Kannagichan works on a new SDK for Neo Geo! Keep an eye towards his Twitter-Account!

NG:Dev.Team keep working on their commercial NeoGeo title Kraut Buster. Via Facebook they shared a bigger status update.

Their latest message to us:

Dear customers,

with the year ending here is the current state of Kraut Buster for NEOGEO.

Compared to our original vision the game got pretty huge, basically twice as many mission parts, twice as many bosses etc. as originally planned. Without any additional financial costs to you, but at cost of waiting time.
At current projections the game will break even but will not generate any profits in the first year, but that was expected from the beginning, it was always a dream project for us.

Work on the final mission already started. We have the basic map done, currently it’s getting finalized pixel art.

The game is kinda “two games in one” both in content and game modes. It comes with two quite different feeling game modes.

* “Slug”* mode: Tactically and slower game mode, similar to the classic MS series. Lots of stops with fighting bigger enemies and a more tactical approach.
Due to the size of the game, we plan to offer a mission select (A or B) in this mode to keep the playtime around 30 minutes.

* “Contra”* mode: Fast and action oriented. Only stop at mini bosses and bosses and run and crush through enemy hordes. Probably no mission select here as the increased speed/flow gets the playtime under 30 minutes.

Enemy balancing and enemy placement may differ slightly to reflect the slightly different mechanics.
Weapons/Powerups/Secrets/Masks will be handled differently in this mode too.

* (Both game mode names are just placeholders)

We will show the “Contra” mode in a later video in 2017.

Some current statistic numbers (subject to change):

9+ bosses
6+ mini bosses
19 mission parts
207 screens.
Nearly all are individually hand drawn pixel screens (not tile based, think more fighting game backgrounds).
That’s like 86 KoF backgrounds (of course with less animation in KB). All combined, give a huge picture of 66240×240 pixels.

New screen shots from Mission 4-4 are available on the game site/the shop site and Facebook.

http://www.ngdevdirect.com/images/kb_battleship_0_512wx.jpg
http://www.ngdevdirect.com/images/kb_battleship_1_512wx.jpg
http://www.ngdevdirect.com/images/kb_battleship_2_512wx.jpg
http://www.ngdevdirect.com/images/kb_battleship_3_512wx.jpg
http://www.ngdevdirect.com/images/kb_battleship_4_512wx.jpg
http://www.ngdevdirect.com/images/kb_battleship_5_512wx.jpg
http://www.ngdevdirect.com/images/kb_battleship_6_512wx.jpg
http://www.ngdevdirect.com/images/kb_battleship_7_512wx.jpg

As you can see in the screen shots, we also reworked the HUD: We removed the big bubble head from the HUD as it looked too “western”/unfitting for NEOGEO to us. It also would have taken too much of the very small SFIX ROM space with the other characters.

Release date:

In the last newsletter from 16th June 2016 we stated:
“Currently Kraut Buster has no release date, but a release in the late 1st/early 2nd quarter of 2017 seems realistic.”

Our new estimate is to start beta testing in June and start to ship in September. We originally had planned to have 3 pixel artist full time on this project, but in the end only two were available over the full course. That lead to an unexpected delay.

We know that we started pre order too early for it, but without the pre orders we wouldn’t have been able to made a big game like this. The next few games will be smaller projects again, with similar work sizes like NEO XYX (pixelart) and Razion (CGI). We will probably do a huge project in the size of Kraut Buster in the future again, but not for a few years and in a different genre.

——————

MVS reprints:

Originally it was planned and communicated in the newsletter that the MVS reprints will be produced together with Kraut Buster MVS. As sales of the reprints are getting close to our minimum factory order amount we will try to produce them earlier. For now we set April 2017.

Thanks for being patient and happy holidays,
NGDEV

http://www.kraut-buster.com/

Cristiano Bei of IoCero.com released NATADEMO which is a tiny Xmas intro for NeoGeo CD.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BwZTDuyjKFEuY1lxQkhVZHhSZEE?usp=sharing

NG:Dev.Team are still heavily working on their commercial NeoGeo title Kraut Buster. Let’s check the recent video and their really big status update.

Their latest message to us:

Dear NEOGEO fans,

after a long wait we finally have a new video ready.

Sorry for the long time. But it’s the first time and maybe the last time we create a project like this. So we want to put everything in that we can. Currently Kraut Buster has no release date, but a release in the late 1st/early 2nd quarter of 2017 seems realistic.

We have great news for the music, Rafael Dyll is back with a vengeance. With a dramatically increased budget and the fist time with the support of a musician who plays live in the studio his guitar and e-guitar. Having live recordings from a studio musician is a first in one of our games. The result is a fantastic rocking OST.

The sound mixing of the video has priority on the music but we have tons of new SFX in the game too. Currently it has around 2x-3x the amount of SFX than Gunlord. We haven’t decided on voice recordings yet, but we will do some experiments with it later this year too.

As the project increased significantly in size and budget we decided to introduce some kind of mission select structure to the game. So the players can choose the length of the gaming session and the mission parts themselves.
Kraut Buster can be played both as a short and sweet arcade experience or a long more console like session. It also adds more variety and replay value. The player can also select his military rank (1-PRIVATE,2-CAPTAIN,3-COLONEL) which has a big impact on difficulty. It influences the amount of action and AI of the enemies among other things. The grunts/Zakus are always kinda stupid but they may learn a trick or two in higher difficulties. We are currently testing whether we allow difficulty selects for each sub mission (kinda like in Death Smiles) or only global. The video was captured at rank 2-CAPTAIN.

The wolf mask was designed for speed runners, it increases both movement speed and weapon power. It’s draw back is that it consumes ammo faster, so it requires a more careful ammo/weapon management.

The video is quite long as it’s purpose is to show new mission parts and general progress. More details will be added but like always in game development that will be done in the last 3 months (polishing phase). It shows parts of mission 2 (2-2/2-4) and mission 4 (4-1/4-2). The last video (#2) showed parts of 1-1, 2-1 and 2-3.

For the first time we used 60 fps for the video. If your video player does not support it, there maybe some glitches with flicker transparency effects (sprites seem to disappear) or other problems.

We added Kraut Buster AES (regular) back to the shop for a limited time to increase the budget further.

Best regards,
NGDEV

http://www.kraut-buster.com/

NGDSGA (NeoGeo CD Single Game Arcade) by BEY emulates the Arcade game Phoenix on NeoGeo CD. News hint by Cristiano Bei via E-Mail.

Changes:

Better Sample, now the sounds are ok! NEOGEOCD ISO LINK DOWNLOAD Rel.006 -> http://www.megafileupload.com/en/file/522278/NGPhoenix-006-nrg.html

http://www.iocero.com/eventdetail.aspx?idEvent=27312

NGDSGA (NeoGeo CD Single Game Arcade) by BEY emulates the Arcade game Phoenix on NeoGeo CD. News hint by Cristiano Bei via PDRoms’ Facebook page.

http://www.iocero.com/eventdetail.aspx?idEvent=27312

The NeoGeo Development Wiki is a wiki is about every technical aspect of the SNK NeoGeo hardware and software (AES, MVS, CD and CDZ). It’s a rather fresh wiki only three days old, so the information should fill up during the next couple of weeks.

Possibly this will give Neo Geo development a small boost, which is badly required.

http://wiki.neogeodev.org/index.php?title=Main_Page