6/21/2023 0 Comments Brave earth prologue demoLate gen games of that era learned to truly embrace this and it’s fun to be able to draw on all their work now with all this hindsight.Some first impressions on the demos I was able to play! Take a look at these 15 upcoming games. But Castlevania on the NES is vibrant and colorful and a little weird. if you look at say, Vampire Killer on the MSX, it’s kinda bland looking. Never having the perfect shade or highlight color means injecting your scenes with a dynamic, colored lighting. The NES palette works well for this, where you can have vibrant blue and purple trees and no one thinks anything of it. I wanted that dark, lonely feeling while also having vibrant colors. The beautiful use of blacks in that game was something I couldn’t live up to, but I tried my best to take elements from that and mix it from elements from Castlevania and the later Ninja Gaidens. I don’t know, I kind of like that?Īs for the rest of the aesthetic, it draws a lot from Sunsoft’s Batman for the NES, which is an absolutely beautiful game. When I kill a zweihander guy and he collapses and curls up, I feel a little bad for him. I want the violence to be impactful and a little sad. I love that kind of super violent late 80s/early 90s anime aesthetic, but not so much the casualness of it. I’d rather those elements, when necessary, mean something. I don’t like the idea of leveraging too much grisliness just to set tone. It gives things some stakes without having to be utterly brutal or edgy in the writing of the story. So, I feel like some of that darkness mixes with some of the levity in the anime-ish tone of the story. That kind of fear and vulnerability is something I think about a lot in even movies when a random goon dies. The game is dark, but it’s not too dark.Īt the same time, that gut punch is affecting. I’ve actually had misgivings about the death animation, sometimes wondering if it’s too much. Just basically ‘doodling’ until all of a sudden the sound hit just right and the whole thing felt horrifying. I was experimenting with something like Alucard’s bloody death spiral and started messing with sounds. Not to be a broken record, but the death animation kinda just happened. Naomi, under normal circumstances still out DPS’s her brother, but his access to sudden damage makes bigger foes less intimidating but smaller foes a bigger nuisance. Then, instead of giving him offensive specials, I gave him all dodges and mobility moves. He’d be slower to attack, or less mobile if he held down the attack button to ‘overcharge’ but his basic mobility could be much the same as his sister. So, I came up with the idea of swiping the Secret of Mana attack bar. Going for the ‘power’ archetype would be obvious, but the thought of having someone less mobile than Naomi seemed dreadful. I made her powerups replace her normal attack. Sinlen’s design was easy, as much of it just contrasted Naomi. Three felt like a more balanced number than two, so I added Naomi’s brother as well (who was already going to be an NPC anyways). Like many things in the game, "It just happened". After making some sprites, I decided she could be playable. She sent me back a mage instead by accident and I decided to go along with it. I asked my friend, the artist Neolucky (who’s contributed to BEP in the form of a lot of cutscene art too) to do a design for me. Honestly, the original idea was to have Naomi do something while a rival knight trailed ahead of her, much like Shorn in La Mulana. Of course has the game expanded that didn’t quite happen… So, the original idea was just to create a Castlevania 1-like game for free, trying to make use combinations of simple enemies, leading to simple, yet exploitable bosses. Bosses were single set piece moments, so they didn’t need to be designed to be flexible. IWBTG had very little in the way of enemies and those it had were used in just a few screens. So, coming off making I Wanna be the Guy, this was something I wanted to experiment with. Either too simple or too erratic to craft reliable challenges with. I think this is something easy to take for granted, but if you’re like me and recreationally play a lot bad games, a common flaw in generic bad platformers are enemies that are just… there. Castlevania 1 and 3 do a great job making enemies that combine well with terrain and each other. So, approaching them as an adult it was much easier to appreciate all the smart enemy placement and design in the game. Michael “Kayin” O’Reilly, developer of Brave Earth: Prologue – Despite growing up with and having played the NES Castlevanias, I was never much a fan of them.
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