Friday, March 6, 2015

Get Glitched with Mega Man-Inspired Platformer 'Glitch Warrior'


Imagine a Mega Man game where your greatest asset is the ability to glitch the game to your advantage. Create platforms from your health bar; adjust enemy behavior on the fly; spawn clones of yourself anywhere and everywhere. This is the concept behind Glitch Warrior, a Mega Man-inspired action platformer by m07games.



Currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, Glitch Warriors offers a unique twist to the tried-and-true Mega Man formula: glitch powers.

As described by the game's creators:

"Glitch Warrior is a 2D action game with an emphasis on precision platforming and game manipulating "glitches." Everything in the game, from enemy spawns to level loading, is controlled by a series of variables. The player is given the ability to manipulate these variables, resulting in unexpected activity that lets them bend the game to their will. As the game progresses the player gains access to new and more exciting types of glitches."

Glitch powers come with great responsibility, mind you. If you're not careful you might end up hindering your progress, like spawning multiple copies of a boss in the next room.

"The majority of what you see in Glitch Warrior, from spawns to which screen will load next, is stored in a series of memory banks. The game is constantly consulting these banks and the variables stored in them to determine what to do next. What the player is able to do, through a series of unlockable powers, is manipulate and swap around these variables."

In all, Glitch Warrior is about experimentation. No two playthroughs will be alike! 

For more details on the game, head to the official Kickstarter!

8 comments:

  1. They literally just recolored Mega Man sprites and assets and even re-used some assets with slight modifications. It's supposed to be inspired from, not stolen from. At least make your own sprites or at LEAST modify the Mega Man beyond just a recoloring.

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  2. Can you really say it's a "glitch" if it's an intended feature?

    The premise sorta reminds me of Hack 'n' Slash by DoubleFine, because the goal of that game is to screw around with the programming (the source files are in plain text) as it features live code reload. But I guess this game is just playing the game, well, normally?

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    1. The general consensus in the glitch art community is that there are 'true glitches' and 'glitch-likes.' Glitch-likes can be divided into two categories; things that appear as glitches but were completely manufactured by the artist (like making a perler bead pattern that evokes a glitch aesthetic) and then there are things that the artist creates by intentionally forcing data corruption (Like data bending or ripping out random lines of code in a program.)
      I would imagine this will fall closer to the first category where the glitch-likes will behave how we expect glitches to behave but is in fact explicitly what the programmer wanted. Otherwise I could see crashing being a major problem.

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  3. Even Rosenkreuzstilette isn't THIS blatant.

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  4. Hey, if others want to use the formula, blatant as it may be, that's fine by me.

    Better than the mass amount of nothing that would be happening otherwise.

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  5. I would imagine the graphics are there as simple placeholders. They did say this was pre-alpha.
    It's not like we haven't seen developers do this before, Lego had those Battle Network sprites hidden in their Ninjago game.

    I can get behind this!

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  6. That this classifies as news these days. How the mighty has fallen, I miss my real MegaMan so much D:

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  7. I like the idea a lot, sadly I can't fund :/

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