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[MekaSkull]

Awesome, thanks a lot. Really appreciate it
Working on some in-your-face enemy spawners:

Some kind of human extermination units are going to come out of them 

[Schoq]

Basically 300ms (average reaction+average display lag) reaction time for easy stuff and 200ms (extremely good reaction+average display lag) for medium stuff.

Some new 4k TVs have a display lag of over 100ms . So playing with those you're gonna need to memorize patterns instead of relying on reflexes. I'm gonna make a simulation to test the game with that kind of lag too to make sure it's still playable.

It might also be worth keeping in mind while designing, if you weren't aware, that we react significantly faster to audible cues than visual.^[1] The implications are many but obvious enough that I don't need to list examples I think.

This game looks amazing btw, don't remember if I posted itt already. Been a fan of your art for a long time and it's great to see you have deign sense to match it.

Really looking forward to playing!

[cykboy]

This game looks awesome, love retro pixel art. I'm curious, what resolution is that rendered/drawn in originally? I've seen many "NES games" on here that look nothing like the system's actual graphics, but this looks the double of it.

Great job 

[tuaarita]

This game looks awesome, love retro pixel art. I'm curious, what resolution is that rendered/drawn in originally? I've seen many "NES games" on here that look nothing like the system's actual graphics, but this looks the double of it.

Great job  

1:1 pixel ratio resolution would be 400x224 to fit 16:9 aspect ratio.  

[Schoq]

the NES doesn't have a 1:1 pixel ratio though. That's often a major thing that makes NES/SNES styled retro games feel off

[jordanchin]

This has got a great look to it!

[HelloComics]

This game looks excellent. I specially like your use of color, the contrast is so pleasing. I have my eye on this.

[MekaSkull]

@Schoq Totally right about the audible cues. Gotta keep that in mind. I'm a bit lacking with sound effects currently.

@Antraxx In short, it's as close to NES resolution as possible, then extra on the sides for widescreen. So far the game is also playable in NES resolution though, and I'll try to keep it that way and add an option for "classic" mode. I've also found a pretty good shader for a CRT effect (thanks to Copy Girl devlog) that adds scanlines between pixels when the game is scaled 2x or greater.

[Magurp244]

If it help's, there's a resource thread for free/royalty free SFX samples available on itch.io: The Big List of Free Sounds. There's also a similar thread by SkyStrider here on Tig's, but unfortunately didn't end up getting stickied. If going for classical 8 bit SFX you could probably go with SFXR/BFXR.

[MekaSkull]

I'll make a big pass over the games sounds. Gonna use SFXR and KORG DS-10 for creating them.

Currently working on a dynamic team enemy set.
The idea is that the team composition increases their difficulty.
1 Pistol guy = he jumps and shoots
2 Pistol guys = taking turns jumping/shooting and covering the other one. Occasional stand and kneel formation together.
1 Bazooka guy = Walk and shoot
Bazooka guy + deflector sphere = Sphere takes positions around you, then the bazooka can shoot and deflect to reach you around corners. Hope that makes sense 
Bazooka guy + beetles = When throwing shuriken at the guy, he might order the beetles to kamikaze into them in order to avoid getting hit.

That's the idea anyway. Let's see how I pull it off 



For humanoid characters I'm using different toys as pose reference 


I also have some lego handy at the desk just in case.

[Io]

For humanoid characters I'm using different toys as pose reference 

Breacher's a good choice no matter the context.

[MekaSkull]

Breacher is such a great transformer. Looks nice in both forms and is very posable. Only downside is the joints getting loose quickly.


Anyhow. Before I tackle the group AI, I did some basic stuff with the flame spider.
I implement most enemies by first making all the movements and actions separate. Like fire flamethrower, walk forward, walk back, idle. Once it can do those things, I loop through them in order to see if they make sense. The final bit is the hardest. Each action will exit (or interrupt) into an evaluation state. Here I use a set of 5-10 colliders to check the surroundings. Then the evaluation state decides which actions will be used.

For more complex enemies I store a history of actions to avoid simple feedback loops. For example with the spider, normally it will throw fire at you if you're close, but if the history is "flame, flame" it will walk backwards instead.

I'll make a picture of it with the next enemy 

[Schoq]

for a sfx synthesiser with a bit more flexibility than sfxr I humbly suggest you LabChirp

[foofter]

I'm assuming you know "Shadow of the Ninja" for NES?
https://gamemakeworld.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/shadow-of-the-ninja-nes-1990/




It's one of my favorite games and I don't even like platformers. Pretty incredible for 1990, too. So looking forward to yours as well!

[MekaSkull]

for a sfx synthesiser with a bit more flexibility than sfxr I humbly suggest you LabChirp

That's really really good. Thanks a lot for sharing. Will experiment with this. 

As for "Shadow of the Ninja"
The game was called "Blue Shadow" here. Same reason as to why "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" was "Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles" for a while. The same guy did graphics for Shadow of the Ninja, Shatterhand, Wild Guns and Gundam Wing:Endless Duel on SNES, all of which have a strong influence on my pixels 

[foofter]

As for "Shadow of the Ninja"
The game was called "Blue Shadow" here. Same reason as to why "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" was "Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles" for a while. The same guy did graphics for Shadow of the Ninja, Shatterhand, Wild Guns and Gundam Wing:Endless Duel on SNES, all of which have a strong influence on my pixels 

Cool, and good to know! I wanna check out these other games now. :D

[UmutD]

This game looks amazing! Also that CRT effect is pretty cool.

[MekaSkull]

Just a quick shot of a new enemy from the editor:

Yellow = wall collision check (turn when bumping into wall)
Blue = drop check (turn when about to drop)
Red = player check (fire projectile if available - has charge time)
Blue circle = starting position (make sure it doesn't wander too far from start position)

Most slow walking enemies have this kind of setup. Gotta come up with something more in-depth for enemies that run, jump and shoot.

[Batowski]

Wow, I missed a lot! (stupid Kickstarter, pro tip: never make one!! )

Game's coming along nicely, and that scanline effect is pretty darn good. So far I got excited for every game that had something like that but in the end I always turned it off because the feel just wasn't right. This looks pretty solid tho.

Keep up the good work, back to hunting backers.

[fskn]

Dude! Duuuuude! 

I need this in my life.
Good f'n job.