Episode 6 with Gunlord500

Yay!

I'm glad I can call the Bloodstained Community Broadcast my #1 source for all things related to Mighty No. 9.

I hope everyone enjoyed the message/song I wanted Mike to sing on the podcast as the prize for the "find the hidden secret" contest. Thank you for being a good sport, Mike!

Also Gunlord, are you secretly the guy who did the voices of Klarion the Witch Boy in Young Justice and the Terrible Tinkerer in Spectacular Spider-Man? Because if you are, you have to say "yes" and answer every fanboy question I have about those shows. It's the law.

It's nice that Gunlord500 gave a shoutout to me as an active member here,even though I have so little posts compared to the many other various forum members here
...and I still have never found out that secret,I blame mike

Nice, even more nice to see that you've became a moderator in this forum too gunlord500 . I've recommended you before and would yet again if I had noticed that XombieMike wanted a new mod.

Your voice is different than I've imagined, yet very gunlord-ish prunyuu~

Glad to have the podcast back man, looking forward to your possible one with Mana again.

The rss feed doesn't seem to want to download the actual file

Was this the Bloodstained Community Broadcast or the Mighty No 9 Community Broadcast?

A good episode all around. It's nice to have this back and I of course appreciated the shoutout. If next episode we can get Mana back to talk about the updates and development of Bloodstained from the "other side" that would be super hype. Since the MN9 discussion took up the bulk of the episode, I kind of wanted to touch upon some points brought up:

• Communication and how one chooses to advertise your product is super important. A lot of the bad blood and loss of goodwill over the past few years have been from issues of communication. In my time following multiple Kickstarter projects, I've concluded that backers overall don't really understand how game are made, how long they take, how expensive they are, etc. They can turn on you quickly and can be slow to forgive. As many real mistakes that have been made with MN9, lots of people are mad at Comcept/Inticreates for what are essentially "non-issues" in my mind. As such, it’s important to be careful of what you say, how you say it and when you say it. Long periods of silence are also a bad look too. I think it’s clear to me so far that the mistakes made with MN9 have been very informative to both Inticreates and onlookers in general and I think both the PR and the development Bloodstained have been and will be better due to lessons learned from MN9.

• While it’s true that Inafune got his start in character design and illustration, I think it’s a bit disingenuous to say his role in the development of the Mega Man series and IP wasn't influential and consequential. As time went on, his role and importance grew and he was a producer on many titles in the series. While it’s true that not all producers work the same and have the same role (and thus their games are going to end up different), I don't think its unfair to say he is as influential (or at least nearly so) to the Mega Man series as Iga is to the Castlevania series. If you want to quickly know more about Inafune, look up his Wikipedia entry.

• 3DS + PSVita versions of MN9 are being made on a different engine from Unreal 3 (and heck they aren't even coming out with the rest of the versions) so it’s unclear to me how much their existence may have affected other versions of the game. It’s not at all uncommon for a game to have "normal" console versions and then "pared down" handheld versions - they don't have to have complete parity. Unless they promised otherwise, and I have no recollection that they did, that option was always available to them to not have the console and hand-held version have parity. I'm not sure if we will ever get straight answer on this though. Did they decide to enforce parity between all versions? If so why? There are pros and cons to each approach of course - again I'm not 100% sure which option they went for and why since none of us have even seen the potable versions.

• Given the trademark that was taken out, there really isn't any ambiguity in my mind that Deep Silver is publishing Bloodstained. One could play semantics but it’s as good as confirmed and I'm not sure "holding out hope it isn't them (if anyone is doing that - I'm not saying you guys are) isn't helpful.

• The conundrums a spiritual successor often finds itself in are interesting. You want to be reasonably close to the "source" since that's what people expect from you but you still want and need to find ways to differentiate yourself - your IP can never grow and find its own identity and you can never surprise players in a good way if it’s just a clone of another series. The dash mechanic in MN9 (especially the ability to dash through enemies) is perhaps the way its gameplay differs the most with regard to Mega Man games. I think when people get more used to it they will be more positive about it but it makes sense that it would dominate that new trailer and I can understand why people might be a bit apprehensive. I, and others, backed MN9 because we wanted more Mega Man like games but I at least wasn't expecting or necessarily wanted an exact Mega Man clone. There are ways in which I think, at least from looking at things, I might have preferred the movement mechanics of the X and Zero series (limited air dashes but better wall movement) but I'm not going to write the game off as slow just yet.

• In regards to the general sense of "what does MN9 mean for kickstaters", I think it might have been good to mention past successes such as Shovel Knight or Pillars of Eternity. Shovel Knight is interesting because it has clear Mega Man inspirations. Some have even argued the overwhelming success of Shovel Knight might have taken took the winds out of MN9 be beating it to the punch and nailing the aesthetics and gameplay so well. I'm not sure if that's 100% accurate but it’s an interesting thought.

• You don't have to "think" about it - we know Judd approached Iga following the success of MN9 and Iga felt ok leaving Konami in part because of the success of the MN9 campaign. I feel I recall saying you weren't sure but I feel very confident on this point. Unfortunately I don't have the time right now to drudge through the articles/podcasts that would have this confirmation.

Great points, Crocodile. To address them-Like I said in the podcast, I wasn't sure exactly what influence Inafune had, so I made it clear that I was just going off of what I'd heard to avoid giving him the wrong amount of credit (more or less). In reference to the 3ds version and UE3, you may be right, I'm not entirely sure. At the very least, however, having to build essentially a different version of the game from scratch certainly would be an unnecessary expense in both time and money, and as you said, it might be hard to get a straight answer--maybe they're enforcing parity, maybe not. I'd like to know that too

Give it a shot now and let me know if it's fixed. Thanks for letting me know.