RetroBlazer is on Greenlight.

[DELETE-THIS-ACCOUNT]

I don't know if any of you played this alpha back in 2012, but it was a pretty cool game that I had long thought to be abandoned. I'm glad to say it is not.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=375199095

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1898548025/retroblazer-25d-run-and-gun-action-fps

Go ahead and check it out, vote yes or even back with your money.

[darknation]

looks furry to me. Do not want.

[dew]

That looks... very flat and primitive. Apart from the furry theme and bright texturework, it would probably get booed out of zdoom upcoming projects, heh.

And he asks for 110k. Ridiculous.

[Technician]

If their intent was to take a modern spin on an old, fruitier, Wolfenstein clone of the early nineties, they achieved their goal.

[Blastfrog]

darknation said:

looks furry to me. Do not want.

I am curious why having anthro characters in a game is a sin, somehow. I get it, the furry community and their, um... fetishes may have tarnished some people's perception of anthro characters, but it doesn't seem very logical to me. As long as it deliberately avoids any kind of mention to sex, I don't see a problem.

I like the usage of anthro characters in things that aren't to be taken seriously as you can have more varied character design as well as have the animal it's based on be a short-hand for their personality (a rabbit may be timid while a boar may be a fearless warrior or something). I heavily dislike "yiffing" but don't care as long as those into it keep it to themselves.

I don't think there was such a hatred for anthro characters before certain subcultures took it too far, too openly. It's been a part of human culture for centuries without any kind of fetishistic context.

[darknation]

It's not the idea, per se; it's the art style. That vague, americanized anime 'this fox has bulging biceps and a curiously anatomically correct genital cluster' thing.

The sort of art that you look at and feel mildly embarrassed for the artist, because you just *know* that the guy drawing it has a locked desk drawer in his bedroom that contains his shameful secret stash of Rosechu porn.

[Mithran Denizen]

This looks kind of interesting, but it's not really drawing me in. I'm much more interested in the other sort of retro blazer.

The frantic pace and abuse of color are endearing, but not enough to make me want to run around an environment that flat and blah-looking. Half of what makes Wolf3D still bearable is the nostalgia, and this doesn't have that.

[raymoohawk]

i really like the visual style, but i hope they will get more varied level design than what the old demo showed

[Phml]

I am curious why having anthro characters in a game is a sin, somehow.

I think the answer is in the way you choose to phrase your reply. "I don't care for this furry game" becomes "anthro characters is a sin". We've gone from personal indifference to broad condemnation in one stroke.

Not everything is for everyone. People who interpret a different taste as a direct slight come off as way too intense. Especially when it's about entertainment!

[Tarnsman]

I like how the stretch goal for achievements requires 15K more. 15,000 dollars to make achievements.

[Varis Alpha]

the level design looks pretty flat in that video, and the gunplay doesn't really strike me as that much fun. the enemies look very nonthreatening and they don't seem to fire in any unique patterns other than straight at you. but the visual style is very vibrant and colorful. if it looked more fun to play it could have been a winner, but so far it looks like i'd have more fun playing Wolfenstein 3D instead.

if we're talking new-school retro FPS games, this one seems to be more fun overall than RetroBlazer. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/strafegame/strafe

[Kirby]

I dunno if it's just me, but the sprite animations seems like they could be smoothed/sequenced a bit better, at least for some of the death animations. The level design reminds me of Wrack's early days, where the levels were also flat and not-quite-so-interesting. I suspect this game will suffer from that same problem unless the 3d-aspect of level design is explored more thoroughly, as for now the word "boring" comes to mind most readily.

[Necromancer-AMV]

Well, it's good that they solved the issue of it having ripped sound effects from the Megaman Zero/ZX games. That wouldn't have gone well for them.

Nice to see a speedy colorful FPS, but I'm not a huge fan of orthogonal map design.

[40oz]

The level design appears to be tilebased too, so it's likely that with some community driven help, they will have about 10,000 levels for it in the span of a few months.

[Ed]

It uses the Darkplaces engine - all Quake, baby.

My love of early 90s shooters is severely outweighed by my disdain for cutesy Capcom games from the same era.

[Technician]

Ed said:

It uses the Darkplaces engine - all Quake, baby.

Now there is no excuse for the lack of heights in the maps.

[Marnetmar]

I honestly like the looks of it. But if this is really using the Darkplaces engine, there is no excuse for that level design. At all.

[Koko Ricky]

Do we really need Wolfenstein-ish layouts in 2015?

[FireFish]

I played the demo somewhere end 2012 or early 2013, it was fun back then. Going against the flow of modern game design is not a bad thing.

[Blastfrog]

darknation said:

It's not the idea, per se; it's the art style. That vague, americanized anime 'this fox has bulging biceps and a curiously anatomically correct genital cluster' thing.

My bad, I assumed it was the idea you were against.

darknation said:

The sort of art that you look at and feel mildly embarrassed for the artist, because you just *know* that the guy drawing it has a locked desk drawer in his bedroom that contains his shameful secret stash of Rosechu porn.

I'm not really seeing that in Retroblazer's art (aside from the anime aesthetic), but okay.

Phml said:

I think the answer is in the way you choose to phrase your reply. "I don't care for this furry game" becomes "anthro characters is a sin". We've gone from personal indifference to broad condemnation in one stroke.

Not everything is for everyone. People who interpret a different taste as a direct slight come off as way too intense. Especially when it's about entertainment!

Intense? Not how I intended to come across. It wasn't even directed at darknation but rather questioning the general distaste for "furry" stuff. For example, a lot of people shat on Dust: An Elysian Tail for no other reason than the characters' appearances.

Main reason I'm interested in understanding such criticism is because I'm quietly working on a game that has anthro characters, and I want to avoid unfair and irrational criticism driving people away.

Marnetmar said:

I honestly like the looks of it. But if this is really using the Darkplaces engine, there is no excuse for that level design. At all.

GoatLord said:

Do we really need Wolfenstein-ish layouts in 2015?

Let art be art, it's very deliberate and is what they felt was necessary for their game. That being said, I found the old demo nice but slightly boring.

[Guest DILDOMASTER666]

Sodaholic said:

Intense? Not how I intended to come across. It wasn't even directed at darknation but rather questioning the general distaste for "furry" stuff. For example, a lot of people shat on Dust: An Elysian Tail for no other reason than the characters' appearances.

Main reason I'm interested in understanding such criticism is because I'm quietly working on a game that has anthro characters, and I want to avoid unfair and irrational criticism driving people away.

I think the best way to answer this is by offering my attitude on the development of furry.wad: "there's always going to be a few people that will project their disdain of furries onto your product whether the product is great or shit. the solution: stop giving a shit and just focus on making the product fun."

Also:

darknation said:

It's not the idea, per se; it's the art style. That vague, americanized anime 'this fox has bulging biceps and a curiously anatomically correct genital cluster' thing.

Not gonna lie darknation I don't see what you're talking about

[Breezeep]

I'd give this game a chance.

[Mr. Freeze]

Looks pretty interesting, furry stuff is a bonus. I'm down for it and hope it releases!

[geo]

Yeah I remember it.

[Waffenak]

Interesting but nothing groudbreaking. Maybe I give it a try when I got time

[Shadow Hog]

They apparently had put out an updated demo, which I tried earlier. I had fun, and really liked the color palette (which might just be the default Quake palette - at least, where the Quake image format is used in lieu of PNG - it's hard to say), and also really liked how detailed the sprites were, even though I'm not a huge fan of the character designs. I'm okay with furries, but something about these ones just seems a bit off to me, and I can't really put my finger on why... Apparently they're furries mostly to go along with the Mega Man X aesthetic they're going for with the gameplay, but I have difficulty seeing it even bearing that in mind.

I definitely don't like the flat level design, however. This is the Quake engine. It excels at full-3D level design, rooms over rooms, all that jazz. Having an elevator to bring you up to a higher area that never crosses the lower area you came from is not using this engine to its fullest potential. That's Doom engine territory, right there - except even good Doom maps vary the height in every area more than being totally flat, other than having inescapable pits that warp you back to where you were when you fell into them. No excuse.

It would also probably benefit them to have keybinds for the dash and altfire (instead of telling me their Impulse codes to manually bind in the console) and probably excise some Quake-specific shit like defining coronas at the end of the Lightning Gun fire. It's a tad unpolished, that. Also had to manually use some console commands to get the HUD to be not-stretched-horizontally when playing the game at a 16:9 resolution, but that's more on DarkPlaces than it is RetroBlazer.

[Clonehunter]

I like the visual style, actually. Very vibrant, very crisp and clean. Enemies seems to move kinda awkwardly, though, and maybe because I have a boner for Quake II to early Quake III and Unreal 1 era 3D models for some reason, I kind of like some of the aspects of the 2008 screenshot a bit more, namely the weapon. The flat level design is kinda meh,but for me it isn't a huuuge drawback. Getting back to basics isn't bad, but some kind of variation would be nice. Again, the 2008 screenshot seems to show off some of the Quake-ish stuff that the later stuff doesn't show.

Also, the side to side head bobbing in a hexagonal room looks so off to me.