A new heavily Castlevania-inspired 2D action game, from the creator of I Wanna Be The Guy of all people. Surprisingly it looks quite decent, and audiovisually it's far above any other Western NES-styled amateur effort I've seen (for once it actually looks/sounds on par with the best games released during the era, instead of an excuse for bad programmer-art).
A few screenshots, taken from http://kayin.pyoko.org/?p=1502:
A page with some cool animated GIFs of the game in action: http://kayin.pyoko.org/?p=2001
A video showcasing the first two stages (second stage starts at around 7:00): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uOER3K4alE
A video showcasing the third stage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKDc-aTLBr8
A link to the game's soundtrack I found: http://kayin.pyoko.org/bepmusic/
In contrast to most (all?) other Western NES-styled games I know of the music here seems to be stored in a proper NSF file, meaning they're real chiptunes that can be played back on the actual system. The soundtrack utilizes the VRC6 expansion chip, the same one that the original Famicom version of Castlevania III used to add more sound channels and polyphony.
And a Q&A with the developer: http://kayin.pyoko.org/?p=2286
Here are some notable quotes:
KayinN wrote:From VioletLinked
How many areas / weapons will be usable in the game?
Can you upgrade and downgrade said weapons?
How many characters will you get to play as?
There should be about a dozen unique stages. Some stages are shared between character and often have paths that are unique to different characters. As for ‘weapons’ and ‘upgrades’ remember, this is not a metroidvania. That said, Naomi has 4 special attacks and can power up one of those attacks at a time. Including air variations, Naomi can do a dozen different moves with her special attack button, though only 5 and a time (only powered up specials have air variants). Sinlen, can hold 1 of 5 spells at a time and each of those spells has a special attack. Trevor has 4 different dodge techniques, but can only incrementally power up his sword, much like a Belmont powers up his whip.
As for the amount of characters? For now I’ll just say 3. I might add extra bonus characters later, but these are the three main characters with their own unique paths and storyline significance.
Kayin wrote:From Fortinbras
I dunno if this has been covered elsewhere, but since you’re best known for IWBTG, I’m curious what the difficulty level will be.
It has, but no harm in saying it again. I’d say at this point, Brave Earth is harder than Castlevania 3, but not by a lot. To experienced Castlevania fans, Brave Earth might actually be slightly easier. There will also be difficulty sets to help people find their ideal level of challenge.
Kayin wrote:From Poki#3
Do you think the self imposed limitations of having it be as close to an NES game as possible limit your creativity, or make you find more creative ways to do things?
Well first, let me be honest: I cheat. A lot. I cheat with resolution (the game is a bit wider than it should be, since NES games are natively ‘square’, and the exact resolution is chose more with resolution multiplication in mind more than accuracy). I cheat with the palette (I edit a number of traditional NES colors to get a few colors that wouldn’t normally exist), I cheat with sprite limits and thusly I can even cheat with colors per character. So I’m not hyper accurate, but I like to be aware of the rules I break and have a reason why. As such the limitation is actually very liberating. I have a lot of aesthetic tools to draw upon and I can cheat them when they are occasionally too strict.
My general rule has been “Would I believe this was an NES game if I played it as a kid?”. I cheat less than that, but if I couldn’t believe it, I know it’s flat out wrong.
Kayin wrote:Going all 8-bit retro often pushes people into tossing in limited lives (sometimes even with limited continues). What’s your stance with this on kicking people back to the start of the level/start of the game as punishment for dying too much?
Default game setting will have lives with infinite continues. In fact, once a level is beat, it’s unlocked and you can resume from there at any time. So you might have to restart a stage, but never the game. Also through an option you can turn on the ability to resume from checkpoints after game-overing. I want to encourage people to play in the ‘old school’ style, but they don’t have to.
Kayin wrote:Kinda related- Difficulty settings. I seem to recall you planning to include them, but how much thought are you putting into them? Just tweaking damage/HP? Altering enemy placement? Changing up attack patterns? Going all Mega Man 10 and including those shame inducing big obvious bumpers in platforming bits? Maybe without being so passive-aggressive about it visually (i.e. just make the pit smaller, don’t throw in big obvious safety bumper sprite)?
Pretty much everything. Health adjustments, some placement adjustments and for certain enemies, AI changes (this will mostly effect the Very Hard difficulty). Easy platforming (and the associated bumpers) are an option that can be toggles individually.
The second-to-last quote is an enormous red flag, but I'm still holding out hope that he was only talking about the "default" game difficulty. The level design in the videos looks pretty solid to me from briefly skimming through, aside from the slow pacing of the first stage (which really does seem like an unfinished alpha until the music finally kicks in with the skeletons around two and a half minutes in -- at least add some DPCM/noise wind or something so it isn't completely silent aside from sound effects). Some of the cutscenes also seem overindulgent compared to the (necessarily) terse writing of actual 8-bit games.
The nearest-neighbor upscaling also sucks, it significantly worsens the art in the blog post I took those screenshots from. I should send the dev an e-mail to this Postback thread -- it only took me around a half hour to implement a shader based on ronan's post here for one of my own projects a while back, with no previous experience in the area. I also have no clue what's up with the game's resolution in general; every screenshot seems to be a slightly different size, and it doesn't correspond to either the "original" NES resolution or a regular 4:3/16:9 one. Either way I'll probably play this once a demo eventually releases and post my thoughts here.