Synival has been hard at work on Harmonia (previously Tales of Harmonia/ShiningMUD), an online game inspired by the Shining series of games. What started as Shining MUD (way back in 2005) is now blossoming into something beautiful.
As you can see the old ASCII interface is gone, and a new 3D one has taken its place. There are videos of the map editor, forest exploration and lots of screenshots showing the different visual modes (including one for ASCII fans).
Synival is also preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign to support development of the game and lots of new features, so stay tuned for information on that!
Project Page: Tales of Harmonia
Synival, the author of Shining MUD, got in touch to let me know that the project is now known as Tales of Harmonia:
Progress has been slow and steady, but productive. The to-do list is overwhelming, and new items are being added faster than I can check them off, but production is in full swing.
The project also has its own site, where you can get updates on development, browse screenshots and get instructions for playing: Tales of Harmonia.
Reddit user SimonLB posted some information (and lots of screenshots) about their Shining Force III inspired MUD.
This is Shining MUD, a project I’ve been working on for several years as a hobby project. It is currently in the Alpha stages, but mostly feature-complete. It is based on the Shining Force series for Genesis/Saturn, although it’s more like an RTS than a turn-based strategy game.
There’s lots more information in the reddit topic, and plenty of screenshots in the imgur.com gallery. It’s always a nice surprise to see new projects, so check out the topic and give some feedback :)
Source: Shining MUD – a huge project in the works for at least 5 years.
It’s been a while, but Ken Hilf recently updated Shining Force PC, a promising looking Shining style PC game. Although there are no new maps to play with, there are some big changes behind the scenes. The map editor is much improved and now supports maps up to 255×255 tiles, as well as brush sizes and other tweaks. It also sports a new Quake style console that makes it easier to perform some common tasks. such as filling an area with tiles or creating a new map.
From the site:
So, it’s been a while since I’ve done any updates on SFPC. I’ll admit, things definitely slowed down for a while, what can I say, I needed a break (or two)! Despite the lack of posts, I have gotten a lot of work done over the past few months, though the bulk of it was not really video or blog post worthy. This release represents the sum of the year’s changes so far, which includes lots of bug fixes, a major revamp of the movement code for performance reasons, and some new editor features and engine enhancements.
There’s no new gameplay map to try, hence the lack of a video. The main draw of this release is the enhanced editor, which includes several features which should be a big deal to anyone interested in making maps. Press the Home key to toggle between Play and Edit modes.
It’s great to see updates from a really promising project, and it’s well worth downloading the updated demo and trying things out.
Read More: SFPC – August 2011 Update
You may have heard of a little game called Minecraft which is apparently quite popular these days. It may be a all the rage, but how could it be made better? With Shining Force textures, of course!
Mythra13 has released a texture pack for Minecraft that makes everything more Shining style, so now you have no excuse for not recreating the entirety of Granseal in block form.
This texture pack includes plenty of changes, including dirt and grass textures, as well as a rather cool Max skin for the main player. Check out the forum topic for more screenshots and videos of it in action.
Source: [16X] [1.7] SHINING FORCE V1.3
Note: We originally attributed this texture pack to another Minecraft user who was taking credit for the work of Mythral13. Our sincere apologies to Mythral13 for this error.
