While the Saturn Homebrew scene is still in it’s relative ‘infancy’ compared to other existing homebrew development communities (take the Mega Drive or Dreamcast for example), it’s had a bit of a ‘growth-spurt’ within the past couple years thanks to the efforts of individuals like Johannes Fetz, XL2 and Ponut, just to name a few…
However, with any significant growth comes the ever increased need for management and organization. One individual who has really spearheaded the movement to ‘bring order to the chaos’ is none other than Dr. Emerald Nova. SHIRO! had the opportunity to catch up with him recently regarding his role in the Saturn development community and his past & present Saturn-related projects. BIG THANKS to him for his time and consideration for this SHIRO! developer interview!
SHIRO!: Let’s start off with the name… What’s the story behind “Emerald Nova“?
EMERALD NOVA: Literally just me pondering for a week about a brand name that would at least be semi-unique and sorta communicate the overall sci-fi tone of the games I had planned making. There is very little to it…
I’ve made and discarded a few other monikers in the past (that I won’t disclose) with even less thought. Essentially, I am Emerald Nova as of 2019, and have no plans to not be Emerald Nova in the future. The Emerald Nova itself picked out its own color scheme once I settled on the name, as the visual of a green exploding seven pointed star was pretty simple to mock up in Powerpoint. I won’t comment on the Sonic influences other than I do not deny their existence.
SHIRO!: So, when and how did you become interested in game development?
EMERALD NOVA: So… this is a bit complicated. I’ve always been more interested in design than actual programming and development. Being good at programming is more or less an incidental coincidence of my day job as a physicist.
My first memory of game development is an incomplete choose your own adventure related to Sonic on an old and long lost geocities website based in HTML. It was not good… I also spent a lot of free period time in middle school plotting out a tech tree and stat system for a hypothetical RPG with no plot planned. There are no notes and it was likely unbalanced and not very fun if implemented. By high school I was able to start playing around with RPG maker to make VERY rudimentary, also garbage, adventures. None have been saved and are not missed.
Once I finished college, I had a chance to develop a small mobile game with a couple friends, Cash Boa. It was never finished, but a playable demo showing the game concept is available for download as an APK and EXE on emeraldnova.com. There were some other failed projects I contributed to in a design capacity, but they never made it out of tech demo phase.
By late 2018, I was in grad school, and was at my friend Meleniumshane90’s place talking about how the only way a one man game development would ever be played by anyone was if it was on a console. We’re both SEGA guys, so the choices eventually narrowed down to the Saturn. By January 2019, I had started making an attempt and was begging for help on the jo engine forums. XL2 and Ponut64 came to my prompt rescue. From there I was inducted into the SX discord. I had made the decision I wanted to document all work on the game I had started on the Saturn, Seniriu. I had to break that promise recently for the competition, but the idea of having a record of the development challenges involved in Saturn programming is largely intact on my Youtube page.
Long story short, I like RPGs and I like design and I wanted to make RPGs…
SHIRO!: Why Saturn? What led you to develop for this console?
EMERALD NOVA: So the previously mentioned conversation with Meleniumshane90 lead to me experimenting with the various tools I could find on google while I was on his couch using my laptop. The SMS and Genesis were out because, from what I could gather at the time, they were assembly based. I tried to get a basic box to display in the Dreamcast but that did not work out. The Saturn, however, had Jo Engine, and several samples to help me get started. This difficulty was part of the motivation for me to try to document my struggles to help others learn from my failures.
On another note, I had found that my blender skills were fairly poor in terms of the fidelity levels of a Dreamcast game, but I could try to make some stuff that would look fine or normal on a Saturn. I was also a fan of the low poly 3D aesthetic of the various 5th generation RPGs like Xenosaga, Final Fantasy (the battle system, not the overworld,) and Vagrant Story.
Shamefully I’m not a real Saturn gamer… I spent much more time on the Dreamcast and (to a lesser extent) the Genesis. By the time I owned a Saturn, I was already an adult and was uninterested in most of the library. I’m not really big into ‘arcadey’ games. A lot of my motivation for Saturn development is in filling the apparent void in terms of what was available.
SHIRO!: Can you tell us a bit about the SEGA Saturn Game Competition? How did that come about?
EMERALD NOVA: I actually have the Sega Xtreme discord chat link for this one.
“More importantly, I want to hold a game jam. The Saturn’s birthday is on November 22nd, so on that weekend of this year, I want to hold a themed two-day game making competition with a modest ($20) pot. However, before I announce something like this, I’d like to know if any of you guys would actually be interested in participating.”
I wanted to hold a game jam specific to the Saturn. XL2 quickly talked me out of the 48 hour format.., because it’s the Saturn, and hardly anyone was programming for it at the time. So it turned into a month long competition to end on November 22 2019, the 25th anniversary of the Japanese release date. As that date grew closer, I realized I was nowhere close enough to being ready for the competition. I asked the rest of the guys on the Sega Xtreme discord how their projects were going. It was decided soon afterwards to move the deadline closer to the New Year, as more people would have time during the holidays to work on projects. That ended up being a moot point for me as I submitted the original version of Forsaken Plane after starting from scratch 5 days before deadline, with Ponut64’s help of course.
That was my first year managing the competition. To make it fair, I decided to post a public link to a poll to judge the winners. The categories were Original Games and Hacks, Patches and Translations. Unfortunately, it seemed that, literally overnight, 50 or so votes appeared for one game in the OG category while a nominal amount were made for HPT in the same time. The community did not like this, so I declared the competition results void and donated the $40 to the New South Wales Rural Fire Service and Bridges Donation Fund, as there was a massive ongoing fire at the time. If nothing else, Professor Abrasive seemed happy about the result. Next year I assembled the ”Supreme Court of Sega Saturn” to judge and try to maintain the integrity of the competition.
SHIRO!: What goals have you met, and what goals would you still like to reach for this annual competition?
EMERALD NOVA: I feel like the competition has become in two years what I thought would take much longer to reach. Thank to various Saturn gurus, I think more or less everyone with a strong interest in the Saturn is at least passingly aware of Sega Xtreme and the homebrew community. Even the lowly Facebook group members are at least aware of Hellslave and XL2… We had 21 entries to the competition last year from 15 community members, some I didn’t even know existed. I have no idea what to expect next year, but the prize pool is expanding to accommodate. I’ve been encouraged by the community to open up a paypal donation link for the SEGA Saturn 27th Anniversary Game Competition, which is on the community section of my website. At this rate, I’ll have to shill out 10+ cash prizes and who knows how many 3D prints (thanks, Meleniumshane90.)
SHIRO!: Can you tell us a bit about the “Family Tree Project”?
EMERALD NOVA: This is the community section of my website that I opened up to try to make some form of directory or who’s who of Saturn development. It is largely incomplete, but it has enough content to be somewhat useful. It’s a partially selfish project to help me keep track of everyone, as I can never remember who does what. I’m especially bad at this for the translations, as my lizard brain immediately assumes these patches emerge from TrekkiesUnite118’s head fully formed, like Athena. As I receive more input I’ll try to expand the entries and maybe eventually make a proper database version of it, as all the entries are literally manually input HTML for now.
SHIRO!: What is your primary focus in terms of game development? What design philosophies are most important to you?
EMERALD NOVA: Another complicated question that I would like to answer first in terms of my influences and role models. I would say my first influence in terms of game development was Yuji Naka, not just for Sonic, but also Phantasy Star. Again, I’m not a good Saturn gamer, I’ve never been interested in Nights. He did some downright wizardry on the SMS.
Though I would say that, for most of my life, my role model for game design, not development, was Richard Garriott. He managed to construct an entire game franchise and lore out of his garage as a teenager. Ultima is a seminal work in CRPGs, and I highly recommend everyone interested in RPGs take a look at Spoony’s retrospective of the series.
He does a fantastic job in summarizing the direction and design and achievements of the games, albeit with some early 2000’s flair that may not of aged as well as some would like. I regularly go back to these videos to remind myself of what bold design direction can look like. In some of these games, with minimal graphical fidelity, the themes and messages of the lore and setting are expressed through gameplay in ways that eschew well established game tropes for the better. While my disappointment with Shroud of the Avatar’s development has somewhat soured my admiration of Garriott, Ultima is a series I look toward for inspiration on how to build a world.
Today, I have two role models that I like to follow: Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software and Yoko Taro (generally published through Square Enix).
Vogel, along with his wife, has made a career out of a two-person development cycle creating fantastic (though graphically lacking) RPGs with semi-regularity. They are slow paced but well worth your time if you have the patience. I mostly admire his ability and courage to turn game development into his life’s work, designing deep and intricate games according to his own taste and direction with little compromise.
Taro is a strange person. His games aren’t always the best gameplay-wise (we have Platinum to thank for salvaging that part of development). Taro’s strength, however, is in his world building and story telling… (specifically in crafting themes). He is able to write a depth into his characters and worlds in a very right brained fashion that consistently embodies the darker themes of the stories he likes to tell and his messages on humanity and philosophy. The worlds themselves don’t make a whole lot of sense taken at face value, but make an emotional sense that few other games can. It’s hard to communicate the laser focus he has on themes in character writing, where the very lore of the game is structured around them. Everyone now knows him for Automota, but I know him for Drakenguard and NieR, the latter of which is possibly one of the greatest games (thematically speaking) of all time.
One more shout out I’d like to make is the Adams brothers at Bay 12 games, that have made the most intricate game simulation possibly of all time. I could never get a handle of Dwarf Fortress, but the emergent story telling you can find of their game all over the internet is testament to their ability to create a rock solid scaffolding for story telling.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about who I look up to, so I guess I should summarize my own thoughts…
FIRST, great art is stolen. Seniriu is largely a hodgepodge of historical events and amalgamations that I have fit together, liberally doused in a number of science fiction franchises I have a great affinity for. It’s a world (really a pair of galaxies) I have been building slowly for over a decade. I am a little self conscious about how many individual aspects are lifted from elsewhere, but I believe the whole will exceed the sum of its parts to justify its existence.
SECOND, I want internally consistent worlds. The lore not only needs to make sense, it has to be believable and free of holes to immerse the player. There shouldn’t be anything in the game in terms of gameplay or story that can eject the player from this sense of immersion, this isn’t just invisible walls and cutscene plot armor, but the overall flow of a narrative. If I have a story in mind for my game, but the path from A to B is too contrived, I rewrite B. I usually end up liking the result much more when I force myself to follow the momentum of the story rather than the plot points. I’m believe stories can largely write themselves once the setting is well enough established.
THIRD, gameplay should reinforce themes while also accurately simulating the world it’s in. For this, I feel like the best way I can explain my point is to simply name the games Ultima IV, Morrowind, and the DrakeNieR franchise. Other games do this, though it’s hard to find good examples. This essentially rolls back into my second point of internal consistency, but here in terms of gameplay. If you’re game is about something, say a father-son relationship, the central gameplay mechanics should focus around this as well. It’s hard to come up with good examples of this. God of War (2018) makes some half measures in this direction. Similarly with Pokemon’s themes of friendship with your enslaved sentient battling monsters and the happiness system.
I think a lot of my design philosophy is well communicated by a Youtuber named MrBtongue. I think his videos on the “Shandification” of Fallout and Choice and Consequences is the closest thing to a thesis statement to my central beliefs about how games should be structured. Really.., all of his video essays are worth listening to if you care about game development and world building, and I would love to see him make more.
SHIRO!: What can you tell us about some of your earlier games, like Cash Boa, Forsaken Plane, Minesweeper and Tower?
EMERALD NOVA: Cash Boa is about a boa ‘cashtrictor’ that emerged from the sewers of Wall Street after being flushed down a toilet. He emerges to literally squeeze the cash of bank customers like his former owner until he grows big and rich enough to literally squeeze the bank. It was a failed attempt at breaking into the mobile game market. I believe in the central gameplay loop, but it’s not a good market to be in to begin with. I have long since decided to just give away all my games and maybe down the line set up a tip jar. I got a little money together from friends to spent some time making this game (with more planned.) Once it became clear that the project would not be profitable, I gave the money back and found a real job.
Forsaken Plane was originally a D&D 3.5 homebrew setting I ran for a short while with my long term D&D group. It is essentially a series of magically floating islands suspended over a sea of miasma. The original party TPK’d and/or stopped playing, but I did not want to scrap the setting. I ended up using it as a subset of the Seniriu setting. The first version was a semi-self contained psuedo-roguelike RPG for the SEGA Saturn 25th Anniversary Game Competition, slapped together in the last 5 days before deadline after getting the display technology from Ponut64. The current plans for Forsaken Plane are to rework it into Forsaken Plane Online. It should be the first action mmorpg on the Saturn once waterfuell can guide me on the networking code and I can devote time to it.
Minesweeper is literally Minesweeper. I just wanted to do an easy one and done port of the Windows pack in as an exercise. Finished in 5 hours, beginning to end, including making the assets. I use this stream as a good introduction of what you can do on the Saturn in an evening.
Tower started as a comment on Reddit. Someone on Reddit said Saturn homebrew was too niche for a tower defense game. I took that personally. It ended up taking two streams to do, so it wasn’t quite a one and done like Minesweeper. The streams doubled as announcements for the SEGA Saturn 26th Anniversary Game Competition and an example for how to get started.
SHIRO!: What can you tell us about Seniriu? What are your plans for this title?
EMERALD NOVA: There is too much to tell. What has been shown so far is merely a tech demo of the dungeon engine I’ve been making on and off for the last 2 years or so (https://emeraldnova.com/games.php#Seniriu .) I highly recommend reading the player’s manual for setting information, but it is essentially my big tent sci-fi setting that I have plans for.
Seniriu started as a plan for an RPG that is currently slated to be Seniriu 2. I decided to roll back the clock on the setting first, to world build and establish a strong enough foundation to tell the story I want in 2, and second, because I am not yet confident that I can make my vision that I have planned in 2. I will give few details other than I have planned a Tetralogy of games (not including Forsaken Plane) that will likely play differently from each other, have different protagonists, cover different themes and time periods, and will serve as more or less my life’s work outside of…my actual work as a scientist.
The plan for the first game is essentially a Daggerfall-like first person dungeon crawler with the story centered around the courtship of two royal figures from majors powers in the galactic quadrant. The marriage the game builds up to is an arrangement to prevent hostilities between the two powers. The fine details should already be in the player’s manual. Essentially, a low-fi Elder Scrolls in space starring a dog-man and an elf princess. (This isn’t a furry thing I promise, it’s just how the setting evolved after a decade. It literally could not be written another way.)
SHIRO!: What can you tell us about Blue Skies?
EMERALD NOVA: Blue Skies is Xenos Interactive’s project. I promised him I’d help him finish it (or at least get it playable) before I started on my entry for this year’s competition. It’s a flight sim very much along the lines of Pilot Wings. Work has been slow but I’m confident that it will be playable at the very latest by competition time, even if I don’t get to submit a game this year. The plan is to eventually have enough polish to make a printed copy with similar fidelity to an official release.
SHIRO!: From your personal perspective, what can you tell us about development on Saturn in general?
EMERALD NOVA: It’s… a choice. There are many times when I tell myself I should go back to Unity and make PC games. It’s a great system for programmers, and the tools are coming along nicely to help newcomers get up and running. One day I may even deliver on my promise of finishing my tutorial series that currently only goes up to hello world. I highly encourage everyone to at least try. I can’t think of a vibrant homebrew community than the Saturn’s in SegaXtreme, and many who have tried have been surprised with how much they accomplished. Part of being in this community means that you will also have people to play your games, even if only to test. The same can not be said of indie PC projects.
SHIRO!: What have been your greatest challenges developing games on this hardware?
EMERALD NOVA: Largely basic implementations that I take for granted on PC. Most of all VDP2 related displays. I am not a developer as much as I am a designer. When it comes to getting things on screen or making sounds happen, if my hand isn’t held, I have great difficulty figuring things out with regards to controlling the hardware. I am very dependent on boilerplate code. If it weren’t for the community I’d have gotten nowhere. This is part of the reason why I stream. If I have to struggle, hopefully someone else out there won’t.
SHIRO!: If you could change one thing the Saturn’s hardware, what would it be?
EMERALD NOVA: Fewer individual chips. Really I just want one CPU, one GPU, and one Sound Processor. I would sacrifice power for simplicity if it meant getting my games out faster…
SHIRO!: What are your thoughts regarding the current Saturn homebrew scene and the future of homebrew development on Saturn?
EMERALD NOVA: Saturn homebrew is in the middle of a second ‘golden age‘. Since the release of the last 3 ODEs to compete with the Phoebe/Rhea and the renewed interest in homebrew thanks to XL2’s games (and possibly also the annual competition) the community continues to grow. Tools are being made and more code is available. It has never been easier to make Saturn games. I’m sure things will peter out as time goes on. People are getting older and having kids, etc. My hope is that we can sustain this momentum for a while. The recent spike in Saturn prices and the constantly sold out ODEs tells me we still have some time left to capitalize on the renewed popularity of the Saturn, namely to get more young blood into the development pool, more interest and potential donations of art/sound assets for use, and a greater player base. If things with the networking developments waterfuell is working on pan out, there should be a lot of good work to come that I think the community will be interested in. A real moonshot would be to get CD prints bootable on unmodified Saturns.
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