Mr. Tibbs, on 10 July 2017 - 04:17 PM, said:
This is a really wonderful summary. Allow me to split hairs for a second:
>Interceptor Entertainment, a studio which declared bankruptcy last year and has since rebranded themselves as Slipgate Studios
Much like the "Interceptor bought 3D Realms" misinformation which never seems to die, technically Slipgate is a new studio with many of the same team.
>The game’s developer, Voidpoint, is a completely independent venture. It began development in early 2015 as a stand-alone project and was quietly announced on a poster back in July 2015
This paragraph started about Voidpoint the studio and continued about Ion Maiden the game. IM started as nothing more than an extra for that Deluxe Edition (for which we were not going to be paid) and grew into a stand-alone product months later.
Voidpoint, LLC began as a joint venture between TerminX and myself in creating the
Hail to the King Collection ports for iOS and Android. We took on Ion Maiden (working titles "The Washington Project" or "Project Washington", and later "The Washington Incident" [but not "Bombshell Codename: Washington Project" or "The Washington Experiment", which were invented by the author of those images]) and worked on the two projects in overlapping fashion until HTTKC was shelved.
>While the game itself is retro rather than an outright 1:1 reproduction of 90's techniques
The ambiguity of what "90's techniques" means, possibly by trying to avoid jargon, leads me to rapidly oscillate between considering this statement false and true. I know of no other game bringing truly retro
gameplay with truly retro
tech. We're still using the original engine and its ideas, though with 20 extra years of development--replacing code, but rarely throwing out ideas. We're still using some of the same data formats, though their structure, workflow and tools have changed with time. We are definitely turning the era's original aesthetic and
creative techniques up to 11. Calling it "retro rather than 1:1" sounds like we're closer to cheap Wolf 3D clones using Unity on Steam Greenlight than Mega Man 9 and 10. Of course it's not 1:1, that would require buying 20-year old hardware, forgetting about 20 years of advancements in art, music, computer science, etc, and selling the game only on CD-ROM or five floppies, available only by mail order and playable on MS-DOS.
>avoiding the limitations imposed on Build engine in order to run better on lower spec systems (think Shovel Knight)
How can the Build Engine avoid limitations imposed on the Build Engine?
Similar to above, Shovel Knight is not a good analogy here. Only the music is what you would call "authentic" if you were that purist about calling it an NES game. It excels at
evoking the era, but the limitations in hardware, software, talent, resources, and human knowledge at that time forced decisions that Shovel Knight steamrolls. I'm not criticizing, I'm pointing out that SK and IM need to be taxonomized differently.
>mod tracker music for about 20 years (the original Build engine has been modified to support this).
The Build Engine knows nothing about sound or music. We added support for MOD, XM, IT, and S3M (via libxmp-lite) to our (quite distant) fork of Jim Dosé's Apogee Sound System, used by Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood, the Redneck Rampage series, NAM, WWII GI,
and Extreme Paintbrawl, alongside modern support for FLAC and Ogg Vorbis audio streams for sounds and music.
>The content will be more or less unique from the full version.
Much like the FEAR demo, the maps in the demo are redressed samples of portions of the registered version. "More or less unique" is a false promise that I do not believe Voidpoint is the originator of.
>The final game is likely to have the face in the HUD, but it'll be more like Doom.
I can confirm that the final game will have a face in the HUD, in much the same way as Doom.
You should also mention that Ion Maiden's publisher is 3D Realms.