Arkagis Revolution - mode 7 like shooter

[Sik]

I thought I may as well put this here. You may have seen this on Twitter (and possibly YouTube) already, and I think in one thread in Blast Processing, it's a top-down shooter with rotating playfield for Mega Drive.

Site: https://www.arkagis.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/arkagis

Have some footage :​D (wishing I could embed tweets here :/)
https://twitter.com/arkagis/status/1138171890902753281

Some screenshots too (click to enlarge)



EDIT: and of course I picked screenshots that only show the phaser (´・ω・`) (there's three weapons in the game)

[Goati]

Been following the feed on twitter, good job on doing something very interesting!
Looking forward to whatever kinda release it will have.

[Alianger]

I don't suppose the gameplay viewport can be made any wider without sacrificing speed? Other than that it looks great.

[nihilblack]

Following!

Looks really promising. Makes me wonder if this kind of feature was possible back in the day, with the tools and techniques that they had back then, or if is this something exclusive to this new age of 16-bit wonders.

[Sik]

It's the same technique as the special stages in Sonic 1 (once you remove that AND instruction that makes the rotation coarse for no good reason), so I imagine it'd have been doable if given enough time, albeit I had to reduce the viewport in order to allow more detail (otherwise there's a lot of sprite dropout, Sonic 1 tries to work around this by avoiding lining up too many blocks in a row but that's not always feasible).

I'm more surprised that the closest SNES seems to have gotten are the mode 7 stages in Contra 3. Seriously? Is there really no top-down mode 7 shooter on SNES? (・～・) (I hope I'm overlooking some game)

[TmEE]

I suppose you're doing similar stuff here as Red Zone ?

[Zebbe]

Looks great! Wish you the best of luck with the project!

[Sik]

I suppose you're doing similar stuff here as Red Zone ?

Not even remotely close (as I said, it's just a lot of sprites like the Sonic 1 special stages)

I did consider the idea of filling in the background with solid tiles and using sprites for details (which would have honestly looked a lot better), but that was pretty much unfeasible if I wanted to keep it at 60 FPS, so I decided against it. One annoying side effect of dropping that is that walls and rooms need to have the same color :/

[Flygon]

Absolutely wild! It's so smooth in motion.

[crazyteknohed]

Looks good so far. If constructive criticism is permitted then I’d get an artist to redesign the main ship as it currently looks very AMOS-esque. And that music hurts my ears. I love the technicality of it though, really smooth rotation effect you’ve got going there.

[Stifu]

Have you considered going for low-resolution mode to make the viewport appear wider?

[moon]

Have you considered going for low-resolution mode to make the viewport appear wider?

Using 32-cell ( instead of 40-cell ) mode drops the maximum number of sprites per scanline from 20 to 16 ( and the total from 80 to 64 ) .. so that doesn't exactly help.

[Vector]

Maybe keep the game just like this 60fps graphics like they are now, but maybe the last stage can be more complex like you said maybe 30fps and alot more detail and snes mode 7 like with a huge boss? That way there is an insensitive to show your friends last stage while playing? Perhaps those 2 engines wouldn't work well though?

"I did consider the idea of filling in the background with solid tiles and using sprites for details (which would have honestly looked a lot better), but that was pretty much unfeasible if I wanted to keep it at 60 FPS"

Imagine the last stage with huge boss looking better than what snes could do maybe, without chips for last stage =)

[Sik]

I meant that with the reduced viewport (there's nothing I can do about sprite overflow and it already tends to pop up every so often as it is right now). But it'd have allowed the walls to have a different color at least. I'm not fond of dropping to 30 FPS when I had already achieved 60 FPS tho…

[homerhomer]

Looks great. Reminds me of Namco's Assult arcade game.