Update [Fri 7th Jun, 2024 14:45 BST]: A demo of the SNES version of Black Jewel Reborn is now available and can be downloaded free of charge (or with a donation if you'd like to support the project.
The project was successfully crowdfunded by 785 backers, who pledged €64,095 in total.
Here's some PR:
Darkor stole the Black Jewel from the ancient Temple of Power. He's going to use it to overwhelm all the people of the kingdom and become its sole ruler. Ryan and Julia are the strongest warriors, the only ones that courageously decided to oppose the dark plans of the enemy. The mighty swordsman warrior and the invincible Amazon with the whip are already on the trail of Darkor, ready to eradicate his army of monstrous creatures and bring the Black Jewel back to the temple.
The game is a classic side-scrolling hack and slash. You can play both alone and together with your friend, with each of you controlling the barbarian Ryan or the Amazon Julia. The gameplay is about fighting your way through intense battles with many enemies. Each character has three normal attacks, a jump attack, as well as a special attack that charged slowly when you kill enemies. If you find yourself in a desperate situation, you can call upon your god to help you, who will destroy everything on the screen.
Original Story [Thu 14th Jul, 2022 12:00 BST]: Dragonbox owner Michael Mrozek – who some of you might remember from the OpenPandora and Pyra hardware projects – has opened a crowdfunding campaign for one of the most ambitious 'new retro' projects we've seen in a long time.
PSCD Games' Black Jewel Reborn is an action platformer with serious Rastan vibes, but incredibly, it is in development for four different retro systems: Mega Drive / Genesis, SNES, NES and Game Boy.
The 'reborn' part of the title relates to the fact that this is a remake of an existing indie game called (you've guessed it) Black Jewel. The team worked with creator Oscar Selestini to port the game to the Mega Drive, improving the presentation and adding in a second character in the form of the Amazonian warrior Julia.
The campaign is seeking €40,000 to finish the production of the game, with the Mega Drive version being around 80% complete at present. The graphics for NES and GameBoy versions are 20% complete, while the game engines and music are fully written. The SNES version will be based on the Mega Drive version, with improved visual effects and music being added.
It's worth noting that the team behind the game, PSCD, is located in a country which is not yet supported by Kickstarter, so Mrozek is running the crowdfunding campaign via his own account. "We've been working with PSCD Games for some time and are happy to support the development of new games for classic consoles," Mrozek says.
It's all looking rather nice, but will you be pledging some cash? There's a demo available if you'd like to give it a spin before you lay down your money.
[source kickstarter.com]
Comments 4
Cool. I’ll look out for the genesis version demo
Happy to see and hear the SNES version is still coming along.
Edit: I just tried the SNES demo and there's some ways to go:
It's just a couple of levels, there's no more colours than on Genesis, there's no use of transparency anywhere, the third background layer hasn't been used for anything at all, you can tell that some elements have been quickly adjusted to fit the smaller horizontal resolution on SNES and haven't been entirely optimized to look as good as they can in the smaller screen space, the controls aren't mapped correctly, and so on.
They've mentioned there's a newer build, and I think there's probably still quite a bit of development time left on the SNES build, so I'd definitely like to seem them use that time to really polish things up and ideally add a few extra details and flourishes to make that version feel properly at home on SNES.
I wish them all the best in their endeavours.
Also tried the SNES demo, and the first thing I immediately noticed is that the attack and jumps buttons are mapped wrong. On SNES, those are always the Y and B buttons. But they're mapped to B and A here, which is absolutely bizarre and awkward.
@MARl0 Yeah, that's not a great first impression when playing any new [or old] SNES game.
Definitely agree that attack/action should be Y and jump B, just like on all the very best SNES games of this type.
I presume this will be getting fixed in a newer build, but it's not a great sign that they'll truly be getting the most out of the SNES to be honest if they don't even understand those basic things out the gate.
Hopefully the final result is at least a solid port of the Genesis game [with some cropping] if nothing more. I guess for now that's about the best we should expect. And that's quite disappointing really. But hopefully the situation will improve over time on SNES.
Either way, I'm happy SNES is at least getting another proper new commercial indie/homebrew game. That I will always welcome.
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