Buck & Miles (devlog)

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Presents...</center>

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Hello!

I haven't been particularly active on the forums, but some of you may know me from IRC. I'd like to present a new game that me and my two partners are working on, and that we are intending to release as a commercial product by the end of next year.

Our game is called Buck & Miles, and is a 16 bit-esque singleplayer platforming game reminiscent of the 80s and 90s classics that most of us grew up playing.

It features a trucker named Buck and his sidekick Miles, who's beloved Betsy has fallen into the hands of an Evil Villain? named Baron Von Kaiser.

Kaiser lives in a blimp which continuously floats around the overworld map. The overworld map in turn is divided into 6 sectors acting as worlds, and the player must chase Kaiser down from boss castle to boss castle until he's cornered and finally brought to justice.

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Astrojone is our team name. We are three guys working on this, and our goal is to try to emulate the design approach, art direction and promo material that Japanese developers used back in the days, with the intention of bringing back some good memories and nostalgic moments for players who appreciate classic games.

We welcome comments and criticism on everything we post, but more importantly we hope that at least some of you will become as excited as we are at the idea of a (we hope) good and polished platformer being produced.

Thanks a lot for looking at our game.

Website

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Also feel free to check out Toadstone's Tumblr and skyline's Trax in Space profile)

toadstone finished up the first world's tileset. Here are a couple of mock screens illustrating the end result:

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Dude, this looks amazing!

The sneak peek music really brought the game out, hope its a game track.

Good work with the graphics, and the gameplay looks killer so far. I'm glad to see more eye pleasing C2 games!

I'm not an artist or anything like that :P

but the color palette for the level in your video seemed a bit... "desaturated" to me. The level seems to have a lot of browns, brownish-greens, and oranges. The colors could be a little more vibrant.

I think the music could be a little better. If that's the first stage, you probably want to make the music really catchy to help grab the player's attention, like

from the first stage of R-Type III for example!

Sorry if I seemed too critical! The game looks great and I can't wait to see more!

Thanks for the kind words!

Zero6, I'll be sure to forward your feedback to our artists. :-)

In other news we're going to try to get our game on Steam Greenlight, so we got help from Jamie Sime to do a couple of '90s video game promos. I think they turned out pretty good!

No Fun

Catch My Drift?

Platforming

This looks fantastic. I like the attention to detail, like the way he glances down as he falls from his jump. Subtle, but effective. Small criticism, but I think Zero6 is right about the colours.

To be honest, I don't have that much of an issue with the tiles themselves. I think the biggest problem is the vibrancy of the sky. That faded-denim blue pervades everything and makes all the colours seem a little muddier.

Like I said, this looks great, but my personal feedback is that some small chromatic adjustments would make a huge difference and kick it to the next level.

I'll be following you devlog keenly!

I agree, the game looks amazing!

I don't think the pixel art is too desaturated. Not everything needs vibrant colors, even though the art style might suggest it. If you don't like bright colors, leave 'em. There's nothing wrong with that.

The art is appealing, it communicates (meaning an apple looks like and apple) and the player doesn't get lost in the background. The animation looks fine too. Nothing jarring. Very smooth.

Visually, this game looks outstanding. It reminds me a cross between Super Mario Bros. 2 and Little Nemo. How long before it's released?

Thanks a lot for the feedback people, it really means a lot to us (both the crits and encouragement).

Visually, this game looks outstanding. It reminds me a cross between Super Mario Bros. 2 and Little Nemo. How long before it's released?

Haha, now that you mention it, it does resemble those games a little. :-)

We're aiming for a release mid- to late 2013, but we're going to release a standalone demo this December (2012).

Also, in other news, we put our game on Steam Greenlight. If you guys and girls have an account, we'd really appreciate an upvote (and if you don't have a Steam account, feel free to spread the word!)

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92932760

Thanks a lot pals. :-)