We’ll also be selling, for the first time ever, PHYSICAL COPIES! That’s right. You can own Aeternum on an actual CD. And unlike some other games, this one has the game right there on the disc, DRM free! For anyone that can’t make it to the con, we will no doubt be making available these physical copies online afterwards.

Learn more at the official TouhouCon website.

Hope to see you there!

Really sad I missed this for so long, but I was checking referrers and I noticed something interesting! Some character art sketches from an artist by the name of Rikki.

Head on over to  neon death parade to check out more of Rikki’s work.

The bundle will run from December 3rd to 9th and is also part of the Gaming Tuesday initiative. A portion of every purchase goes to assist aid in the Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan.

The other games in the bundle are:

• Rush Bros.
• Bad Bots
• Who’s that Flying?
• Defy Gravity

If you don’t know how Indie Royale works, the price starts at $2.99 for the lot, and every purchase at the current minimum price raises the minimum a small amount. But you can pay what you like! So if you spend $10 or more you can help push the price back down for everyone else.

Aeternum has also been updated to 2.0.1 which includes a few bug fixes, and also makes the name entry remember the last name you used.

If you’re only interested in Aeternum though, please feel free to continue buying through Humble Store! It helps me out much more than purchasing the bundle.

Street Cleaner is the soundtrack to a 1980’s action film that never was. A 13 track romp through the back alleys, beaches and downtown of San Diego in an era past where a lone detective takes to the streets to clean up the all-pervasive crime and corruption.

Contributing artists include Nick “Bonkers” Perry, Matt “Norrin Radd” Creamer, Dan “Creepy Pizza” Lillie, Sergio Radatelli and Erik “VikingGuitar” Peabody. Also photography by Chris Herrera.

The album is available now on Jesse’s Street Cleaner Bandcamp, digital download for $5. Or for a mere $5 more get an actual CD as well as a postcard, stickers, and special bonus prize!

Check out the video for the album’s second single, “The Wet Look” (directed by your’s truly!) below, on YouTube.

So to give a little more insight into what it took for me to bring Aeternum to life, I’m going to outline several of the steps of creation and animation of Winter’s sprite.

	I started by painting the basic blocks of color and shape over the common character base.
	Next I refined the shape of the hair, and filled in some extra details.
	Further refinement of the hair.
	Decided that light blue would be a better match than a dark gray for the hair.Also lightened up the dress and rounded it out by adding highlights.
	Adjusted the shape of the head, since soon I would be looking at animating the hair and it needed to be rounder.
	After getting the static character how I like, I start a floating idle animation with some simple up and down motion.
	The bangs are the first bit I animated here. I find hair is a good starting point to get a good feeling of motion.It was important here to have the basic up and down in place to know when the hair should fly up and when it should fall down.I usually start with the two extents, the highest and lowest points, and fill in from there. I think Winter’s bangs turned out especially nicely.
	After being very satisfied with the bangs, I moved on to the rest of the hair.With the bang motion in place, it was easy to match the basic beat points and extents frame by frame.
	I then moved on to animating the dress. Often I will switch to blocks of solid color so I don’t have to have little details getting in the way.
	With the dress motion in place, I matched the dress color and animated the legs.Here the leg motion was achieved simply by selecting chunks of the legs and nudging them a pixel at a time per frame.
	Next game matching little details to the animation, and adding some extra personality to the character.I made the dress sleeves and front appear loose by again matching the extends developed for the hair.
	I went a little crazy animating the color on the eye.
	And the final idle sprite!The only thing left here was to pick a frame and draw the eyes closed to use for a blink animation.

Here are the two winning videos. Congratulations! Just as soon as their prizes get back from the printer, they’ll be going out. You’ll have to bug them to find out what they got. ;)

Or buy on IndieGameStand or Desura!

(Buying on IGS gets you a Desura key too.)

Features

• Includes all 4 stages of the original game AND the Extra stage featuring the true final boss, Winter.
• Play fullscreen, or windowed with appropriate size/stretch options.
• Playable with an Xbox (or compatible) gamepad, or keyboard with configurable bindings.
• Additional Easy Difficulty.
  • You’ll find the exact same bullet patterns as on Normal, only taking a hit loses less Power.
• All new Arrange Mode!
  • Play as either Ellica or Aubrey.
  • An entirely new rank-based alternate scoring system for seasoned shmup players who demand a more complex experience.
• Unlock Aubrey as a playable character in Arcade Mode too!
• Toggle bloom filter on/off, for less powerful computers, or if you just plain hate bloom.
• New “Retry” option in the pause menu for practicing perfectionists.
• Fancy appearing text in Story Mode dialogue scenes.

Balance Changes/Bug Fixes

• Player movement adjusted. Ellica’s slow move speed is slightly faster.
• Bombing no longer fails a boss spell bonus.
• New “game over” animation. Sorry if dying felt cheap before.
• Arcade mode now starts with 6 lives in all difficulties.
• Powerups should no longer buggily appear above bullets.

As always, I’m totally open to questions/comments/suggestions/criticism, or just plain old talking!

So feel free to leave a comment here, drop me an email at brooks@wastedbrilliance.com, hit me up on twitter at @BrooksBishop, or whatever!

Aeternum on Xbox Live Indie Games has been updated to version 1.2.1, which brings with it a few changes.

• Firstly, my apologies on Arcade Mode. It was intended to be a “limited lives” mode more akin to an arcade experience, without the “power as health” mechanic the normal game has. So, all difficulties now correctly start you with 3 lives (instead of 3, 2, 1, 0 for Normal, Hard, Demonic, Lunatic respectively). If anyone prefers this mode, should make it quite a bit more fair now!
• Adjusted contrast on the bullets. All bullets should now skew a bit more towards being colored rather than being bright white, which should in turn make them even easier to see against bright backgrounds (like the moon in stage 1).
• Made the boss indicator fade out when you’re under it. No more disappearing player/bullets behind the indicator!
• Added sound effects to Candynce fight.
• Fixed visibility of main menu GamerTag. Now you can see it on every page of the menu, not just the top level.

But most importantly, this patch finally closes this first chapter of events in the Aeternum universe, by adding a 5th Extra stage, with an entirely new boss fight!

You can fight Winter, the prisoner in the sub-space closet, by beating the normal game on any difficulty, with any number of continues. All you have to do is beat Greytail once in a full game (not in Practice) and you can face the greatest challenge yet!

Aeternum is now $2.99 on Xbox live Indie Games. But if you bought it previously, just run the game and it will prompt you to update for no additional charge.

The additions include another 2 audio tracks by Jesse Bishop. These tracks have been rolled up into a re-release of the Sound Track, which you can still download for free at Jesse’s Bandcamp page.

There’s some stuff about creating Aeternum, some stuff on my thoughts indie development of bullet hells in general.

Read the whole thing at AizenGamer.

Unlike most releases, she only comes with two faces. However she makes up for it with a good range of arm bend alternatives, and more importantly with her three little included dolls! The dolls all have the same body and head, but come with three different interchangeable sets of legs and arms/weapons.

I ordered the Yuyuko reissue at the same time as well, but they haven’t shipped yet. Hopefully she’ll show up soon, followed in a couple months by Mokou!