I saw this on Steam Greenlight, and it did look pretty sweet. The more I thought about it tho, the more I disliked it. Yeah, the pixel art is cool and the metroidvania mixed with metal slug looks neat and everything, but the gameplay looked a bit too exacting for the animation lag. If the controls are off in any way, this will just be pretty but aggravating game.

I think it looks cool, and I especially like the pixel art and animation, but unfortunately Metroidvanias are second only to puzzle platformers as genres in which indie developers are overindulging. I hope he's got something extra up his sleeve when it comes to the gameplay.

The retro craze on kickstarter has seriously run its course. Not backing.

I understand people tiring of the "but it's low res so it must be cool!" attitude, but this is an aesthetically pleasing game in its own right so I think it's unfair to write it off for using a low resolution.

Because that's how pixel art works. If the game was running at 1920x1080 then everything would be really small and you'd be able to see further. If you made everything higher resolution instead of small then it wouldn't be pixel art any more. Pixel art and 2D are not exactly the same thing. This guy is a pixel artist, not a traditional 2D artist/animator (what you'd need for a higher resolution).

Also I think you're missing the difference between internal resolution and external resolution. The game's internal resolution is low (256x192 if I remember correctly), but the game is almost certainly designed to have an 'external resolution' of some much higher multiple of that, so as far as your computer and monitor are concerned, the game is probably running at 1024x768 or 1280x960 (4x and 5x respectively).

I'm not sure why you think that there isn't such a feature already. At the very least it appears to have integer multiple nearest neighbour scaling, the video doesn't look particularly blurry.

The animations are amazing, it's the sampling that feels weird in the kickstarter promotional video (which is perfectly understandable, let's give dev-people a break, they started gathering backers).

Sidenote, I really hate the 'metroïdvania' word ... it's as if 'platformer' is a pejorative word (which seems to be the case nowadays). Comparing games to metroïd just because it's got a map feels like playing with people's nostalgia.

I wrote 3 different posts and deleted them because I have a hard time expressing my opinion. I don't want to sound fanboyish, but I think I can't prevent myself to do so.

In a nutshell, my opinion is that more than a sub genre, Super Metroid is a master piece. It did so much more, so much better than its predecessors that I consider it a 'design marvel'.

I frown upon people saying 'We will make a game like Super Metroid' (which is my understanding of the Metroidvania term). In my opinion it's far more honnest to say 'We will make a platformer' and then let the public decide if it deserves as much praise as Super Metroid had.

I hope I don't sound like the l33tists b4st4rds i despise.

I totally agree that Super Metroid was a masterpiece (I'm replaying it right now on my xperia play!) but I think using the term metroidvania isn't saying the game is as good, but rather just being open about the direct inspiration. If anything it's honouring Super Metroid as the mother of an entire gameplay style. :)

Wholeheartedly agree. Also, and I know it wasn't brought up, but I would argue that the Batman Arkham games are as much Metroidvania as anything else linked to the genre.

There's now a link to a demo on the KS page (early build with placeholder art & audio), for anyone that's interested. It's pretty rough, but I didn't run into any big issues. Apart from wonky hitboxes and hit detection, but that's the sort of stuff that's expected in early showings.

11 days to go, slightly above 31 000$. Might make it, but it's probably going to be close.