Hello everyone!!
This is my very first post on those boards so I would introduce myself by sharing something about me and a project that I worked on recently.
I'm Paolo, 47, from Italy, retro gamer and indie (retro) developer. Let me tell you 2 cents about my background:
Afaik the first videogame I met in my life was Aztec Challenge for the Commodore 64 at friend's home, I was like 6 or 7.
It was just the beginning of my journey, as in the same period my parents used to take me to the arcades in the spare time and I felt the joy to put some coins in games like Rampage or Contra while they were just released.
One episode I particularly remember happened at elementary school once my very rich schoolmate (he really seemed the kid from Silver Spoons TV series) invited me at his home to play his new Atari 2600 (the best console around in these years), hence I had the honor to play games like Pitfall!, Yar's Revenge but most of all Adventure without knowing yet that these games were about to become timeless classics. They looked just amazing to my eyes, however.
My first home computer was a very obscure french machine and my first home console was the epic Atari 2600, but nowadays I own a wide range of 8 and 16 bit machines in my room, including - of course - a modded multiregion SEGA Megadrive with a boxed copy of Sonic : some of my fav games are Shining In The Darkness (what a masterpiece!), Castlevania Bloodlines (one of the best OST I ever heard in my life) and Wonder Boy In Monster World (perhaps not the best in the WB series but still awesome).
While growing up by playing games and coding with my home machines, at first I became an IT developer, since there was no real game industry in my country at time. I quitted that job like 10 years ago and became a full-time indie developer. I'm not a company man, I like to work mostly on personal or small team projects, hence I split my time between working as a freelancer for the gaming industry and working on personal projects with my tiny team. I work mostly with Unity, but so far I coded stuff in many languages from ASM 6809 to C++.
Although I can see that the modern gamers want high definition 3D graphics and a lot of buttons to use in their analog gamepads, I'm still addicted to the old-school paradigms (less is more, pixel art is timess, D-Pad rulez).
That's why I was looking for places to share my same passion once I hitted your boards and the SAGE event. Shame on me I didn't know about it. Unfortunately I discovered the event only few days ago, when it was already too late to sign up, hence I just really hope to run in the next one. Great idea however!
So at this point I would like to introduce what I would have presented in the event, although it now ended on Steam, but I'm not here to sell any copy to this board, I would just spread the word around to gather more attention and feedbacks, like every dev does with its games :) I'll leave some activation keys at the bottom of this post.
It's a collection of four original arcades that I wrote as a love letter to the old glory days. The game starts in an arcade room where you can play with the four cabinets and do some other little things (buy tricks, read the leaderboard, etc).
Here's a quick recap of the featured games:
Crescent Moon:
A classic horizontal STG somehow inspired by titles like Air Buster or Gradius: I wanted to apply a very simple formula here so the game is pretty linear, there are some parts were you are requested to fight and some others where you have to fly careful between obstacles. Five different incremental weapons, three different shot ranges, two different optional pods to equip and four stages, each of one with its own boss to defeat.
Peng Peng:
This is something that I started working on the Nintendo DS in the 200X, but he was impossible to release it in these days, so I kept the graphics and reworked the entire engine from scratch with Unity. It's clearly inspired by games like Bubble Bobble or Snow Bros. where you have to clear each round by defeating all the monsters in the room before jumping to the next one.
The game features a local coop, a bonus reward system similar to the Bubble Bobble one, and a gameplay that's designed tp meet casual players, speed runners and score raiders. The game system allows you to solve each round by using your speed or your tactics. Two runs done by different players which came to the same round can get an extremely different score depending on how they approached the game. There are four different worlds, different endings and secret rooms to discover according to tradition. A boss is waiting at the end of each 10-rounds single world and lots of secret bonuses and special events can spawn here an there anytime.
Heist Of The Ninja:
The most "golden era" game of the collection, it's inspired by single screen games featured in the arcade rooms by the end of the '70s that had their explosion in the beginning of the '80s, with titles like Donkey Kong, Bag Man, Mr. Do, Mappy, Bomb Jack and so on. Now what I did in this game is mixing these mechanics with the seek system seen in Epyx's Impossible Mission, where the player had to find the right time to approach a furniture and look into it for useful items avoiding to be lasered by enemies. That put some authentic tension and made it a sort of survival game. Here's more or less the same story: sure you have to shot enemies and jump obstacles, but there's also this heist factor that adds its proper mechanics signature.
Since I don't like the games that loop endlessy, there are 10 rounds and three bonus stages. This game was the most played one so far since I released the collection.
Don't Mess With Rick:
And last but not least, a scrolling beat 'em up directly from an alternative 1992. This is by far the one where me and my pixel artist put the best effort. At first we only wanted to develop a single stage, but in the process we found ourselves so amused by the result that in the end we came up with four stages, different weapons to use, cutscenes and a complete moveset list. While the game has a pure 2D environment (no up and down movement allowed) the combat system is taken from games like Double Dragon (especially the NES versions) and there's also a super move system that works very similar to the Street Fighter Alpha one.
So ... While I was working on my HD huge next game called Fantasy Network I had the idea to put an arcade room into the game's world (which is called Holua), with some arcades to play in order to take a breath during the main exploration. At a certain point, Fantasy Network's development went in some development hell and the circumstances forced me to heavily rework it. Hence, to not lose any further time, I decided to pool the featured arcades in the game and publish them as a separate collection.
That's why the collection is called Holua's Arcades.
For those who want more, here's a trailer.
And here's the Steam page.
But as I said above, here are four keys to activate the game for the most quick ones who will read this :)
If you want extra keys just find me in pvt, I'll answer soon or later XD
If you try the game, don't forget to leave me a feedback.
Thanks for reading and let's catch up on the boards :)
This is my very first post on those boards so I would introduce myself by sharing something about me and a project that I worked on recently.
I'm Paolo, 47, from Italy, retro gamer and indie (retro) developer. Let me tell you 2 cents about my background:
Afaik the first videogame I met in my life was Aztec Challenge for the Commodore 64 at friend's home, I was like 6 or 7.
It was just the beginning of my journey, as in the same period my parents used to take me to the arcades in the spare time and I felt the joy to put some coins in games like Rampage or Contra while they were just released.
One episode I particularly remember happened at elementary school once my very rich schoolmate (he really seemed the kid from Silver Spoons TV series) invited me at his home to play his new Atari 2600 (the best console around in these years), hence I had the honor to play games like Pitfall!, Yar's Revenge but most of all Adventure without knowing yet that these games were about to become timeless classics. They looked just amazing to my eyes, however.
My first home computer was a very obscure french machine and my first home console was the epic Atari 2600, but nowadays I own a wide range of 8 and 16 bit machines in my room, including - of course - a modded multiregion SEGA Megadrive with a boxed copy of Sonic : some of my fav games are Shining In The Darkness (what a masterpiece!), Castlevania Bloodlines (one of the best OST I ever heard in my life) and Wonder Boy In Monster World (perhaps not the best in the WB series but still awesome).
While growing up by playing games and coding with my home machines, at first I became an IT developer, since there was no real game industry in my country at time. I quitted that job like 10 years ago and became a full-time indie developer. I'm not a company man, I like to work mostly on personal or small team projects, hence I split my time between working as a freelancer for the gaming industry and working on personal projects with my tiny team. I work mostly with Unity, but so far I coded stuff in many languages from ASM 6809 to C++.
Although I can see that the modern gamers want high definition 3D graphics and a lot of buttons to use in their analog gamepads, I'm still addicted to the old-school paradigms (less is more, pixel art is timess, D-Pad rulez).
That's why I was looking for places to share my same passion once I hitted your boards and the SAGE event. Shame on me I didn't know about it. Unfortunately I discovered the event only few days ago, when it was already too late to sign up, hence I just really hope to run in the next one. Great idea however!
So at this point I would like to introduce what I would have presented in the event, although it now ended on Steam, but I'm not here to sell any copy to this board, I would just spread the word around to gather more attention and feedbacks, like every dev does with its games :) I'll leave some activation keys at the bottom of this post.
It's a collection of four original arcades that I wrote as a love letter to the old glory days. The game starts in an arcade room where you can play with the four cabinets and do some other little things (buy tricks, read the leaderboard, etc).
Here's a quick recap of the featured games:
Crescent Moon:
A classic horizontal STG somehow inspired by titles like Air Buster or Gradius: I wanted to apply a very simple formula here so the game is pretty linear, there are some parts were you are requested to fight and some others where you have to fly careful between obstacles. Five different incremental weapons, three different shot ranges, two different optional pods to equip and four stages, each of one with its own boss to defeat.
Peng Peng:
This is something that I started working on the Nintendo DS in the 200X, but he was impossible to release it in these days, so I kept the graphics and reworked the entire engine from scratch with Unity. It's clearly inspired by games like Bubble Bobble or Snow Bros. where you have to clear each round by defeating all the monsters in the room before jumping to the next one.
The game features a local coop, a bonus reward system similar to the Bubble Bobble one, and a gameplay that's designed tp meet casual players, speed runners and score raiders. The game system allows you to solve each round by using your speed or your tactics. Two runs done by different players which came to the same round can get an extremely different score depending on how they approached the game. There are four different worlds, different endings and secret rooms to discover according to tradition. A boss is waiting at the end of each 10-rounds single world and lots of secret bonuses and special events can spawn here an there anytime.
Heist Of The Ninja:
The most "golden era" game of the collection, it's inspired by single screen games featured in the arcade rooms by the end of the '70s that had their explosion in the beginning of the '80s, with titles like Donkey Kong, Bag Man, Mr. Do, Mappy, Bomb Jack and so on. Now what I did in this game is mixing these mechanics with the seek system seen in Epyx's Impossible Mission, where the player had to find the right time to approach a furniture and look into it for useful items avoiding to be lasered by enemies. That put some authentic tension and made it a sort of survival game. Here's more or less the same story: sure you have to shot enemies and jump obstacles, but there's also this heist factor that adds its proper mechanics signature.
Since I don't like the games that loop endlessy, there are 10 rounds and three bonus stages. This game was the most played one so far since I released the collection.
Don't Mess With Rick:
And last but not least, a scrolling beat 'em up directly from an alternative 1992. This is by far the one where me and my pixel artist put the best effort. At first we only wanted to develop a single stage, but in the process we found ourselves so amused by the result that in the end we came up with four stages, different weapons to use, cutscenes and a complete moveset list. While the game has a pure 2D environment (no up and down movement allowed) the combat system is taken from games like Double Dragon (especially the NES versions) and there's also a super move system that works very similar to the Street Fighter Alpha one.
So ... While I was working on my HD huge next game called Fantasy Network I had the idea to put an arcade room into the game's world (which is called Holua), with some arcades to play in order to take a breath during the main exploration. At a certain point, Fantasy Network's development went in some development hell and the circumstances forced me to heavily rework it. Hence, to not lose any further time, I decided to pool the featured arcades in the game and publish them as a separate collection.
That's why the collection is called Holua's Arcades.
For those who want more, here's a trailer.
And here's the Steam page.
But as I said above, here are four keys to activate the game for the most quick ones who will read this :)
WDYQR-868EK-D7L9W
NI75J-TPTXX-XWZ6J
NQKY2-Z84RE-R6MWA
6C7GP-DPQC7-L7TDZ
NI75J-TPTXX-XWZ6J
NQKY2-Z84RE-R6MWA
6C7GP-DPQC7-L7TDZ
If you want extra keys just find me in pvt, I'll answer soon or later XD
If you try the game, don't forget to leave me a feedback.
Thanks for reading and let's catch up on the boards :)
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