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[sinclairstrange]

I thought I'd start up a thread to post about my game that I'm currently working on. As you can't really go in-depth on twitter about the development process and I'm sure people might get bored of me posting gifs everyday I thought it'd be wise to start up a dev-log as well. That way I can write down what I've done for the day as a record and for people not to get bombarded with animated gifs over on twitter.


At it's core the game is a basic run-n-gun action with multiple bosses/routes and a weapon levelling system. It takes heavy influences from some of my favourite games like Gunstar Heroes, Mega Man, Sparkster, Alien Solider, Natsume's NES games, Sunsoft's NES games and so fourth. I've never attempted to make a multiplayer couch co-op before so I felt this would be the perfect starting point for me.

The main reason for the NES styled graphics (because I sense everyone going "another low bit pixel game) is that I utterly love it's palette. I also love the quirks of how people would make parallax backgrounds and also stuff like sprite flicker. It gives me such nostalgia that when done right really gives of a charm that personally I find can't be beat. I try and stay faithful to the NES limitations in most aspects but I have taken a few libraries when it comes to the amount of sprites, aspect ratio and sound channels.

I've finished the main bulk of the engine and I'm just currently tweaking some values (like bullet damage, enemy health ect) to get the feel just right but mostly from now on that I show should make it into the game. I'm aiming for six to eight stages each with multiple paths and bosses to help the replay value. Also I have two player co-op for extra run-n-gun loveliness.

• Six+ levels with various routes to take and bosses to explode
• Two player action, blow up s**t with a friend!
• Five weapons that can be super charged for maximum carnage
• Authentic NES styled graphics, relive those late 80's again
• Retro styled cut-scenes with dodgy English text
• Retro Styled Soundtrack created on a real 8bit Brick

ENGINE:

• Gameplay Engine: 99.9% COMPLETED (Always room for tweaking)
• Stages: 15% COMPLETED
• Guardians (Boss Battles): 3% COMPLETED
• Menus: 25% COMPLETED
• Music/Sound FX: 45% COMPLETED

Anyway I hope you like what you see, I'll try and post frequently with updates. I sort of want to keep this diary, not only to show the game off to people but also to see how I progress and develop this game. (I like looking back on stuff! >.<)

[haretro]

This game looks awesome! I love your art style!

[Alec S.]

I've been following this on twitter, will happily follow it here too. Looks great!

[SolS]

Really loving the art!

[sinclairstrange]

This game looks awesome! I love your art style!

Thanks! You can't go wrong with a bit of the ol' NES style!

I've been following this on twitter, will happily follow it here too. Looks great!

Awesome! I hope to show off more in depth stuff here, it's about time I used this forum properly

Really loving the art!

Thankies! :3

This looks so cool! Those shimmering pixels put some alternate future vibe to this i somehow cannot really pinpoint... Love the fast paced gameplay, looks like an upgraded version of classic games form an alternate branch of reality where moore's law doesn't apply, shimmering slow silicon crystals

Haha I love that description! I usually just call it NES+. I do miss those days where games were 2D 8-bit affairs and we was so wow'd by the graphics. I'd love to have a time machine and go back in the past and show those peeps some modern horror games.

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So the past couple of days I've just been polishing up the engine, fixing a few bugs and adding in some extras. I've added options where you can turn off the parallax scrolling and the extra explosion effects just in case you wanted a more authentic feel to the game:



Also as you can see in this animated gif you can also turn on an option to lock your direction when firing your gun. I know some people prefer this play style compared to the original approach. This way I cover both grounds. Not sure at the moment if I want to include a way to turn this off/on during gameplay however. I'm trying to stay authentic with the amount of buttons used and adding this option would push me over the 3 button limit, (A,B and Select.)

Also last night while lying in bed and feeling a bit unwell I decided to mock up a Sega Master System version and annoyingly I really REALLY love it's palette and limitations. It actually came off looking much better than expected and now I'm debating if I should go down this route. (Although I doubt I shall as I'm already pretty far into dev with this game.) Perhaps the next small indie project.



Today I plan on creating a new boss and perhaps a start of the next section of stage 1. Next devlog post I'll explain more of how I'm planning to have multiple routes and how I like to make explosions. :3

-Joel