The identify of 17-Bit’s studio comes from founder and artistic director Jake Kazdal eager to make “16-bit video games with fashionable aptitude”. You possibly can see this with its new recreation Awaysis, which resembles a traditional top-down action-adventure from the SNES period like Secret of Mana, besides its cute (and bizarre) anthropomorphic weapon-wielding critters aren’t offered in pixel artwork however in 3D.
The titular historic floating relic you journey on has a sort of plasticky diorama really feel to it, whereas characters knocking one another about have the anarchic vitality of getting out your toy collectible figurines to scrap with each other. “That is very soiled, bodily, gross, avenue combating fight,” he says.
(Picture credit score: 17-Bit)
The revolutionary facet of the sport comes from the studio’s bespoke physics instruments, completely different from the Chaos Physics that comes with Unreal Engine 5. “With Havok [or Chaos], you may ragdoll stuff however there’s no enter left in any respect,” Kazdal explains. “What we would like is me swinging my sword, and once I hit a wall, we’ve got a goal animation that performs a recoil, then we mix that recoil with precise bodily data, so in the event you hit the sword this quick on any such floor, it can bounce again this a lot.”
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It might probably get extra granular, too, in how one can cost up the facility of your weapon assaults, but additionally simply shove or slide into an enemy (or one another). In most video games, you may need a preset cost animation or a knock-back stun animation, however in Awaysis, in the event you shove somebody in the midst of their assault animation, it might nonetheless cancel their assault however not the entire animation.
It might be extra just like the enemy will get knocked again whereas their weapon swings on the air in useless. “This combines bodily simulation with animation. and that enables for simply much more subtlety and selection, so you will not see the identical response again and again,” Kazdal explains.
(Picture credit score: 17-Bit)
Canned animation is, by nature, prerecorded and due to this fact predictable, as you may see the identical animations play out repeatedly. It is one thing Kazdal has gotten uninterested in, regardless of additionally talking of his love of traditional arcade video games that, whereas reliant on canned animations, additionally enable for tight and clear inputs. Awaysis’s physics-based fight animations are, nevertheless, impressed by the emergent physics in occasion brawler Gang Beasts (if that recreation had swords); additionally they have a quirk that did not sit proper with Kazdal.
“Most [physics] simulation video games are fairly clunky and inexact within the mistaken means, you do not have fairly sufficient management over it to really feel actually in tune with it,” he says. Awaysis, then, is supposed to be a cheerful in-between. “Our characters do have weight, so you may bounce and switch round and never have air friction. It feels bodily, grounded, heavy, you are coping with bodily props, bodily weapons, every part about it’s bodily, heavy, soiled, and opportunistic, and it is only a completely different sort of recreation.”
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Alongside the forward-thinking physics is an aesthetic that does not simply take inspiration from however is definitely made in collaboration with veteran Japanese creators behind video games which were influential to Kazdal. There’s the music from Hirokazu ‘Hip’ Tanaka, who made his identify at Nintendo as a sound programmer and composer on many NES classics (top-of-the-line retro consoles) like Metroid, Child Icarus, and the Mom collection. He, nevertheless, eschews his chiptune stylings in favour of extra dubby beats (“it is nonetheless obtained that chip-tune core, that traditional online game soul”, says Kazdal).
(Picture credit score: 17-Bit)
(Picture credit score: 17-Bit)
The character designs, in the meantime, come from Satoshi Matsuura, finest identified for his cute and eccentric creature designs – he even has a e book that includes greater than 600 illustrations for fantasy characters and creatures, referred to as Fantasy Characters and Creatures: An Artist’s Sourcebook, which is an important sourcebook for any budding character artist.
“I have been following him on Twitter for years, I like his model, so I simply cold-called him,” Kazdal explains. “When Sq. Enix was sort of cut up between the real looking Nomura stuff and the cuter stuff, he was on the latter facet, however he had additionally labored on Legend of Mana, and Secret of Mana was an enormous inspiration for this recreation.”
Household-friendly fare like Minecraft Dungeons has additionally been an inspiration, and given the nice and cozy and vibrant environments with lush gardens and flowing water, the primary space of Awaysis definitely feels extra chill and welcoming than your common recreation that includes dungeoning. Hopefully, that does not work towards the sport as one other throwaway light-weight indie recreation. It is one thing Kazdal is acutely aware about, too.
“I am a giant Steam participant and I’ve performed loads of different indie video games that look cute and well-executed, however I’ve performed them 100 occasions earlier than,” he concludes. “That is our determined try to maneuver the medium ahead and do one thing completely different and new. That’s going to be certainly one of our largest challenges, as a result of this does have a look at a look like one thing you’ve got performed earlier than, and I do suppose that individuals are gonna have expectations that aren’t this recreation.”
(Picture credit score: 17-Bit)
(Picture credit score: 17-Bit)
Awaysis is coming to Xbox Sequence X/S, PS5 and PC quickly.
