NG:Dev.Team nous donne encore des news sur leur metal Slug Like en vue de nous faire patienter.
Pour justifier ce retard, ils nous font rêver avec l’arrivé d’un 3ème personnage jouable, féminin, nommé Valéria avec choix possible de la couleur de chevelure^^. Elle apparaîtra d’ailleurs sur le nouvel insert qui a donc été retravaillé pour l’occasion.
Ils ont amélioré des niveaux en rajoutant des scrollings parallalaxes dans les 4-1 et 4-2 car, retravaillé le boss du niveau 1-2 car trop vieux, un des premiers programmés donc qui faisait tache depuis l’énorme évolution du jeu :). Ils en profitent pour lancer pleins de petites animations pour rendre plus vivant le tout.
NG:Dev.Team espère avoir le MVS dispo pour fin juillet début Août selon les retours du Beta Testing. De plus, pour ce jeu, de nouvelles PCB ont été créé et donc cela a entraîné une mise à jour du kit de développement.
En gros , pour leur plus gros projet à ce jour, NG:Dev.Team se donnent les moyens pour ne pas décevoir et on ne peut que saluer l’évolution incroyable du jeu en 3 ans^^
En passant, on note une confirmation de la réédition de manic shooter « Fast Striker » pour l’automne 2018
** Kraut Buster Status **
* Current status and schedule *
You can see a first look of the newly added character Valeria here:
http://www.kraut-buster.com/img/screens/valeria_1_840wx.jpg
Btw. her hair color is configurable if the color is too extreme for your liking.
The base game is already fully done for a while. We are in the final phase of polishing and detailing.
We can finally see the ends of our to do lists.
Finishing up takes now again about 6-8 weeks.
We will order the MVS PCBs in early June to be ready for an end of July release. Of course beta testing can add 1-2 weeks if unexpected issues come up there. But we will have anything in stock in end of July to be ready at any time.
Reasons why it takes longer again:
General difficulty to estimate time of pixel art.
Art is not a linear process you can calculate by the pixel count and frame count. It heavily depends on style, quality and specific tasks.
Just some examples of many:
As parallax scrolling fells so much better we decided to add it to stage 4-1 too, maybe even 4-2 (both weren’t planned before)
Stage 4-2 get small new background animations like sailors on the war ships/dock workers
Boss 1-2 animation needed reworking. It was the oldest boss in the game and not up to standards anymore
Another unplanned task was to give the grunt soldier different personalities. They were a little bit boring.
Randomly picked they get 1 of 4 personalities assigned. Each personality has it’s own walk/idle and shoot face animations.
Personalities: stoic / angry / psycho / cold blooded killer
New hardware PCB + programmer add-ons
We created a complete new hardware generation of our PCBs (v2.0 3rd generation).
We switched to a completely different MCU and to a more modern and powerful FPGA as the old ones will be discontinued in the future and/or are getting more difficult and expensive to get a hold off.
Also our production chain/dev kits and cartridge programmers needed an hardware upgrade. All this was more complicated than anticipated and added several weeks too.
Getting GDPR compliant
Current to do list:
Graphics:
Cleanup of intro/ending
Parallax scrolling for mission 4-1/4-2 (nearly done)
Stage win animation for each character
Little things for menus.
Adding small things like small animals to the stages.
Adding animated stuff to the map screen.
Coding:
Menus
Intro/Ending
Hiscore screens
WLAN/wireless
Music:
Finishing up the music.
The intro music is currently missing.
Some sound fx and voice work.
Btw. the shockbox insert of the MVS version will change to the same design we use for the AES CE.
The artworks we used back then belonged to another project and they will return to their original (back then frozen) project.
The Kraut Buster AES regular will get an update of the insert too. The 3rd character (Valeria) will be added on the front cover.
We will show the respective insert shortly before shipping starts.
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Fast Striker AES (reprint) is still scheduled for autumn 2018.
Best regards,
NGDEV »