mapmerry I'm glad you didn't let the pixel art ruin the experience for you! Thanks!

Although that bug should no longer exist, something has caused a mirroring bug to resurface - I've just put a fail safe in place for both players. If Slide > 0 the do not mirror! Thanks for catching that!!

We've gone back and forth on what the holes can and cannot do. I will be making a couple of the jumps over pits smaller but they will always be auto death.

I made it easy to jump the pits on the slide except for the last one where I extended the pit sizes. You can speed up by pressing right or slow down by pressing left. On the first two slopes you can press right and not even have to jump, you go to fast for gravity to pull you in! That's always been there! We had an enemy that attacked you while you were sliding... basically killed you just as you hit the bottom of the slopes every time. He's gone :)

Nixel HAHA! Sorry you were upset about the 8bit GFX not being there - But they will be in the final version of the game. There will be an 8-bit mode since 60-70% of the gfx were already finished for 8-bit.

The wall jump was fixed back when we were doing the Kickstarter too!

Which 2nd boss are you stuck on? There are two on the Buggy. The axe man you just need to jump and attack a lot, he's not smart - just hit's hard. And for the Ghost boss you can (if you upgraded your weapon at the shop) Stand to one side of the screen and cram the attack button and hope you leveled up enough to kill his bullets :D

There is a glitch on the corpse surfing still (the zombies should explode when you hit them), many kinks to work out of the engine overall, but it is still very much in beta - This is the last demo using the beta that will be released to the public. We may update it a little and do another release tonight and then its nothing but videos and screens until the game is finished so no more of the game is spoiled. The demo is first chapter of the game minus a few power ups sounds and gfx - and the cutscenes.

And thanks for the support Nixel!! We hope you like the final product when it's released!

Katala It was already voted on to go full color. The vote was done on Kickstarter through backers. They were given a few days to vote. So it's full blown 16-bit arcade now. That boss video is 2 weeks after the fact I think!

Originally aside of the multilayer scrolling which was mostly doable later on with different chip sets included in the carts, the game was doable on NES other than the size of the cart itself. The game would have been too big - too many gfx. The mode 7 stuff was actually doable to an extent on NES which I didn't know until recently. Battletoads vs Double Dragon - the bike fight scene floors could do it.

PixelRebirth all of the big stuff has always been hand drawn and downgraded to the right res. I've allowed for too much color in the recent stuff I've done though so I may downgrade the color a tad at a later date. The game sprites all have 9 colors on them or more. As well as regular background tiles. Depending on the background I've allowed for 16-32 in most cases now. But player sprites aren't as sharp if I do overkill on the color so 9+ is enough.

But yeah as far as the Kickstarter goes - it was a private back vote. Majority won. In fact no one said no. The only request was to have an alternate unlockable mode to have the original 8-bit graphics. Which we will have :)

The complaints about sprites blending into backgrounds led to this for the most part. The reason why NES games had mostly black backgrounds. Although as an avid player and collector of NES games, it was no worse than a real NES title.

I'm aiming for a fuller but faded palette for the background now. So there will be no blending of foreground sprites and background at all. But everything is all still pixel art. Even my actual drawings once I've done the full sized/full colored version in photoshop I still go into the sprite editor and go to work in C2 :) Down sizing alone never goes over well at all, lots of editing to do after the fact.

I should actually dig out the old Genesis png converted I had for doing Genesis GFX it brings things to the nearest color and brings the palette down to 64 color max. Though I don't have those restrictions on the game it would probably would look more authentic if I did :)

Anyhow as of a 2-3 weeks ago the project was officially called "Insanity's Blade: The Arcade"! But will of course still have the 8 bit mode since 75% of the gfx were already finished and it would probably only take a week to downgrade everything new. It's the FX that have to be dropped. The music is still 100% NES vrc6.

And thanks for voting too guys! It means a lot! We're going to have a full 4 stage demo including the new flying/shooter stage for the first week of Feb it looks like.

Chris

***EDIT***

In all honesty once we added the much requested co-op during Kickstarter, it pretty much killed it being an NES game - at least thats how I felt. It's one thing to have a larger sized main sprite but two on the same Y pos all the time would have made the game flicker - added to the 2 or 3 enemies on the same Y pos all the time too. So yeah - once co-op was added it was unrealistic.

Batman Return of the Joker, Battletoads, BattleToads/Double Dragon and Mr.Gimmick were the hardware pushers as far as I can remember. I have Return of the joker and it looks like a genesis game minus the color.

***

Insanity's Blade the "Arcade" Experience?

A full 16-bit/arcade styled graphic update from the games original 8-bit graphics. And then some!

You read that right! I put about 18+ hours into updating the graphics in the demo (separate set of working files) over the weekend and updated all of the graphics to full color in the game. So technically it's no longer the 8-bit experience if we go down this route.

So before I pull the trigger, I wanted to show you all a video of the game in full color. Also I have made other changes along the way that were part of the 8-bit update as well. The main character has a new upper body animation for walking. No one liked my super Robocop pose ;) So I caved and changed it. Title screen is now animated - this is my favorite new update! End of first stage house is partially rebuilt as well as a bit of the underground to make it a bit easier for co-op. Tweaked camera here too. Intro bits have subtle animations in them. And I can't remember what else I have done. It basically looks like a new game!

The gameplay itself will remain the same as well as the music and sound. Only the graphics would be changing.

The reason behind this update mostly because we wanted to bring you a better experience - and with the limited 8-bit NES palette there was a lot of color blending going on between the action and the background. This not only fixes that issue but also brings a new level of excitement and playability to the game!

I will be posting a demo later today of the "arcade version" for those who want to see it running on their machines.

This update is not the beta update that we've been working on with the shooter stage/cart boss fight etc. If the new graphic update gets a yes votes then I will have to recolor everything I've done since the Kickstarter ended - will take a few days :)

Anyhow enjoy the video and I look forward to your feedback and votes. I will check the votes as of Friday Dec 10th at 12am my time and let everyone know which direction the graphics will go in!

Here is the Video:

[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHDAf9Pnoxw[/tube]

Chris

Nixel Thanks! Well if I was happy with just a platformer, we'd probably be closer to done. But I've gone and added in a side scrolling shooter section :O

In single player or co-op you take to the back of an undead dragon and fly through an onslaught of flying undead and other nasty bastards :D Complete with giant gross bosses at the end of each shooter stage (3 in all). I couldn't handle just having the straight out platforming no matter how much we added to it. So I accidentally started on the shooter section last week around Xmas :)

Also redrawn boss 2-2. The second stage boss fights now take place on the back of a wagon that has hostages on it. Driven by a possessed woodsman who immediately attacks you, you battle as the scenery flies by. Upon defeating him the true boss appears. His name is Fester. The closest way to describe him would be to say a really ugly hairy fart sack that resembles Slimer from Ghostbusters in mostly color alone. He pukes souls at you.

So yeah, tons of new art and stage stuff :) I'll post pics and vids soon :) Still a bit busy around here being New Years etc :)

And thanks for all the support through the Kickstarter!!!

NotionGames Thank!! We're been listening to the feedback and trying to get this sucker perfected! We're still a ways off though!

retrodude Thanks! It's not over til midnight technically but I'm hoping we're ok!

And yeah - it's just like real life :O LOL!!

Over 80% Funded on Kickstarter and a bit about upcoming update!

First, Thank you so much to the kind people who are showing us such wonderful support! And a big thanks to the ones who have come over to the Kickstarter and backed us! You are all truly amazing!

Second, I wanted to talk about the updates we are currently working on. As I had mentioned in a comment, we are working on several new additions to the game. Many of them are suggestions that have been made on in the comments section! We are actually listening to feed back ;)

We are working on local co-op at the moment. I've completely drawn a second character just for the first stage as the dwarf character is not in the story yet. He's basically just a weaker clone of the main character but with a pole ax. He will be available in all modes of the game but in story mode, only the first stage.

We have added widescreen support but since the game was coded to 4:3, this will require heavy tweaking and additions to make the game play correctly when in widescreen.

Alternate methods of control are being added. Although the controllers will be locked according to the player, we will have custom key setup in the final version of the game, it will likely show up in a later demo.

Bonus stages - get more cash for the store! We will be adding a "Shinobi" style bonus stage where you throw knives at zombies to get coins for the store (buy power-ups, extra lives, etc). And due to popular demand, another bonus stage which will be coin collecting while zombie surfing!

Other little tweaks will be made as we go. Collision boxes have been fixed on some enemies, the zombie double up bug... etc etc. We'll try to get the bugs sorted for the next demo!

Thanks again!! You've all been very supportive!

Chris

Katala I'll think about it ;) How about two big clumps of them instead of scattered?

Nixel Thanks! Yeah, I've seen people get some really nasty stuff. But it's all trolls so you just take it with a grain of salt. No biggy :) Since last night it's been all positive stuff (new video and demo). So hopefully we wont get trolled too badly.

PC elitists are a painful lot to sort. If you want controller support in a game created for consoles but ported to PC you get the "MOUSE+KEYBOARD or get out" argument and they get all hot and bothered like you killed their favorite pet - which is absolutely absurd. It's all personal preference. Some people just need to relax - and take a nice long walk!!

But usually when someone posts a crap comment - just check to see what kind of games they play. They're usually nowhere you're target audience and just want to be mean for the fun of it ;)

I've put up the Steam Greenlight tonight thanks to a generous non KS backer! But that's not all!

We've been working hard for the past week to bring you some serious updates!! Keep an eye on this page for a new demo and video tomorrow morning (Monday)!!

And here is the Steam link! Get out there and support us!!

STEAM GREENLIGHT

And for all of the new backers that jumped on with us this week, a huge thanks! We're almost at our goal!!

Chris

— The character animation is done like that on purpose. Over exaggerated and 80's. It's modeled after the walking animations of several of my favorite old games (Robocop, Black Tiger and Magic Sword). But I wanted a very exaggerated walk for the character that went with everything else that's over exaggerated in game.

I also don't want him to look like a cave man all hunched over which would be all too typical. If the game was more serious and less dark humor I'd probably change the animation to something less funny. But I like the cruising along look!

Thanks for the input though! It's always welcome!!! I'm more excited about the corpse surfing down the pile of black plague victims now I have coded this bit :)

It still needs more "mess"!! It's hard to capture the humor of the comic/story in 8 bit haha :)

AlexFrancois Looks fantastic!!! Backed!

Ashley how's this looking lately? Any responses from Nintendo at all?