Keiji Inafune and Comcept are working hard to bring Mighty No. 9 to life after a successful Kickstarter campaign. The game is still early on in its development but has managed to make enough headway where Inafune-san was confident enough to release two gameplay screenshots.
Now keep in mind that this game is literally still in the building block phase of development. There are no stable visual structures in place yet and the final look of the game has not been touched at all. The only thing they've managed to do is finish Beck and a few enemy's models and basic textures.
The original target concept of the game's look can be viewed below so you have an idea of what they're aiming to achieve.
The game is still a heck of a long ways away from that image, though. Utilizing the Unreal Engine (because they're on a budget and they need to be able to the costs low), you can see in the screenshots that none of the environments are finished at all. The basic building blocks of the Unreal Engine are used as a basic platforming structure, as you can see, which includes generic checkered boxes. Literally, when you design things in the Unreal Engine that's just the default look, so it lets us know that Comcept hasn't even started on environmental or stage design assets just yet.
It is nice to see that Beck looks about perfect in comparison to his target render, as far as his design and artistic look goes. A few old maids on Neogaf complained about the visual art-style and the “bloom”, but a lot of people fail to realize that's just the default look of assets in the Unreal Engine: lots of bloom, plenty of blur, and a general Gears of War/Unreal Tournament look.
I'm just happy to see that they're already ironing out the gameplay foundation and mechanical effects (i.e., the voxel sparks that blast out of enemies when attacked and Beck's ability to scale environments).
We can see that Beck can climb ledges and shoot his weapon. We can see that enemy reactions are there and the outline for special effects are in play. In a gameplay design diagram, this would mean that the core player functions (or the the things that players will be doing the most of throughout the game) are in place. That's great news.
I imagine from here after that we'll soon get to see Call, the recently voted-on fem-bot in the game, as well as the other environments and enemies in play.
So far, I like what they've accomplished in such a short amount of time following the close of their very successful Kickstarter. You can check out the alpha shots below, but keep in mind, and remember, these are early visualizations of a game that's not quite a game yet. Expecting high-end anything is still a long ways off in the development cycle.
Mighty No. 9 is set for release in 2015 for consoles and PC.
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