Steam Community :: The Spirit Engine DX

The Spirit Engine DX

All Discussions Screenshots Artwork Broadcasts Videos News Guides Reviews

The Spirit Engine DX

0 in Group Chat

What happens when one woman's scientific ambitions go unchecked in a world dictated by magic? The upheaval of three lives who'd have otherwise never met each other in this JRPG-inspired, sidescrolling autobattling adventure with real-time pausing & tactics!

Visit the Store Page

Most popular community and official content for the past week. (?)

Resolution increases and graphical updates

May 28

The original version of The Spirit Engine was created in an era of bulky 4:3 cathode ray tube monitors, where 640x480 was the most common screen resolution. The game ran in a 490x400 window and that seemed OK at the time.

Twenty years later, desktop displays look very different! TSEDX supports a range of resolutions up to 3840x1080 (32:9) and 3840x2160 (4K)!. This is over ten times the visible area to display. Since the original game is scrolling, the task didn’t seem too daunting - until we got to work.

First, the entire UI needed to be re-designed. Most of the backgrounds needed to be drawn outwards to support larger screens, from deserts and marshes to trains and skyscrapers. Some skill effects relied upon a fixed top screen edge. Even one notable boss whose body used to be off-screen now needed to be drawn in its entirety. Some of the cutscenes rely on characters appearing from off-screen positions and so we’ve needed to come up with clever new ways to rewrite their entrances.

Below are two example cutscenes that needed a lot of work to scale up from their original 490x400px display, both involving methods of transport (click for the full versions):

We chose 1920px and 600px as our upper limits for width and height respectively. 1920px width was needed to support 32:9 if we wanted to keep a 540px height that could scale, and 600px is intended for 16:10 resolutions.

Going past a 960px width for a pixel game is rarely explored due to the work required, but we think the effort has been worth it!

- Mark and Aquellex

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3424270/

The Spirit Engine DX

The Spirit Engine 2?

Will it come out on steam?

Mathias Duke

May 4 @ 8:12pm

General Discussions

The Spirit Engine DX is a part of Indie Assemble!

May 5

Alright, guvnors? We're pleased to share we're partaking in Indie Assemble! A gigantic festival full of indie titles with potent production values!

Special thanks to Giorgio Catania of Excaliber[excaliber.it] for granting us the privilege to be a part of this opportunity.

Please wishlist & follow The Spirit Engine DX! A demo is imminent in the next couple of months!

In the meantime, why not have some gameplay footage?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3424270/The_Spirit_Engine_DX/

Don't forget to peep our press kit![impress.games]

The Spirit Engine DX

The History of The Spirit Engine

Apr 25

“Can a real-time, side-scrolling action RPG be fun?”

This was the question I asked back in 2001. I was at university and playing Seiken Densetsu 3, a classic top-down 2D action RPG on the SNES. I wanted to make something similar, but with a twist. It would be side-on like the platformers that remain popular with indie developers and it would be real-time, without the need to pause and navigate menus during combat. And I knew how to make it.

In the early 1990s the revolutionary game development software ‘Klik & Play’ was released for Windows 3.11. It let amateur developers create games without needing to learn a traditional programming language and while new versions of the software have followed, the concept has remained the same.
A thriving amateur development community soon grew up around ‘Klik’ products. I sold my SNES to get the money to buy a copy of ‘Klik & Play’ and get involved. Websites and IRC channels formed, followed by small indie studios, one of which was Natomic, led by Andi Smith.

It was as a member of Natomic and with the playtesting help of fellow members that ‘The Spirit Engine’ was developed over the two years I spent at university. Early iterations of the game included platforms and jumping but these were eventually removed, resulting in the game’s signature 2D side-on view and real-time battle engine.

The final game was released in 2003. It was experimental and rough around the edges but it found fans and eventually spawned a sequel. Sadly there have been no obvious successors in the twenty years since and this is disappointing if you wanted to play more!

Being unpolished made TSE1 a great candidate to revisit when Aquellex started work on an update several years ago. And TSEDX is not just a remaster, but a complete rebuild of the original game for modern systems, with a new engine, new features, updated graphics and revised dialogue. The upgrade is so comprehensive that it’s impossible to go back to the original release. We’re excited about what DX has become and we hope that you will be too when it’s released later this year.

- Mark

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3424270/

The Spirit Engine DX

See More Content

No more content. So sad.

You can help: share a screenshot, make a video, or start a new discussion!

Returning to where you were last on this page...

Cancel