Ask me questions, and I'll give my best shot at answering them.

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I'm going to operate under the assumption that it'll be an Xbox indie game, but I've already attracted some interest from publishers, so it might go directly onto XBLA (which is, of course, better). I'm also submitting a demo to the Dream Build Play contest, which is tantamount to submitting it to Microsoft as a game pitch. So keep your fingers crossed!

(It bears mentioning that it's also going to be on PC, likely Steam, Desura, etc.)

About 50% of the artwork I drew by hand, scanned, then resized and reduced to 4 colors in Photoshop. This only works well for sprites larger than, say, 32 x 32, so the rest I drew using the pencil tool in photoshop, one pixel at a time. In either case I imported into GraphicsGale to animate them. The bosses have multiple parts so for those I brought the GraphicsGale animations into Anime Studio to animate the transforms cutout-style.

Thanks, Lucid! I haven't done any "min spec" tests yet, but it should be really low. On my Xbox and my 2 year old mid-range laptop it runs at 280 fps. You'll need at least a Shader Model 3 video card, which you probably have, but the 8 year old radeon 9800 in my 10 year old desktop doesn't support.

Thanks, Johnny. I'm going to be setting up a Kickstarter once I have a certain feature implemented and can show it in a trailer (the state it's in now, some people are thinking the game is just about mindless action, which I don't think would do well on Kickstarter). In actuality, I work full time so I don't even need Kickstarter or donations to finish the game. I would just be using it to purchase better software and maybe some advertising.

Thank you, Chris! It zooms out to a 60 x 34 area to accommodate the larger bosses, but the rest of the game is 30 x 17 (i.e. you don't have control over it).

Thanks for stopping by! It'll be on Steam and whatever other services I can get it on. I don't know about the price; $10 seemed good to me, but I think XBLIG has a limit of $5, so I might have to lower the Steam price to match. Release is sometime in 2013; that's the best I can say about that.

It uses XNA, which is not really an engine per se, if you were looking for something with built in level editing/physics/animation, etc. You're more or less expected to write your own engine. I believe Unity and Torque both supply fully featured 2D engines, and people seem to like them :)

Alex, I'll be putting in a configuration screen for other types of controllers, but the Xbox controller will just work out of the box. I didn't plan on including multiplayer. Perhaps in the sequel I can work something out?

It all depends on what you're going for and what you think looks good for your game. I use a low resolution (480 x 272) with 16x16 tiles, then scale up the whole screen 4x as my last rendering step (with point sampling to enforce jaggies, which I want). You could even go as low as 8x8, which was usually an option in tile based consoles and handhelds, if not the only option. But if your game is meant to be high res, larger tiles might be in order. I've always been a little curious as to what the visual effect would be for a non standard size, like 19 x 14 or something, but I don't know what games have done this.

If that happens, it won't be until sometime after the Windows and Xbox release. I just don't have the time/resources to make multiple builds concurrently, but if the game is successful after I finish with those, I can start thinking of other platforms. Likely contenders would be Windows Phone, then iOS (which I believe Mac will be emulating at some point?), or whatever else. There are some studios (e.g. Nicalis) that specialize in ports of Indie games so there is always the possibility of working out a deal with one of them.