There's been two particular retro-inspired side-scrolling shoot 'em ups that I've been particularly intrigued by: one is Hyper Sentinel, which showed some massive improvement with a new demo for a Kickstarter campaign, but the team is regrouping after they weren't funded. Meanwhile, there's Z-Exemplar, another game that's had a great demo but kinda disappeared. Well, the game lives! The developer has posted an update on SlideDB talking about how the game is entering its final stages of development, and is aiming for a release by the end of the year.

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There is a total of 961 planets (semi-procedurally generated), where you must explore the galaxy to try and conquer, while you upgrade your ship and deal with your base as well. Z-Exemplar is feature-complete, but they're locking in the content right now. "It's hard to get to this point and not want to keep adding features as I'm sure every dev has experienced, but it's getting to the point where I just have to get this game out the door." But what sounds heartening is to hear the developer Suminell say "Z-Exemplar is looking like the game I wanted to make when I started out on this project." The demo is a bit old at this point, but it's worth checking out just to see what the game entails. I'm really looking forward to this one.
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