Lufthoheit Is A Thunder Force-Style Shmup For The Genesis / Mega Drive

More shooters the better, Earthion & ZPF look amazing!!!

Aaaaaaaaactually...... The original Thunder Force was a Bosconian clone with a view from above the spaceship. Lufthoheit is in the style of Thunder Force IV.

Possibly a stupid question, and this is not meant to lessen the efforts of these devs:

Could a game like this been made right at the end of the Genesis's/MD's lifespan? Or are limitations being found only with the help of modern hardware?

@farrgazer
To my knowledge no commercial game used sprite multiplexing the way we do in Lufthoheit to get more sprites onscreen for general purpose.
There was one game that never got released late in the life of the megadrive Stone Protectors in 1994 that was going to use sprite multiplexing for a snow effect - there is a video of it.
Castlevania 4 bloodlines uses some sprite trickery but its not with the purpose of reusing sprites for other objects eg sprite mulitplexing , the effect did however involve switching the active sprite table midscreen.
Both games are covered in a great article here about it
https://rasterscroll.com/mdgraphics/graphical-effects/sprite-raster-effects/

There is no doubt modern tools help a LOT , eg for luftoheit i have automatic instruction counters that tabulate the cost of a routine before I even run it. I also have the grace of much more time to perfect code, likely whole games were released in commercial days in the time I perfected just our sprite multiplexor.
SGDK (sega megadrive development kit) is a fabulous tool and we use that toolkit for 20% of our game , the other 80 % been assembly , still its a critical 20% such as the XGM sound driver etc.
So could Lufthoheit be made in the commercial time of the megadrive , whilst possible it would be highly unlikely . The need for sprite counts > 80 was likely not a popular thought then as very busy shooters etc were in their infancy and mid 90s is often quoted as the time they were starting to come to life.
Sorry for a wall of text but it was an interesting set of questions you posted !

@ShannonBirt Thank you for responding, though!

Admittedly a good chunk of that flew over my head as I'm no dev, but I do get the impression that both time and tech are important factors.

Besides, especially with time, not being pressured means you're less likely to burn out or compromise, and this applies to a lot of other fields, too.