Fealty is a game of territorial control, where you places pieces on a randomly generated board in an attempt to gain influence needed to seize the crown.  The catch is that the pieces which garner the most influence are the slowest to claim it.  With strategy, you can cover huge swaths of the realm and block your opponents’ attempts to gain favor of their own.

I helped to playtest the game, and it is in the category of “easy to learn, hard to master”.  If you’re a fan of Euro games, you’ll definitely want to check this out.

Next week we hope to introduce our other new sprite artist, with something a little more wicked.

Our heroine is probably outside, judging by the green background, and is either moving quickly or in a very windy spot.  To find out what she’s doing there, you’ll have to play the game.

The cheese was as strong as one would expect from a game from the late 80s, right down to the armored dudes with laser pistols on the cover that never appear in the game.  The story, such as it was, was that aliens from the Boondoggle Galaxy blew up the Moon, except for its main computer, which was covered in plants.  They came to take over little old Earth, and only you could stop them.

There were eight stages, the first five of which happen in a computer simulator as you train for battle against the Boondoggles.  If you did well enough, they send you (alone, of course) into the heart of the enemy fleet to the core of the Moon, complete with any virtual power-ups the OF-1 Daedalus had from the sim.  The game scrolled vertically at a fixed rate, and enemies came from all directions.

The ship’s basic capabilities were a twin laser mount on the front and a 4-speed transmission.  Switching gears did more than change your speed; the burst of flame from the thrusters when you did so was your strongest attack.  Of course, it could only damage things immediately behind you.  Your other armaments were an assortment of attachments for the front of your ship which could absorb a hit as well as changing your main weapon.  You could also collect up to three pods which would fire either forward or opposite the direction you’re moving, and could be hurled at the enemy like a boomerang.

I still remember the stage select cheat, because it’s one of the easiest in gaming history.  Hold A and B when you press start, and then you can use the select button to change stages.  I always went for level 6 when I decided not to start from the beginning, because that was the last one with a reasonable number of power-ups.

I’ve never played the arcade version or any of the other variants, but I have it on good authority that I have the weakest version of the game.  I don’t expect NES games to play as smoothly as modern titles, but Image Fight’s controls are stiff even compared to its contemporaries on my shelf.  I choose to blame the fact that I never beat the game from the start on this fake difficulty.  The graphics on the 8-bit version were as good as you could expect from the system; you could see everything, but nothing spectacular.  The music was suitably , but the effects were odd, unless you consider chirping birds the right sound for an exploding spaceship.

Despite the amount of time I spent on this game in middle school, I figured it was just another obscure title that no one but me played; I found it in the bargain bin at a toy store back in the day.  It turns out, according to my Internet research, that Image Fight is an ancestor to Point of Descent in a more direct way than “it’s a shooter”.  The producer of Radiant Silvergun cited this title as his primary inspiration, and Radiant Silvergun is one of the major inspirations for our game.

(As a side note, if you happen to live in Japan or have a Wii that thinks you do, you can download Image Fight on the Virtual Console.)

So yeah, about Point of Descent. We’re kicking into high gear this month as we get close to the end of the development cycle. The mind-boggling amount of progress we’ve made since… uh, June… has precluded a lot of the discussion we’ve wanted to have on this blog. Now that we’re nearing the end, there’s going to be a lot more news soon, so please stay tuned.

Rick and I are more familiar with bullet hells than John, so our task is scripting the levels.  There are a few steps to this.  The first, and most fun, is to play though other bullet hells that inspire us and observe closely what’s happening and when for a baseline.  We don’t want to have significantly more or less waves of enemies per unit time than an existing bullet hell; the formulas they use are used because they work.  Deathsmiles got the nod this weekend, but we’ll be putting ourselves through quite a few others.

We also listened to the stage music composed by Michael Veloso with an ear for musical cues for on-screen events.  We want to do the soundtrack justice by making it a part of the game rather than just something that plays in the background.  After that, we went through the time marks for the songs and decided when things would happen – impressive enemies entering at crescendos, for example, with enemy waves at other points of interest during the song.

The final steps, which we will be completing over the next couple of weeks, is to decide exactly goes into each wave, and then translate it into XML for the program to read.  This is not difficult, but it will definitely be time-consuming, since we are working with frames and pixels as units of measurement and the appropriately large number of enemies and shots that the genre requires.  After that, testing to see how it plays and tweaking anything we don’t like.

A testing related aside – we got to squash a couple of bugs while playing build 4.  Sadly for our players, you will not get up to quintuple points for killing enemies with a specific weapon any more.  On the other hand, defeating a boss with a different weapon won’t crash the game, which is definitely a good thing.

Point of Descent – Demo Reel 2