What happened to Chronoburst?

[WrongEnemy7]

Hi, does anyone know what happened to n0rty games Chronoburst? i can't find their site anymore, their youtube channel no longer has chronoburst work in progress videos, and i can't find much here on the forums.
It looked very promising and i was excited for it, now i have a really decent pc to play shmups i was hoping that it might be out or at least sill in works.
So does anyone here have any news on that game?

[amdiggywhut]

All I know is that the game stopped working on my XBOX360 a long time ago and never seemed to get patched or fixed. It was fun while I was able to play the game, but my understanding is I never got to play the final, complete version that supposedly fixed a lot of issues. Was a fun game though.

[n0rtygames]

Yeah sure, why not! I've been meaning to make a post on this for a while.

Firstly, there's two games. Chronoblast and Chronoburst.

Basically development ceased on Chronoblast - which was the XBLIG title. The list of changes people wanted to see was pretty extensive and the game got to a point where it was no longer the same game.

However, the changes made were so extensive that with each change I'd make - I'd have to go back and check that the original version hadn't broken as a result. The game wasn't really engineered to support multiple rulesets you see - so it was extremely hacky. There were lots of sections in the code that ended up looking like this:

Code: Select all

switch (mVersion)
{
   case eVersion.Original:
      // original firing stuff
      break;

   case eVersion.RevA:
      // some tweak
      break;
}

This really turns in to a mess. While I'd have liked to have just use a bunch of #defines - I wanted to preserve the original version because some people were actively playing it and making significant progress on the more stupid modes.

Ideally what *I* would have liked to do for a patch would be to have released a completely seperate download however this was hindered by a couple of things.

1. XBLIG guidelines prohibit you releasing 'duplicate' titles. While you and I could argue a very strong case for why Futari 1.5 is a very different game to Futari BL, if this was an XBLIG release then the amount of red tape and arguing to get through would be impossible. The game would require most likely require new content, major visual changes and so on. Unfortunately, the XBLIG peer review process is community driven and believe me - people love to fail games on there.

2. Even if I got around that, I wouldn't have been able to put this patch up for free. It would have been another $1. While it's only a dollar, it's really the principle of the thing. The main idea behind patching it wasn't just a few bugs - it was that people were expecting a game that played quite differently and I really would have felt bad charging for these incremental updates. See next point for why I didn't update the main build as quickly as I'd originally intended:-

Also, while this was happening two players - Emuser and Taitoaplan seemed to actually be competing for high score (God knows why) on hell mode. Eventually Emuser also 1cc'd it. As someone who plays these games, it didn't really feel right to just nuke the original build after all that effort went in.

So weighing it up, I realized I'd get a bit of heat for it but after Trap15's advice the best thing really was to just create a new game. That's where Pete came on board and we started working on Chronoburst.

This project turned out to be monumentally huge. We got a third person to help us do paintovers while Pete could focus on things like UI elements, character art and so forth which is his speciality aswell as producing the 3d models which our pixel artist could then trace over.

To cut a long story short, everyone needed paid work. We were all working on this for free with the dangling carrot of profit share at the end. I ended up getting a contract which ate in to at least eight hours a day to begin with. They're a good client/employer and treat their staff extremely well, so naturally I was under obligation to do my hours! Getting sacked isn't fun. As time went on, the workload increased and we entered several phases of crunch - I simply didn't have the time I would have liked to work on the game. Being a major part of a big game release takes a lot of energy.

Pete had to work on his own thing to survive (hey, artists need to eat!) and the project unfortunately fell flat on its arse. However, Pete does have a job out of it now so he's comfy. But he's in the same position as me - being contracted to a good employer to whom he owes his daily hours and so on. Jen, the third artist is also working on a very big contract to pay the bills.

We're still at the same point - mechanics need tuning and graphically speaking, the only part that's left to do is to cut up the bosses so they're segmented and can be coded to have multiple attack phases that are properly telegraphed as well as destructable parts. Most of the work on the bosses is done, they just need a bit of love when it comes to cutting them up and making sure they work properly. Also as a final touch I'd love some good bomb effects per character. I think that's pretty much it.

I would love to actually finish this up at some point, but it really does come down to simply not having enough hours in the day.

With some internal nonsense causing a lot of friction in the team (I'm not going to air that here, since there are two sides to the story and it would be unfair to do so) - it got really stressful having to constantly update people with where the game was at while focussing on the job that pays the bills. On top of this, the shmup community is extremely fussy and while the first game certainly proved the whole "tate is hard" thing wrong - I'd really like to put out a shmup that I don't personally feel is shit after releasing it. Chronoburst is far from shit, but it still needs some mechanical love to give it that little bit of zest that makes you want to actually play it.

So, simple as that! Chronoburst *may* finish - but it's in hobby-state. It'll be done "when it's done" if ever. Perhaps we'll patch things up and at some point find a little bit of time to squeeze on a couple of quiet weekends to get stuff done. For now though, it's in limbo.

As for the site, youtube and thread being gone - that's basically because I just needed it to die down. It was awesome at first to have Sined randomly pick up the game and post it here. Seeing my own game mentioned on this forum I'd been lurking on while I was learning to play these games was humbling - but I guess after a while you just want to take it out of the spotlight and work on things in peace. That is not to say I'm ungrateful, the offers from STGWeekly to have an episode were appreciated, the tweets to support it, various magazine interviews, features and of course Fagins video were fantastic gestures from the community -- but there are two sides to that coin.

At this point it's become a bit of a running joke on IRC. People regularly ask me "When's the chronoblast patch?" and I wish the plague of a thousand camels upon their heads. Generally I think it's known why I'm not actively working on things among fellow devs and those who follow things a bit closely - but if not, I hope this clears up a few things.

Sorry about that, but that's the best answer I can give and I know a few people have been wondering for a while now.

[WrongEnemy7]

Wow i didn't quite expect to hear that, I assumed in my head that there were money issues as there always are in indie development, but this man. Wow it clears a lot up. I appreciate that you've spent time to write this. It means a lot, it helps me understand a little more of the behind the scenes of game development. Thank you.

I really hope everything gets better in your lives and you'll get the time to do the stuff that you want one day. Best of luck, i'll keep the fingers crossed that you get to finish that game one day, so we can all play it! But i'm not holding my breath on it!

[brokenhalo]

I was kind of under the impression that the whole thing had fallen apart. I'm glad that it's still on a back-burner somewhere. Also happy to hear that you guys all have jobs that you enjoy. Anyways, hopefully one day you're able to get it finished up properly. The content that you were putting up for it and the ideas you were floating in the dev thread were all sounding amazing. It would be a shame for this project to never see the light of the day.

[NeoStrayCat]

Man, and I thought this topic would also address SkyRavens too, but I know it would never see the light of day I assume. >.>

But yeah, indie stuff does take a toll, I presume. <.<

[n0rtygames]

Never assume.

Unless you hear it from me, it's probably not true

[NeoStrayCat]

Never assume.

Unless you hear it from me, it's probably not true

So it'll still might happen in the future? Well, then again. @_@