Progress Update (June 2018)
over 6 years ago – Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 01:36:41 AM

Apologies for the belated update, it’s been a bit of a crazy month! Matt had an accident suffering a bad concussion, losing his speech at times but fortunately a CT scan has given the all clear - so we’re wishing him a speed recovery. Fortunately we’ve still made loads of progress with Xeno Crisis, so here are some of the latest bits for you:

Cover art

We finally have our cover art variations, courtesy of the amazing Derrick Chew (https://www.instagram.com/dcwj/) and Gonzalo Ordoñez Arias aka “Genzoman” (https://www.deviantart.com/genzoman)!

This allowed Matt to more or less finalise the cover designs (all 18 of them?!) for the various regions and styles, some of which you can see below:

General Release

Kickstarter Edition

 

This is the final piece in the puzzle which is the physical production of the game, as we can now not only go ahead and produce the cover art for the game’s box, but also the cartridge labels, vinyl / CD OSTs, manual and other items.

Enemies

Henk’s been busy (as usual!) designing and animating some fantastic new enemies which you’ll come across in the later areas:

All of the enemies and most of the bosses are now implemented in the PC rapid prototype leaving just the final boss to be designed, and the Kickstarter backer’s boss to be implemented. With all the assets starting to finalise the Mega Drive version is fleshing out really well; we’ve also written some nice tools to monitor the ROM asset distribution and sizes as we begin to close in on the 32 Megabit limit.

Cutscenes

Catherine has had a prolific few weeks, essentially finishing all of the cutscenes and she’s now working on the game’s ending sequence. Here’s one of the new cutscenes, but we won’t tell you what’s going on of course...

Audio

Savaged Regime has been working on some new tracks, with each somehow being better than the last! We didn’t think it was possible to push the Mega Drive’s YM2612 soundchip any further, but Daniel continues to push the boundaries with some amazing new techniques. He’s also made good progress with some of the game’s sound effects, which we’re hoping to be able to demonstrate soon.

Game design

Mike has also been doing a considerable amount of work on the game’s balance, and reckons it’s coming together nicely! Given that Mike has spent several hundred hours playing the game, he is concentrating on the hard difficulty to begin with, then toning down things such as number of enemies, bullets etc. for the game’s easy mode, but even then we don’t think it’s going to be a walk in the park!

Anyway, that’s it for this month - we hope you found the update interesting, and as always, get in touch if you have any questions!

Progress Update (May 2018)
over 6 years ago – Thu, May 31, 2018 at 11:13:05 PM

It’s that time again for another progress update on Xeno Crisis! The last month has been a little bit patchy with holidays but still lots to share. :-)

We’re pleased to report that the PCB has passed all the testing and we’ve begun work on a parallel ROM flashing set-up. Xeno Crisis is throwing up some fun challenges along the way and this is one of them:

The aim is to be able to program the cartridges as quickly as possible once the game is complete. It takes us about 3-5 minutes to flash and verify a 32Mbit ROM which means 1,000 cartridges would take us about 3 days with no break, constantly swapping cartridges every 5 minutes - clearly not fun or possible!

So we are hoping to have a parallel set-up with 8-10 cartridges being flashed and verified simultaneously. This brings the time down to about 7 hours - whilst it will still be a crazy day, we can be ready to ship a day after game completion!

And here we have the revised enamel pin badges, exclusive to Kickstarter Edition backers. We’ve finally managed to find a great printer with some interesting finishes to make some of the other printed items extra special. And after a bit of a delay we’ve just received some more artwork for those printed items, so expect to see more on those soon!

Game Development

Art production continues to make rapid progress; Catherine has continued to put together some amazing cutscene images for us. Henk has created a wide range of boss, enemy and UI pixels and he’s also been kind enough to put together a little break down of how he designed the boss for the lab arena:

Mike continues to have fun this month coding the bosses and has been polishing and refining some of the enemy behaviours. It’ll be more of the same this coming month as the core of the game continues to be fleshed out.

Matt’s made great progress with the UI refinements on the Mega Drive which will hopefully be completed shortly, ready for the localised text. He also did what any coder would do when on holiday, he coded a bunch of cross platform logic! The result is that the Dreamcast port has started to shape up nicely and any cross platform design implications can be addressed better now versus once the Mega Drive version is complete.

However (with some amazing support!) he’s also got Xeno Crisis running on another platform (teaser above) - we’re not quite ready to announce the details just yet but some exciting news is brewing!

And of course an update wouldn’t be complete without a preview of some more great music from Savaged Regime! So here are a couple of tracks spliced together in a quick preview:

Thanks for all the great comments and feedback! It really keeps us motivated.

Progress Update (April 2018)
over 6 years ago – Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 09:31:12 PM

Time for another progress update on Xeno Crisis! The last month has seen excellent progress on various fronts - here are a few highlights:

René (from db electronics) has just received what we hope will be the final revision of the PCB design. After some more hardware validation tests we expect to soon be able to order the PCB production run so that we are all set, well ahead of the completed game ROM.

Our Mega Drive cases arrived this morning, so it looks like we’ll be dashing around sorting a storage unit this week! As with many the aspects of Xeno Crisis’ production we’ve bought, received and rejected lots of samples for not being up to the highest quality. But I’m pleased to say these cases are excellent, as close to the originals for size, quality and finish as we can get!

Preparation of the other physical production aspects such as covers, manuals, labels and other printed materials continues to go well. We’ve had a few setbacks like having to reject the Kickstarter Edition enamel pin badges for not being made correctly. But this is why we’re trying to get the physical production completed sooner rather than later, as otherwise lead times for unexpected issues could cause big delays when nearing release.

Game Development

Tilesets are complete! We’re pleased to say the pixel art for all 7 arenas is now complete but not only that; they are all packed, compressed and optimised for the ROM, and the logic for all the procedural room generation is finished too. This is a major milestone for us as we can now focus on layering up all of the enemies and bosses for each of the zones.

Talking of bosses, here is another gem from the mind of Henk Nieborg! You’ll encounter this boss at the end of the second area - the storage facility.

Henk’s also been cracking through more of the enemies and other details in the game. Here are a couple more enemy sprites for your enjoyment:

Vigilis

These somewhat resemble the standard Xenoids you come across, but prefer to shoot from a distance than fight hand-to-hand, and have a tougher exo-skeleton.

Remuneror

One of the more annoying enemies you’ll meet as they fire back when hit, making them particularly dangerous if tackled at close-quarters. An alternative way to deal with them is to propel them into pits by rolling into them.

Aside from the procedural logic and new enemy / boss coding we’ve also been refining the story, cutscenes and text into the game this month and the related materials (like the manual). We’re now sending all the text off to be professionally translated and we hope next month to integrate and test the multi-lingual game aspects. Once we’ve got those up and running we’ll be switching focus back fully onto the core game development.

We’ve also got some great new audio from Savaged Regime; here is a preview of the title music:

Thanks for all the continued support, comments and feedback! We couldn’t do it without you.

Progress Update (March 2018)
over 6 years ago – Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 01:36:28 AM

Hey everyone, we thought it was time for another progress update on Xeno Crisis! 

Thank you to all those who have filled out their Backer Kit survey already - it really helps us plan manufacturing quantities. If for whatever reason you’ve not received one please visit: https://xenocrisis.backerkit.com/ or contact us if you need help.

Since the Kickstarter campaign closed we’ve been working hard to prepare and manufacture as many of the physical aspects of the game, pledge rewards and add-ons. We’re keen to get as many of those made sooner rather than later, so we can maximize focus on game development and try to avoid any manufacturing delays nearer release. Quality is of the utmost importance to us so we have been busy sourcing and acquiring a whole range of samples from different suppliers, as well as commissioning various bits into prototyping, manufacturing and so on (a big thanks to Matt Phillips, the creator of Tanglewood for all of his help).

We’re pleased to announce a high quality extra (free to all backers) has come out of the mix that wasn’t planned - we’ve managed to source some lovely custom Mega Drive cartridge shells. Hopefully they will make Xeno Crisis stand out even more in your game collection!

 

We’ll be showing some more sneak previews of further bits we have commissioned as and when they are produced and delivered - watch this space!

Henk has been pixeling like crazy and we’re pleased to say he has now completed 6 of the arena tilesets! What we’re even more happy to announce is that we’ve commissioned a 7th tileset, so it will mean even more great content for everyone! Check out this amazing air-lock animation and a sneaky preview at one of the new tilesets:

 

Catherine has continued to work on some more beautiful static screens and is currently focusing on the in-game cutscenes to help progress the story line through the game.

 

Savaged Regime has been working on some of the sound effects, vocal processing and composing some more amazing tracks! Here’s a preview of one of the boss tracks:

 

This month coding has been largely behind the scenes important but more “boring” work needed to make the game. Mike has been busy implementing and refining the game UI, controller configurations as well as the general game progression/flow. He’s also been refining the game balance for the first area and testing out the in-game hud. I’ve been focused on creating improved tools for packing Henk’s tilesets and implementing the procedural generation for the arenas. We now have 4 of the 7 arenas working nicely in-game.

If you haven’t already then you might want to check out our interview on the Retro Hour Podcast, where you can hear us ramble on about retro game development and of course Xeno Crisis:

https://theretrohour.com/henk-nieborg-and-bitmap-bureau-the-retro-hour-ep110/

BackerKit surveys are coming!
almost 7 years ago – Thu, Feb 08, 2018 at 06:17:46 PM

Hey everyone, thought we'd better do a quick update to let you know how we're getting on! 

The first thing to tell you is that the BackerKit surveys will be on their way shortly, so please look out for these in your inbox / spam folder. You’ll easily be able to confirm your pledge and add-on items using the survey, and purchase any more too. It’s important to respond to your survey as quickly as you can since we need this information to confirm quantities for manufacturing.

In terms of development, Xeno Crisis is moving along very nicely - we have prototyped several more of the enemy behaviours, procedural generation of the newer tilesets and some of the first boss battles. We also have a sneak preview of boss from Henk to show you:

Catherine has been making great progress with the interstitial art - largely focusing on integrating the female marine fully into the game, creating new art for the intro, cutscenes, continue screen and credits. Below is an example of the female marine as used on the equipment screen:

Matt has been arranging details with various suppliers ensuring that everything is in place for the physical production of the game. He’s also created some tools to crunch and pack tiles into the ROM and VRAM, as well as load balancing and stress-testing our Mega Drive's tile pushing logic, so that we know we can throw loads of sprites at the screen whilst also maintaining a solid 60 frames per second. Here’s a GIF to give you some idea of the large amount of sprites the game can handle at once!

Other than working flat-out on Xeno Crisis, we took a weekend off to take part in the 2018 Global Game Jam at the University Of Southampton - it's a fantastic event where your team are given 48 hours to create a game based around a specific theme. This year the theme was "Transmission", and the game we came up with was a "chase 'em-up" for 8 players called "Jiangshi". It proved to be very popular and we were lucky enough to win Southampton’s People's Choice award for the second time:

Anyway, I think that just about wraps things up for now - please get in touch if you have any questions, and we'll be looking to provide another update in the near future!