An in-progress isometric RPG was submitted to the SegaXtreme Showcase last month called Shadows of Peakwater.
It’s a 2D turn-based game being developed by 500zorkmids, who said they were inspired by the 1998 Japan-exclusive Saturn game Black/Matrix. Its battle system draws from the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. You can download it from Google Drive here.
500zorkmids said the game only works on the Mednafen emulator — and its forks, like Bizhawk — so anyone using other software emulators or optical drive emulators with real Saturn hardware may not be able to run Peakwater.
500zorkmids used the Saturn Basic Library to develop Peakwater. They said they focused on setting up their development environment on MacOS, understanding VDP2 — they managed to get four background layers working at the Saturn’s highest resolution, 640×480 — using both SH-2 processors as well as getting metrics for memory, VDP1, VDP2 and both CPUs.
“Still [the] Saturn has tons of resources under the hood,” 550zorkmids said in their submission post.
The game isn’t very long yet, but that’s because they had difficulty working with SBL’s GFS, the library of functions used to load files off the CD. “So no resource loading yet (no sound either) and thus only initial episodes of the planned story implemented,” they said in the SegaXtreme post.
There are still sometimes artifacts caused by sprites moving, too, which 500zorkmids said is caused by using high-resolution double interlace mode.
“I plan to evolve it further for the next year, once GFS gets working on the hardware,” they said in the post.
Shadows of Peakwater is one of 14 original games submitted to the SegaXtreme Sega Saturn 31st Anniversary Showcase. You can read more about them and the showcase’s other submissions here.
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