It's been several months since we announced the upcoming Kickstarter campaign that our team has been working towards every day! As you probably know, White Ninja Studio is creating the official demo of Irena Genesis Metal Fury! Unlike the prototype demo which was designed to gather initial opinions from the community, the official demo will demonstrate a much more refined preview of the final game.

We are aware that you are very excited to participate in the financing of the project and to pre-order your physical copy, but the development of the demo as well as the preparations obliges us to take the necessary time to to achieve our objectives. Despite the latest events the world has experienced with COVID-19, we haven’t stopped working and are staying focused on Irena Genesis Metal Fury. To demonstrate this, let's take stock of all the new features and improvements made since the prototype demo.

Our first goal was to establish a new optimized engine to display more sprites on the screen without slowing down. This is an essential point that we wanted to put in place in order to offer you a great experience and to demonstrate that the SEGA Genesis / Mega Drive is a very powerful console. This is a radical change from the prototype demo which was not capable of displaying as many sprites on the screen. Looking at our demonstration videos, it seems obvious now that the engine is more robust and efficient.

We’ve  also added support for "maps"  which now contain destructible elements in addition to displaying even more colors since two palettes are now used for one background. The presence of a map for each level is a major improvement in order to offer you a varied level design that will significantly improve the gaming experience.

In addition, the gameplay has evolved thanks to the appearance of three distinct weapons, each offering its advantages and disadvantages. For example, “rifle” (your starting weapon),  has a fast fire rate and can cover a large space on the screen, but is not as powerful as the laser which has a slower fire rate. Rocket is a good compromise, as it covers a large space on screen, a good fire rate, but lacks precision. Due to their contrasting properties, it will be important to choose the weapon that will best suit the present situation to ensure that you take the victory.

You will be pleased to learn that we have deemed it important that the Rayden MG323 (your ship) reappears immediately in the correct place on the screen after being destroyed in order to immediately resume the action where it stopped. Thus, each level has checkpoints and respawn points to allow the player to be correctly placed when they return to the combat zone.

As promised, many graphic elements have been reworked in order to improve visual quality and better adapt to the world of Irena Genesis Metal Fury. In addition, we have significantly improved the audio quality that will put you right in the action on your favorite 16-bit console. Better yet, Irena Genesis Metal Fury now has a new soundtrack made by SpaceCastle and promises to vibrate the bowels of the YM2612.

Coinciding with the game’s evolution, the game’s storyline and main characters have been expanded upon to give the player a more immersive experience. Celina takes on a new look and is accompanied by great warriors such as Kayshan, Vulkan and Krawzer, each with their own back stories. You will certainly appreciate the presence  of in-game short dialogues occurring at key events. At White Ninja Studio, we believe it's essential to provide a quality story and character design to help the player project themselves into the world of Irena Genesis Metal Fury.

As you can see, there are many improvements and new features, but there are still many other top secret improvements that we’re excited to let you discover when the demo will be available. For our team, Irena is a work of love for arcade games and the SEGA Genesis / Mega Drive. We hope that many of you will enjoy our demo and participate in the future Kickstarter campaign which is coming very soon! Thank you for your support!

Original post at : https://www.whiteninjastudio.com/posts/news/irena-genesis-metal-fury-update