Chronoblast : Maximum Force Dev Thread

[n0rtygames]

Updated thread title, will keep main post here and add info with bumps when appropriate.

[NeoStrayCat]

So...is this going to be any different or similar than the XBLIG release?

[S20-TBL]

Long time no see. Is this a sequel to the original from years ago?

[n0rtygames]

-- editted, no longer accurate! Have I necro'd the wrong damned thread?! --

[NeoStrayCat]

I see! However, I'm not sure if I said this before in the forum here, or otherwise someone else did, but I wonder, has SkyRavens been shelved? It was supposed to come out on XBLIG but never did. I wonder if anything leftover of that title exists in some form? This has been bugging me since after the XBLIG was discontinued.

[n0rtygames]

-- also inaccurate! man we tried some crazy stuff, redacting for clarity in case new people are reading --

[NeoStrayCat]

I see, so some things just kinda...happened. But at least you're still around, and good thing its still in the works if it comes to chance. But yes, I'll be looking forward to your future titles as well, such as this very topic of a game, looks to be good in pre-production at the moment.

[n0rtygames]

-- busted image links removed --

[Enemy]

I was only thinking the other day about this follow up game. Good to see it's back in development. +1 for a switch version after pc one!

[n0rtygames]

-- NO SWITCH RELEASE --

[clippa]

I'm just gonna come out and say it, those bullets look unnervingly like dildos.

Any chance of a pc port of the first game, or would you rather leave that in the past and move forward? This looks great, can't wait!

[n0rtygames]

One day I will tell the story of Gus and the first game.

<3 Gus.

And yeah at this point I want to leave it in the past. It's had its day. I no longer have the original codebase for the Chronoblast version that was released on 360 - only versions that are modified and tweaked making it a very different game. It also taught me a lesson in promising patches >.<

But I was younger and more foolish.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

One concern with announcing it as a sequel will be the questions about access to the first game. Instead of appending the number 2 to it you could retitle it something similar to make it clear it's a follow-up game, but it's the start of its own true series in terms of representing how far you've progressed as a game dev.

Chronoblaster or something like that.

[n0rtygames]

You might be right about that Roo, it does have the subtitle "Maximum Force" so maybe we'll just go with that and ditch the number

[brokenhalo]

And yeah at this point I want to leave it in the past. It's had its day. I no longer have the original codebase for the Chronoblast version that was released on 360 - only versions that are modified and tweaked making it a very different game.

Maybe at some point you could put those up somewhere? As an "extra" on chronoblast 2, perhaps? I remember the Batrider inspired team system. The rest of the madness is just a hazy memory.

[n0rtygames]

Maybe at some point you could put those up somewhere? As an "extra" on chronoblast 2, perhaps? I remember the Batrider inspired team system. The rest of the madness is just a hazy memory.

All stuff that I intend to bring back at some point, its quite easy. I've been reworking the base stuff/gameplay in Unity since all the old code was XNA and not really usable anymore.

Very close to a demo build for our testers soon, so things are looking good

[hechelion]

The game look fantastic.
You say some model are 3D, but in the captures all look like pixel art. How you make it? some shader/filter?

[n0rtygames]

The game look fantastic.
You say some model are 3D, but in the captures all look like pixel art. How you make it? some shader/filter?

We make 3d models ourself for the reference based on sketches and ideas, then manually pixel over them all. This is really useful for doing things like multi directional tanks and independently rotating turrets

When making the game we might use the models rendered straight to sprites to get things in quickly but they all get pixelled over.

In the future on other games, going to use full 3D but perhaps do it the way Aka to Blue does it - where they can only rotate at fixed increments to keep an old school look.

<3

[Krimzon Kitzune]

Hi, I'm the artist for the game. It's been slow-going guys on the art side of things, due to issues that had been coming up for me since the Summer. After the holidays are over, I'll be going back into full production without any further delays.

[n0rtygames]

-- discord is down, but when we are more ready we will open up a public one again properly --

[clippa]

Cwoar, loving those chunky medals!

[NeoStrayCat]

So I see that there's already a steam page for this lately, but no date yet. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1144 ... mum_Force/

Also, I find it funny there's some screenshots having the logo say Maximum Violence, lol.

[n0rtygames]

I'm just bumping this thread to let people know we are not dead and generally give an update on things.

The game is taking us a while, but we are getting there. A lot of work is going in to really making our lives as designers easier in the future and I'm solving some issues with the codebase, refactoring things for a number of reasons.

After some major real life stresses for every member of the team -- we had family members pass away before and during COVID, people had to find new jobs, tensions and the stresses of life were pretty damned high. But we've hung in there and are working on the game quite hard still.

Because of stuff like this, we talked and decided a while back that we really wanted to just work on the game "like old times" and keep it fun for us to work on. So you may have noticed a couple of our social media handles are down. No more twitter (can't stand the place!) and we moved our discord stuff to a new server where it's just dev team for now. Sometimes it can feel like a lot of pressure to get stuff done when you've got eyes on your project wanting to report on the latest news. Which while it's appreciated, can be a bit overwhelming when real life hits.

Emuser has even tested the game and that's been really promising/encouraging as it's really just been 'internal testing only'. Although this did raise some tech issues that we needed to fix. Specifically to do with frame timings, which while we've got a solution in place has affected some other aspects and I'm working away to bring back one of the more impressive features of the game. Some feedback and discussions on general balancing have happened and I'm quite keen to have the game be enjoyable to all (not necessarily easy) upon launch without extensive patching required.

So I see that there's already a steam page for this lately, but no date yet. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1144 ... mum_Force/

Also, I find it funny there's some screenshots having the logo say Maximum Violence, lol.

The date is officially "When it's done" - COVID stole a lot of time from us and I won't lie, it feels like we've had a whole year at least of downtime combined just not touching the game. As for the title, yes it's definitely Maximum Force but I want to update the screenshots when they reflect what's in the game now which looks 20x better than those old screenshots.

We have a few decisions to make still and maybe cut one stage but extend another - but yeah, there you go. An update. We're not dead, it's still happening.

Thanking you

[NeoStrayCat]

Aye, NP Norty, glad to see you're still alive and well. And yeah, the pandemic really screwed things up essentially. But hey, as long as its still coming out though.

[BulletMagnet]

Good to hear that the project is still ongoing - I've never done any game development or other such work, but just intuitively I should think that your team's approach of "do what we can so long as we still enjoy what we're doing" is the right one, if everyone is in a situation where they can take the time to progress in such a fashion. Best of luck going forward.