I assume @bomtoons will post about this in his own userpage, but i think itd be fun to get both the programmers (his) point of view and the art side (me) on this drawn out re-make.

BACKSTORY:

I think we started working on this a year and a half before the actual 10th anniversary of the game (2008). We got pretty far, and then as with most things, life gets in the way, i think i was moving into a new job, and moving, and i think Nick had some stuff on his plate going on in the west coast of the continent. The game got about 80%? done then sat for awhile, i'd make stuff but i ended up not liking it or i just didnt feel like it lived up to what i wanted a remake to feel like. So I'd not pass over the art. Whatever the reason, the game sat for a few years.

PODCASTS:

I think even though the game had stopped being in production, it always seemed to come up in conversation, so in some ways it probably was what kept it alive, even as it lay dormant. I think the last podcast i was on with ZJ i stared to feel like it was worth seeing where that got left off, and most recently the podcast with Nick, started to feel like there was some momentum and started getting on the same page. The tough thing about making a game is that both you and our peers have to be on the same motivation and wavelength or it just doesnt work! So it was nice to have been invited to do those podcasts or maybe i would have never gotten back my mojo to continue it.

ABOUT THE ART:

I think aside from the art being an upgrade from where it was years ago, remaking this game has had its own set of challenges from a creative standpoint. I'll try to loosely talk about some of them:

Framerate: This game's art was built for 36fps. Which wouldn't normally be so bad if the game wasnt so huge in regards to screen size. It's built at 1920x1080, for a game with a 2px stroke (its a wierd pixel art style which ill get to in a minute). So each sprite takes forever to work on, i think just the foilage up top took me about a week to do correctly. I think the original had recycled sprites for the knights, this one has unique ones for each version and Tom himself has some new attacks and variations from the original.

The sloppy 2px stroke: This was kind of an unnecessary experiment that ended up being a total pain to integrate into a game of this scale, because each outline i have to redraw twice so that some parts of it have a 4px outline and some 2px. I call it a sloppy 2px stroke. At the time it seemed like fun but its a total annoyance. Too late to redo it all now so the show must go on!

Anyways here's a gif Nick made to post:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykURWvAo6Eg