The Story of Power Kick so far.

Some time is the early 90s, I played an old game that a friend gave me on a 5 ¼ disk. 

The game was named Bruce Lee and even though the graphics were outdated, even back then, one move stuck in my head forever.

The forward kick of Bruce Lee.

Other than that, Bubble Bobble and Snow Bros will always have a hot spot in my gaming heart.

A long trip begun and as it looks like it will never end.

I started learning about programming, and learned from programmers to fear the C language.

Moving on, on early 2000s things started to change. Game Engines started to surface like the Game Maker, Adventure Studio, Mugen etc, but the gaming world changed too. Now (in the 2000s) 2d games were out of fashion and especially single screen platformer. The world demanded 3d, and I fell in the loop of learning Blender and failing to create anything remotely interesting for far too many years.

Years passed, and I became an early Godot user, between trying to make something reasonable in 3d with it, I started making simple 2d games, until one day I had enough with the waiting for the actual 3d in Godot and I switched for a short period on making Quake total conversion that I never released and when I got a new PC at last Unreal Engine. Feeling not good with the whole idea in making Total Conversions or Unreal Engine game without AAA graphics I finally decided that I will return to Godot and made some simple 3d games with it, but soon afterwards I decided that to focus only on 2d games with simple graphics, just because I wanted to make games and not graphics.

After making some games with it, an old demon came back to me. The hungry CPU resources demon. I was making simple games, but those simple games were too hungry on CPU resources. And in the end, the demon won.

I switched to the Rust Lang and started using the lightweight lib MacroQuad. Soon, the first version of Power Kick appeared.

It was light weighted and the demon was happy, I was happy too.

But soon I bought a Pi 400 and I wanted to compile it for the Pi. A closed gate of the hell named Cross-Compilation started to open once again. I first believed that it was something of the past. Damn, I believed that we (the humans) had sorted out this problem. Well, of course I was wrong.

Any logical person would have gone back to Godot, but I said, "That's it, I am done with the Computers and the new devices, I will go back to the past, I will make game for old devices and if anyone for any reason wants ever to play my games he will use an emulator or an old device."

My search obviously leaded me to SGDK. 

Mega Drive was the perfect much. A CPU identical to the 80s and early 90s arcade machines and a sound chip similar to DX-7.

I felt like I was blind, I played many Mega Drive games with emulators (or as a guest to several homes) over the years, but till then I never realized that Sega actually tried to bring the Arcades to the home with this machine. My respect for the in this sort period of time became ten folds bigger.

And SGDK was so good, so well organized, it made all other SDKs or even Game Engines for modern machines to feel like amateur attempts.

And like that, I started learning and making games for the Mega Drive with SGDK.

Of course, the first game that I made was...

Power Kick.

The transition (port) to Mega Drive gone well, but I made many mistakes in design because I had underestimated the CPU power of the Mega Drive. This lead to a source code not too flexible to expand. So I shelved it and moved on to other projects. Knowing that, I let out many game mechanics from the old single screen games. I always kept in the back of my head that one day I will come back and do this properly.

Afterwards I made for the MD several games and in different genres, I even made an original J-Adventure Visual Novel for the MD. Now seriously... who does that?

Anyway, MD felt like home to me and even my demon was happy with it (even when I was running those game through an emulator for some reason). Of course, I bought my MDs too and a flashcard to be able to run my games. I even found working CRTs etc.

Then one day when I was making my ultimate gift to the world (Plato's Socrates), I was approached by an immoral pixel artist who presents himself as a retro developer too, and he told me that he wants to make a single screen game for a client. When he asked me if I have any prototype to show to his client, I have shown to him... what else? Power Kick MD.

Anyway this client of him, wanted a very bad game to be made, completely different from Power Kick. He was offering around 3000-4000EU for this to me and I said, OK.

We started planning, but then the date for my scheduled holidays with my family came, and I was absent for one week. When I came back, he told me that he started a project like Snow Bros with another developer and that he is sorry for that. I had no problem with that, and I resumed my work on Plato's Socrates.

Moving two months from this point, he approached me again. He told me that the Snow Bros project didn't go that well and asked me if I am available to code it, but for 750EU. To convince me, he told me that he is the king of the Pixel Artists, and he is willing to work with me and with other games where my payment will be much higher. Thinking that he may be in a very strange situation and me willing to work with a Pixel Artist, I agreed to help with those conditions. He gave me the game (not the code) and it was broken everywhere. I fixed the game design to make it as much possible with the client restrictions, an actual one screen platformer, and started coding it. After a period of two and a half weeks, I had the mechanics and the first stages ready. But a huge thing was going on in those weeks. The more confident he became that I liked his work, the more ironic he became with mine. And the more he started trusting me, the more his immoral character surfaced. And the cherry-pick in all this was that he had all my source code. It felt that as the coding was near completion that he was trying to drive me away from the game. And then one day I had enough. I was so sick by all this ill atmosphere and I said that I had enough, and I am out. No money or anything. I just want to get out from all this nonsense and immorality.

I was tired, angry and disappointed by this work, I worked day and night to make it. It was even more exhausting than making a 3d dungeon crawler in a month for the MD.

Sitting there angry as hell, I only wanted to Power Kick someone. Of course that's not possible and extremely dangerous by the way, so don't try it at home.

I was there with a one screen platformer game engine written. Flexible and expandable. The answer was clear.

I will do another Power Kick. I will do it as it was supposed to be.

And that's what I did. I worked on it for another two weeks day and night again, and I made this demo-beta 1 that it is right now on this page.

Of course, changes from the first two Power Kick are here and many.

But the most important change in my opinion is that now when an enemy have no energy left, he becomes Red. Those enemies will become rolling enemies if a rolling enemy hits them.

It sounds simple and not that important, but it is.

This way you can beat up enough enemies on screen and achieve to get them all out with just a single Power Kick.

In fact, from the time a rolling enemy is created, if you do not stay without rolling enemies until all the enemies are out, you get the bonus of the stage. Like Bubble Bobble's ice creams or the Japanese cards in Snow Bros or the Diamonds in Nightmare in the Dark.

Also, because the enemies must get in the Dizzy state or to be Red for them to start rolling, the game moved a little bit closer to Bubble Bobble from Snow Bros.

For example, in Snow Bros or in Nightmare in the Dark, you can clean the stage with a single throw of a ball. You don't have to bother with the rest of the enemies. In Super Power Kick, you will have to deal with more enemies to make them Red, and sometimes you will have to beat them all before you Power Kick the right guy. This in a sense is like Bubble Bobble, where you have to put all the enemies in a ball.

I believe that this single new detail makes the new Power Kick... Super Power Kick.

So what is in the making for the future?

This Demo-Beta 1 can be cleared in 6 and a half minutes and probably faster, but I believe that this is the average time. I want this game to be a half hour blast. So I will create 4 more parts for this one. 5 worlds with 8 stages.

It also needs more enemies with different behaviours and more power ups like the shuriken.

I believe that things will come as I go. It will take time, of course, but it is something I want to have and play with my friends.

I will probably upload a new version every time I have a world completed. I can't give a time estimation right now. But probably it will go slow, because lately when ever I sit down to work with it, I find myself just playing it. Oh yes, I am already addicted to it.

So that's it. Thanks for reading. See you when the helicopter is here.

Thanks.

P.S. Does anyone know where is the Ninja in the Demo?