The Shining Source

Jeremy Doolin got in touch with me about his new project, “Ballad of Thuriana”. It’s a Shining-style project that has been under development for about a year now, and if all goes to plan it will be released either fall 2020 or fall 2021 (depending on content creation times).

The game features all new graphics from the artist behind the Time Fantasy collection, and an original soundtrack composed by Ferret Entertainment.

Even more exciting, it is planned for release on Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux and possibly Nintendo Switch.

More info about the project:

The graphics will be very different (see screenshots).  Menus will not be the four-way style, but more traditional.  There will be some gameplay changes, but nothing drastic.  For example, I use the same stats, 100 XP per level system, same turn-based battles.  But I have more damage types, a secondary weapon/equipment, a slot just for a ring and one for an accessory, more item slots and other differences

The game will also feature Shining Force 2 style exploration:

And I will have Exploration! In fact, that’s all I’ve been working on for months. It will be much more like Shining Force 2, with a world map, some random encounter battles, exploration, secrets, some side quests and more. I’ve nearing completion of the Exploration mode and will build the Battle system over Summer.

As you can see it’s an ambitious and exciting project!

You can follow the project’s status on Instagram (@doolindigital) and Twitter (@DoolinDigital). A website for the project will also be released in a few weeks.

Shining Force Unity is a new project built using Unity. From the topic on Reddit:

Hi everyone, I’m currently working on a project called Shining Force Unity, a remake of shining force (1 and 2) in the unity engine. The project is still in the early stages of development but the goal is to create a full game editor for people to create their own levels, dialog and sprites, all of which can be saved outside of the game and shared with friends. I’m also adding a few quality of life fixes but all changes can be turned off if you want the classic experience.

/u/Shining_Force_Unity

It’s still in the early stages, but the map maker looks promising.

Source: Shining Force Unity – Personal Project

The Legacies of Veridocia team have released a new demo of their stellar Shining-style RPG.

Below is a list of changes from the official release notes:

• Adjusted Battle 2
• Changed the UI to make magic selection clearer
• Changed the Move area to be nicer to look at
• New scene and location after Battle 2
• Access to the World Map
• New location and Battle 3

The demo contains towns to explore and battles to fight, all tied together with some very Shining-style cutscenes.

I highly recommend giving it a go if you haven’t had already. There’s an incredible amount polish, especially for a demo, and everything has a nice feel to it. The music and artwork are fantastic, and the battle animations in particular are really well done.

Download Legacies of Veridocia 2.5

Go try it out!

Source: Demo 2.5 Release

The Legacies of Veridocia team have released a video of demo #2 in action. It’s well worth watching if you haven’t played the demo, and it shows off a lot of gameplay and the excellent graphics and animation.

Be sure to download the demo from the Legacies of Veridocia homepage (available for Windows, Mac and Linux). It’s extremely polished and is a lot of fun play.

Visit the demo download page

Demo #3 is under active development, although there’s currently no scheduled release date.

Source: Legacies of Veridocia – Demo #2 Footage

Chaoswizard98 dropped by Ye Olde Blah with some pretty big news – he’s sharing the engine that powers The Legend of Syro!

I feel that the engine is finally complete and stable enough to share with everyone. Now before you go and download it, you should know that the engine itself is still a work in progress. There are a LOT of scripts and objects which is to be expected from a more complicated game such as SF, and as such it’s easy to get lost. Especially since I don’t have everything fully organized right now.

The other thing you should note is that I don’t have any sort of tutorial for the engine just yet. I’ll make a few tutorial videos down the line once I have everything organized, but for now, I’ve included the entirety of Chapter 1 of my game so that anyone who wanted to poke around and try to figure out how everything works can do so.

The project requires GameMaker Studio in order to load everything, but even if you don’t have it installed you can poke around the script files in the scripts directory. There’s a lot of things in there, such as:

• All of the cutscenes from the most recent demo
• AI scripts (including the different behaviours, such as moving to a location or following a target)
• Interactive features like the church and shop
• Battle status effects, item usage and more!

It’s well worth looking over, and if you have Game Maker Studio you’ll be able to make your own Shining style games!

Download The Engine of Chaos 1.3