there's nothing wrong with that. The art is great and the gameplay looks fun. But I feel it's only right to let you know it doesn't look very NES-like if that's what you're going for.

Hello,

The Game Designer for Alwa's Awakening here. This is my first post on this forum

Yeah, our game is only NES-inspired. Alwa's Awakening did however start out as a NES homebrew. We didn't get that far though since Assembly was too complicated for us. We got a sprite up and running and it loaded a screen with some graphics but that was about it. So we decided it was too big of a project for us to finish so we decided to switch to Unity (and C#).

We're using a 400x240 resolution which is the same resolution Shovel Knight used. It's PAL in height but we're using the entire 16:9 screen. We did think about using 4:3 and we also thought about doing it the same way Odallus did, but we ended up going with a 16:9 display instead. I remember reading an article on Gamasutra about doing games in 4:3 compared to 16:9 and after that we ended up going with 16:9. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EliasFrost/20150814/251232/Why_I_Chose_to_Refuse_Widescreen.php

Odallus


Regarding NES limitations - You are very much correct. And WOW, you know your limitations. Very impressive. I take the blame for this. I'm the one mocking up screenshots in Tiled Map Editor (and Photoshop) and I'm actually not sure how to count colors in our screenshots. I'm pretty sure there's a way to tell and I'll make sure to ask our pixel artist next time. I should add though when we mock up screenshot we pretty much just throw a bunch of enemies and stuff together which makes the palette go crazy. We're closing up on finishing the different areas though and when we've decided where the different enemies go we'll change the palette of them to decrease the number of colors used. So the finished game will look better.

We're ignoring the 8 sprites per horizontal lines rule. If I remember it correctly Mega Man 9 had a sprite flicker feature (you could turn it on/off) and although it's a neat feature I don't think it adds anything valuable to the game. Since Unity is quite powerful things that just worked in a certain way in NES games work entirely different on Unity making them hard to re-produce. And since this is our first game (for half of the team) we're pretty happy how well it's still turning out. Maybe our next game will be a real NES-game?

Thanks for your feedback!

https://twitter.com/MikaelForslind

[TheGrandHero]

Each 16×16 pixel area of the background can have a single palette assigned to it. Like idoru said, you get only four of these palettes for the background, and each palette has four colors: three unique colors plus a shared background color. Within these limitations, it's pretty easy to keep track of the color limits just in your head.

I wouldn't worry too much, though. Most people will care whether or not it looks good rather than whether or not it's technically within the NES's limits. Your main character, for example, wouldn't look as good sticking strictly to NES limits, in my opinion.

[kevin andersson]

Again, it's been a while since I posted anything new but lately we've been working very hard on finishing the last of the large features in the game. Here are some gifs of things we've done.

The map keep track of where you've been and your current position. It also let's you know where the warps, checkpoints and the bossrooms are. Some of the art is still a bit w.i.p.



I've also added a small fade when you enter a room to hide the movement of the camera to the new position, makes it feel more polished.



You can also find signs in the world that you can stop and read, some are more interesting than others.



We've got a lot of things up to an alpha state or further. At least 80% of the game is playable right now and almost all events are in there, like shortcuts that you can open up so you don't have to backtrack too much or people that you need to talk to in order to get doors opened. Also some secrets are in the game!

[kevin andersson]

I just wanted to make a small update and show our warp feature. If you find and unlock warps in the world then you can get to them via any warp.




These past two weeks I've fixed over 150 fixes in various sizes.. I've also optimized the game to makes sure that it'll run as smooth as possible on all possible pc/mac/linux that people have.

Would love to post more gifs next week because we've got a deadline this weekend so there's some minor things left that will be prioritized.

[kevin andersson]

A few months later and we're getting close to wrapping this up! The interesting news are that about a month ago you could complete the game if you had a little imagination and now the flow of the game is finished and 95% of the in-game features are implemented.

So what state is the game now? My guess is that we're most likely going to have an Alpha sometime by the end of the month and an Alpha in my opinion is when the game is fully playable with all of it's component. There's no more big features that's left to implement and the game is basically content complete. What we've got left is further balancing & polish and also prepare for release on our target platform. We've never confirmed a platform for the game since we didn't want to promise something that we couldn't deliver (because of various reasons). We've been preparing for an announcement at the start of next month about which platform Alwa's Awakening will be released on so stay tuned for that.

Here are some fresh gif:s from the game. All of the rooms in the game have now been decorated to a state that we're proud to actually ship with, however we might still go through it once more just to be safe.

[PsySal]

Just seeing this now for the first time! Looks so lovely, definitely love the color choice and the scale of everything.

EDIT: I should add it *definitely* is scratching that retro itch for me, it reminds me actually a bit of Legacy of the Wizard (scale/speed a bit different of course) which is one of my favorite games. And the first thing I thought of was Zelda: Adventures of Link. Good luck with finishing and releasing the game, I look forward to it

[alvarop]

This looks awesome, feels legit retro.

[kevin andersson]

Thanks guys! Glad to hear that you like what you see!

[kevin andersson]

We keep on getting closer to our announcement so follow us on Twitter if you haven't, while we're preparing for that I'm also implementing the final new stuff such as the intro segment with the old lady entering in the gif below. The other gif is just gameplay from one of the levels.

[kevin andersson]

For those of you who's not been following us on Social media, we're going to do a Greenlight campaign for Alwa's Awakening which is amazing! It's an incredible feeling knowing that a game that we've been working on our spare time since Oktober 2014 will soonl be in the hands of you guys (if it goes through Greenlight).

To Greenlight Countdown

Here's an old gif I recreated a few months later.

                                               OLD                                                                                                                                     NEW

Here are two images from our updated presskit! Enjoy!

[HoffmanIV]

I just caught up on the thread. I always love seeing NES-styled games. You definitely have my vote when it goes live!

[bclikesyou]

I am all about this. Getting some serious Legacy of the Wizard vibes.

[kevin andersson]

I just caught up on the thread. I always love seeing NES-styled games. You definitely have my vote when it goes live!

Really glad to hear that Hoffman!

I am all about this. Getting some serious Legacy of the Wizard vibes.

I haven't seen the Legacy of the Wizard before, I think I see where you get the vibes from.

[andyfromiowa]

Just adding another compliment to the sprite work and color palette.  Looks great!

[kevin andersson]

Just adding another compliment to the sprite work and color palette.  Looks great!

Thanks Andy!

[kevin andersson]

I don't have a screenshot or gif right now but I wanted to quickly update and say that we've now implemented all of the features in the game. So the game is now feature complete. There's still some content left, more polish and balancing the game. On Tuesday we're launching the greenlight and we're very excited!

[kevin andersson]

Our Greenlight page is live! Please help us by going in and vote YES! There's a new gameplay trailer as well!

GREENLIGHT PAGE

[Joeb Rogers]

Just voted yes, this looks fantastic! The art style is great and the gameplay looks fun, I'm a huge sucker for games like this. Reminds me a little of Rogue Legacy and Cave Story if they were to have a baby with Castlevania and Zelda 2.

Also that soundtrack is fucking awesome.

[alvarop]

Voted. Best of luck.

[UmutD]

Looking great Posting to follow.