Lethal Wedding (SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive) Kickstarter | $50K Smashed! Deluxe CD Unlocked, More Gore, and Lead Dev Spotlight!
3 Days to Go!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeOUoPTcFRY
Reaching $50k is huge, so we wanted to take a second to highlight the absolute engine driving this project. We sat down with our lead developer and primary programmer, Mikhail Nikishin, to give him some well-deserved credit and chat about how he’s crafting the core gameplay of Lethal Wedding.
For readers who are completely new to Lethal Wedding, how would you describe the core concept and setting of the game in your own words?
Mikhail: "Hi. I am the programmer of Lethal Wedding, and I am the one who does all the technical stuff for the game.
Most of the time, when people think of retro, they think of platformers or metroidvanias. Lethal Wedding departs a little from this. It is a top-down shooter where you navigate the maze-like levels, shooting endless clowns that appear out of nowhere, trying to make them not to do the same with you. Our goal was to make the concept a blend of seriousness and wackiness. They say that getting attacked by clowns isn’t something you get to experience in everyday life, but sometimes you get lucky."
What was the initial origin of the project, and what tools did you use to build the first prototype? Did you begin development directly on Sega Genesis tools, or did you test the concept in a modern engine first?
Mikhail: "I never did any prototyping. I started with the SGDK kit on day one. SGDK is an acronym for Sega Genesis Development Kit, and it is exactly what it says on the tin, a C-based toolkit already containing all the basic routines to quickly draw the backgrounds, sprites et cetera. A fantastic tool, if you ask me.
Some people think that retro development is assembler only, but in reality, C is like “we have to build a car, here are the tools for it”, while assembler is like “we have to build a car, but first we need to invent the wheel, the tools, and our hands”. Besides, you can write assembly code in a C project in some critical places, so it is a win-win. Currently though we only have exactly one asm(“nop”) instruction for the entire project, but that’s a possibility!
Prototyping on a modern engine can help, but it can also backfire. The main thing in retro development is adhering to limitations. You always know that there’s a limitation of “one can not rotate the sprite 90°”, but the limitations like “that’s how many cycles you can work with” are way trickier. Modern PCs and even phones are orders of magnitude more powerful in comparison to Sega Genesis. You can easily end up with something that is simply too computationally expensive for the poor old Genny, and the only way would be then to cap FPS to 30 or something along the lines of that. No one will enjoy playing at 30 FPS. So, prototyping is an excellent tool, but you have to be aware of limitations and pitfalls."
Given the nearly ten-year development cycle, how significantly did the game change from day one to the final version? Additionally, how has your personal coding style evolved over that decade? Have you updated your development tools over the decade, or stuck with your original setup?
Mikhail: "Of course it didn’t take us ten years to work purely on Lethal Wedding. First, we made a game which was fun, but something was amiss. The first iteration looked like the current one, yet the level design was quite bland back then. But it wasn’t only about the level design. That’s the hardest thing to pinpoint: The Feel. It is not quantitive. You can’t measure “The Feel”. It is either "there” or “almost there”, and the latter is not good enough. I’ve had to work on other game prototypes during that time. We needed a fresh look, maybe fresh pairs of eyes, a new perspective. And on the last iteration something finally clicked.
Of course, the big drawback of this approach is the fact that I am essentially working with the legacy code at this point, but that’s how it is. Rewriting the entire game from scratch would have probably taken many more months.
About the development tools: no, they haven’t changed over the years. I still use vim as my go-to coding program. I just keep adding more plugins on ...
Read the full interview here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/megacatstudios/lethal-wedding/posts/4732082Pledge your support on Kickstarter now:
https://bit.ly/MCSLWKSSM
