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/