The Brazilian developer and retro YouTuber NaiSan (aka Nai Adventure) posted in the SHIRO! Discord server on Tuesday evening a glimpse of his in-development Sega Saturn homebrew, a beat ‘em up set in the Dragon Ball universe.
Simply titled “Dragon Ball” and labeled “Version 0.1 Tech Demo” in game, this early effort by NaiSan is truly impressive.
The demo shows menu functionality, animated loading pages, story stills (in Portuguese), as well as a start to finish playthrough of “Stage 1.”
In the footage, the player controls the series main protagonist, Son Goku, with a second character, Krillin, controlled by the computer — this AI character looks to be invincible at this stage in the build as they continue to fight even after their health bar is depleted.
The gameplay sees the player fight their way through enemy waves composed of wolves, bear thieves, and giras. Currently a simple combo system appears to be implemented. Impressively, the demo features varied enemy behaviors, notably with the giras enemies who position themselves first at the back of the playing field and then rush towards and attack the player position. In addition to the three types of baddies present, breakable boxes containing health replenishing items are interspersed throughout the stage.
Combat within the game takes place across a three-dimensional playfield with player and enemy sprites moving freely — movement accentuated by smooth sprite scaling. Upon defeating an enemy wave, a “Go” message prompts the player to move to the right of the screen. Screen transitions include parallax scrolling of the tile-based background and opaque foreground layers used to convincing effect. Currently a single looping music track accompanies the gameplay.
The Stage 1 demo ends with player character acquiring one of the titular Dragon Balls.
While this effort only reached the attention of SHIRO! yesterday, NaiSan had teased the project in a programming tutorial in February of this year. Within this video NaiSan gives an overview of the Saturn’s hardware architecture, demonstrating the functionality of various components using an earlier build of his Dragon Ball game.
The video, in addition to being an excellent entry-level tutorial into Saturn programming, reveals that this Dragon Ball beat ‘em up is being programmed using the Jo Engine, developed by Johannes Fetz, and uses the Saturn Graphics Library (SGL).
Additionally, NaiSan has openly stated that thier game borrows sprite assets from Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure, a Game Boy Advance exclusive title developed by Dimps and released by various publishers between 2004 and 2006.
You can keep up with NaiSan’s effort on GitHub or via their YouTube channel.
The late Akira Toriyama’s legendary Dragon Ball franchise hardly needs an introduction, but for those who are uninitiated, the series begun as a serialized manga in Weekly Shōnen Jump 1984. The manga’s success prompted an anime follow-up in 1986. The sequel series to the original anime titled Dragon Ball Z, released in 1989, would see unprecedented success in international markets, transforming Toriyama into a household name. The franchise grew into an international, multimedia phenomenon that is still going strong to this day.
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