A Hydlide Clone That Saved the Studio

While keeping my head down and working on new projects, I lost track of time and missed hat Ringlorn Saga turned one year old on November 7.

If you’re unfamiliar with this game, it’s an Adventure RPG inspired by classic games from Japanese computers, such as Hydlide and Ys. You can grab it on Steam, GOG, and PlayStation 4 for eight bucks and return in a couple of hours to read the rest of the story.

Now, let’s have a quick talk about its history.

How it Started

Let’s go back to mid-2022. NeuroWorm came out and bombed, my work computer died, and I had to spend most of my savings to get a replacement. To make matters even worse, the prices and living costs kept increasing due to the war, which added to the financial insecurity indie devs have to deal with.

As a distraction, I started playing around with pixel art. Since I was fascinated with Japanese computers and obscure games, I started researching the graphics in these old games.

After a while, I decided to start a small project to practice pixel art and animation. After thinking about what kind of game I wanted to make, I came up with three conditions: it had to be something that I personally liked, it had to be different to my previous work, and it had to be something recognizable.

That day, the lightning struck me as I was playing Hydlide. I liked it, Japanese players loved it, there was a small following in the West, and I could bait “haters” into trying it.

It was perfect.

Development

It’s funny, but I expected that Ringlorn Saga would be my last game, which made development surprisingly stress-free.

The development took about four months. Since I didn’t have much experience with the action genre or 2D graphics, I had to go through a long adjustment period, as my prior experience was mostly limited to 3D turn-based games.

My goal was to create the feeling of an authentic MSX game. That's why the game uses the original MSX palette, as well as Yamaha YM2413 and AY-3-8910 sound chips for the sound effects and music.

Story

Initially, the story focused on a princess who traveled to a distant land to return an idol to a hidden temple in order to lift a curse from her family.

After a while, this scenario was scrapped in favor of something smaller — in my experience, adding more beats to a simple story is a much easier task than cutting down a more complex story in order to fit the scope of the project.

Since I wanted the game to trust players, I needed to make sure players could trust the game. That’s why I avoided flavor text as much as possible — if players learn about something through dialogue, they should be able to find it in the game world.

I don’t like objective markers or handholding, so making sure players can piece things together was crucial. Same goes for lore dumps — no one likes hearing about cool things without any means to interact with them.

Gameplay

Combat system came together rather quickly — switching between Attack/Defense modes worked in Hydlide, but I wanted something more complex, so I added damage types and a power meter. I wanted to allow players to use their superior mobility to deal with difficult situations and sneak into dangerous areas to grab better items. After a while, I added more nuances, such as faster health regen in Defense mode and slight health and magic regen after each kill.

Enemy AI was pretty rudimentary, and I was still thinking in turn-based terms while designing it. Enemies behave in a “turn-based on a timer” fashion, which created a certain rhythm for each enemy type. I thought about changing it to something else, but eventually I grew accustomed to how actions were unintenionally telegraphed, so I didn’t bother changing it, and players found this approach intuitive enough to get by.

The magic system came together late in development. I didn’t want to implement a mana pool, so I decided to use a cooldown system. This way enemies could also use magic at certain intervals, and it created a sense of urgency when dealing with magic users.

I didn’t want to create a tutorial, so I made the early game harder and left a few hints in the starting area. The death system was a bit of a happy accident — I wanted to be able to respawn while testing the game and I didn’t have the budget for a game over screen. In the end, I decided to turn respawning into a small location where you can talk to defeated bosses and see how their attitude changed once they died.

The Temple of Rebirth bonus mode was initially planned, but removed from the game. It only returned shortly before release, as I had time to figure it out and make it fun. In this mode, you start as a slime and play as the last enemy you’ve killed. Your goal is to find Stefan cel Rau’s body and possess it, thus returning him to life.

World Design

The world design was somewhat fragmented — a few maps were designed as test areas before I started thinking about the story. The idea to have self-contained areas came up early, as I didn’t want to limit myself to just two layers of the world map,

I wanted to keep the world map small to ensure that players never have to go too far to reach their goal, and if they are lost, they can stumble upon it by wandering around.

The idea to keep the overworld and the underground areas interconnected came from my older game — Das Geisterschiff actively used this method, and it wasn’t too hard to handle, but it limited the space available for underground areas to make them truly interesting.

Release and Localization

The game didn’t have too many wishlists, so I expected it to bomb. However, upon release, it received quite a bit of coverage from the media, which boosted sales and quickly recouped the development costs.

Ringlorn Saga was localized into two languages: Ukrainian and Japanese.

The Japanese localization was handled by Ryu Ito, who contacted me shortly after release and offered his services, since he liked the game and wanted Japanese players to experience it. The localization process was smooth, and the game sold well in Japan, so I hope we’ll be able to work together again and bring future games in the series to Japanese players.

The Ukrainian localization came first, and it was handled by me and three volunteer translators (Kilsufat, TellerySpyro, Oleksandr Urizchenko). It took us about a month to localize the game since it didn’t have localization support and I had to quickly implement while translating the text. Unfortunately, it failed to recoup the localization costs.

Ringlorn Saga was also ported to PlayStation 4. The port took about 3 days, but unfortunately there was a long-standing graphics bug that took a long time to fix — characters wouldn’t get colored properly (e.g. while taking damage) and turned invisible instead.

The game sold over 3,000 copies across all platforms.

The Future of the Series

After seeing the success of the original game, I greenlit two projects: Ringlorn Saga Gaiden and Ringlorn Saga: Book Two. Gaiden would be a quick spin-off that focused on expanding the bonus mode into a full-fledged game, while Book Two would be a direct sequel.

Unfortunately, Gaiden suffered from several problems:

1. The possession mechanic was a hack in the original codebase;
2. The scheduling was all over the place due to other commitments, which caused multiple setbacks;
3. The scope of the project spiraled out of control, which prolonged its development time and demanded more resources than initially planned;
4. Once it reached playable state, it was clear that it wasn’t fun, and the issues were on the fundamental level.

Once these issues became apparent, Gaiden restarted as a completely different game with a much more limited scope. It’s currently undergoing a complete redesign into something more manageable.

The focus shifted to Book Two, a direct sequel that doesn’t require too many new features — the original is solid enough, and it only needs minor adjustments and a new campaign to work as intended.

Ringlorn Saga: Book Two is scheduled for release in early 2024.