Steel Assault - Famicom-styled action platformer (PC, Kickstarter)

[Tain]

I think this will be pretty sweet:




Official site: http://steelassault.com/
Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects.../steel-assault (there's a pretty great trailer on the KS page)
Greenlight: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfile.../?id=377961407

I'm generally cautious about smaller-team action platformers like this, but this is being developed by a dude that knows the genre well and the proposal sounds great. The game's tone seems exactly as serious as I'd like, and the footage shows some awesome aesthetics. Love the backgrounds especially.

The Kickstarter page puts to rest a lot of concerns that I'd normally have about a project like this:

An arcade-style game. What that means is: tight length, tight design, and high difficulty.

Multiple difficulty modes, from Expert (the hardest mode, which the game will be initially designed around) down to Novice mode (which most people will be able to beat).

You have one life, and there are no levels per se. Instead, the game will be one unbroken "shot" from start to finish, beginning when the player is dropped off in the first level (or last checkpoint, on lower difficulties) and ending when he/she either dies or defeats the last boss. (Remember how Sonic 3 & Knuckles had Act 1 and Act 2 levels seamlessly connected? Now extend that to an entire game.)

"Flow" is extremely important to us in designing Steel Assault. Many modern 2D platformers take the route of "bite-sized" design: hundreds of levels or checkpoints, each less than a minute long, and with infinite lives. But while "bite-sized" design is now a popular paradigm for platformers, we believe that this design choice severely limits a game's flow and tension, and (even more importantly) player immersion in a game's atmosphere and world

Fundamentally, we believe that retro styles should be an invitation for developers to push the limitations, not an excuse to fall back on them. We don't have any nostalgic pretenses or axes to grind with modern videogames, and we're not trying to sell you some tired rhetoric about "the good old days". We just want to make a kickass 2D action game.

They've also put together a style guide to explain when and how they'll be following or avoiding Famicom hardware limitations in their design:



I'll be backing this, hope it gets made. At $8,000 I'll be surprised if it doesn't.

[Mzo]

Looks great. I'm down for $10.

[Finch]

I'm glad you posted gifs because that looks so much better in motion. I'm going to put a reminder on it and i'll probably throw in $10 if i'm not dying next month

[Joust Williams]

Why have the limitations

[Cheebs]

Why have the limitations

Don't be a dumb ass.

This looks great!

[Yoshi]

Why have the limitations

Cheapness and/or laziness

edit: I did enjoy all the infographic stuff about how the NES worked though.

[Joust Williams]

Me too. But, yeah, game could be fun, but I don't see why someone wouldn't say "We'll make an old school game but make it look really amazing" instead of "Yea, NES". Old school gameplay needs older school graphics because of reasons

This looks great!

This is hilarious

[Yoshi]

When this is $10, and Ori is $20, that's a problem.

[Mzo]

Some people like the way it looks.

[Yoshi]

And they're the problem. Like every other retro game, this won't be as good as the true classics, so it's just adding clutter to an already huge pool of effectively 8-bit games that no one has fully explored. So what niche is this filling? People who are too lazy to go find games that already exist and are of similar quality?

The irony is that the infographic basically admits this but then claims to be different. "All too often, retro style becomes an excuse, with developers falling back on limitations; in our minds, this style is an invitation to push them."