A new homebrew game blending a visual novel with RPG elements released today for the Saturn — Red Moon: Lost Days, the culmination of two years of development by Neuromage Studio.
The game can be downloaded from the team’s Itch.io page for free, although Itch.io allows visitors to name any price they’d like to pay to compensate the developers for all their hard work.
SegaXtreme and Shiro community member Sansigolo programmed the game and wrote its script, Adriano Kitani drew the artwork and Guilherme Crispim composed the original soundtrack.
The Itch.io page describes the alternate reality sci-fi plot of Red Moon:
Red Moon: Lost Days is a RPG/visual novel hybrid developed for the Sega Saturn about Kyou Tan Wa, a pilot who after lost contact with a Army General friend, sets out on a journey to Egypt to investigate his disappearance.
Nineteen years have passed, but the shadow of the Great War is still upon the world. On February 28, 2019, the 3rd world war began. The war was between China and the United States of America. A series of sanctions imposed by US ignited this war. Eventually, including a total ban on trade between China-backed countries. A feature of the Great War was the use of war robots, pilot operated biped machines, the Metal Knights. When China won the war, the world changed. For good.
China now called Great China became a union of republics. Consolidating itself as the largest economy. After that, Great China has establish a system to remain militarily stately. The Great Generals system. Each of the Great Generals act as a strong independent force. They are distributed throughout the nation. Zhaoky base with Houke and Rinshu, Weisho base with Ren and Goke, Yannro base with Gakuk and Gekishin, Quinou base with Koshou and Lu, and Chukou base with you.
You are Kyou Tan Wa of Chukou, Great General, leader of the Kyou Army and daughter of Shin Tan Wa and Rei. You carry on your back the weight of being the sword and the shield of Chukou. Before being a Great General, you were just a girl in the middle of nowhere. You grew up on the border of United Europe with Great China, once known as the Middle-East. The battles between the United States and China happened there nineteen years ago. It was at that time that your story began.
Red Moon spans two discs, which is a first for a homebrew game. Sansigolo said it’s because of he had trouble fitting all of the game’s code into memory off of just one disc.
“The CD in a CD-based game contains everything related to the game, code and assets,” Sansigolo explained. “When the first read happens, it takes all the code from the CD and puts it into memory. For the game to work, it is not possible to read from the CD and execute code in real time. The issue is that I didn’t learn how to manage code in memory, so everything that was made was being loaded into memory at once, thus getting heavy. On two CDs I cut [the] content in half.”
While he might have been able to fit it all with one disc with some more effort, he said, he was crunched for time.
“The game was already memory-heavy by the time I reached the 80% content mark,” Sansigolo said. “It was a decision to remove the two explorable RPG areas and the language selection to fit on a CD. I decided to keep everything.
“I am 100% sure that if I spent more time on memory management I could get the game onto 1 CD. But I spent a lot of time trying and could not do it.”
The game is estimated to take a little more than an hour to play from start to finish.
Sansigolo released a demo for Red Moon last October and submitted it to SegaXtreme’s game competition.
The game was created using Jo Engine, an open-source code base that allows developers to program Saturn games using the C language.
It was also made with Sansigolo’s Neptune Engine, a library he designed with which to make visual novel games for the Saturn. The Neptune Engine is available for anyone to use in Jo Engine’s example folder.
Red Moon: Lost Days is a followup to a PC-only visual novel that the team made in 2020 called Red Moon of April.
“Red Moon of April was my first major game, since the beginning of the development I was intrigued with retro game dev, I really wanted to make an old console version of the game. When I was in the middle of the development I got to know the Sega Saturn in depth, watched YouTube documentaries about its history, best games, etc. And near the end I decided that I wanted to close the Red Moon story in a DLC. I wanted to make a campaign DLC, my reference was The Last of Us: Left Behind. That’s when Red Moon: Lost Days was born, a campaign DLC of Red Moon of April that grew in scope and became its own game. I took advantage of it and decided that it would be for the Sega Saturn, my favorite console, so I would have a Red Moon story on the Sega Saturn.
I said it’s kind of a sequel because it’s a different story with a shared character, Red Moon of April is the story of Kohime’s journey. Red Moon: Lost Days is Kyou’s mission.”
— Sansigolo
Neuromage Studio has made two other visual novels for the Saturn, The Case of the City Botucaiba last year and The Lighthouse of São Bento do Oeste in 2020.
Now that Red Moon: Lost Days is finished at long last, Sansigolo can relax a bit.
“I feel light,” he said. “Developing Red Moon: Lost Days was much more tiring than Red Moon of April; the game was for PC and I used an exclusive visual novels engine, so I just had to add text and adjust.”
And what’s next for him?
“I have been developing for older consoles for 5 years,” Sansigolo said. “I don’t see myself stopping but I want to slow down a bit. My next project will be a PC game. I want to follow a structure of: one major game for PC and one major game for old console.
“Also, related to old console, I want to explore the Dreamcast.”
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
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