Dreamcast shooter SLaVE is still on its way
Around two years ago, Isotope Softworks announced a new Dreamcast shooter in development called SLaVE. The game featured a neon aesthetic and maze-like maps, taking some influence from DOOM and Robotron 2084. There have been sporadic updates about the game’s progress since then, but no concrete release date has been announced.
Coraline from Isotope Softworks recently gave fans an update on SLaVE‘s situation, which you can read below.
“If you remember, Chui and myself, many years ago, got EDGE running on the Dreamcast with no issues. SLaVE was developed with a newer version of my engine, but it wasn’t so new that we didn’t expect the time to take to port would be so long.Rather, it has evolved into us submitting patches to KOS, and several work-arounds to get the hardware and toolchain “talking” to an extent. There were many things that we had to reduce and completely refactor (it was not as easy as we had initially hoped) and, finally, we are on the last leg — flushing out Video RAM; which also changed with KOS 2.0.
Combine that with an army of programmers, myself included, getting the thing to run without overflowing became a nightmare. We are finally at the point where we just need to handle VRAM auto-flushing, and the game will be ready.It was either that, or ship it in a very unreliable state. We are sorry to have stayed silent for so long, but with many of us encountering life-changing situations the last two years, it seemed we could only work on it here-and-there while real life took utmost priority. Luckily, things have became a bit more sane, and now we are hoping to get it done with the level of quality you would expect for a commercial release.
We could have done this much sooner, sure, but we wanted to do what we could to prevent random (sometimes, it wouldn’t even happen) video RAM overflows and other potential issues our customers could have faced.So please, be patient — we are gearing up to get it done, and once it does our engine will surely become a viable platform for other DC developers, and SLaVE itself will be more than worth the wait.”
Following the response, Coraline urges fans to check out their Facebook page really soon for a collection of new shots and a video of SLaVE running on real hardware in the near future.
