Mysterious Song HD - Possibly OUYA bound (Speaking with the Developer)

[T2KFreeker]

Not sure how many of you are salivating for RPG's, but I know I am. Not sure how many of you have played the PC Engine/Turbo Duo game Mysterious Song, but it's one Hell of an RPG. I know the main coder over at Eponasoft, and he has a serious desire to bring the game to Ouya. He really wants to make it possibly exclusive to the platform as well, but sadly, due to money issues, he's having issues getting an actual Ouya system. I know he'd rather just program the game for the Ouya instead of doing the Android programming and then converting it to Ouya. I have invited him to join here and hopefully things can get worked out because I have the Turbo Duo version of this game and I would gladly pay for it again if it was redone in HD to take advantage of the system specs. You guys should want this too! Here's a look at the Turbo Duo version;

[Eponasoft]

Thanks for the intro, T2KFreeker!

Yes, the intent is to make this an Ouya exclusive. I am also going to greatly expand on the original concept. The core storyline will still be there, but the game world will be much larger and will bring in new NPCs, a massive expansion to the original storyline, new enemies, and new items. Everything will be much more active visually while still retaining the hardcore play style of the PC Engine version.

Here are some reviews for the PC Engine release of the game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qETRG3eNoSM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5l5PNGaYxE

We had planned on bringing this to the Xbox 360 in the XBLIG section, but deep-sixxed that idea when we caught the news that it would all be shut down on the release of the Xbox One. I don't know whether or not that is true, but it was not worth the risk to continue development there. All of the assets planned for that version are immediately portable to this project, but I am going to take it about fifty steps further than the original conversion plan.

Many of the graphics were simply upscaled for the Xbox 360 conversion. Example:


Original on the left, manually scaled version on the right.

Another such resize:



However, all of the original enemy sprites will be redone to be much larger, much more detailed, and animated.

The background artist still has the originals of his work, most of which are actually scaled *down* for the PC Engine version. Here's an example:



Naturally, things will be made to work at the Ouya's native resolution, so the game will be ultra-crisp-looking.

Here are some other screencaps of the PC Engine original version:




I will be doing some new videos of the game at some point in the near future, and indicating where things will be improved for the Ouya remake.

[T2KFreeker]

Nyah, glad to see you made it man!

[Jakenut86]

Sweet this looks awesome

[IanLuvsMunkys]

why not do a kickstarter fund like paulscode did with mupen64? free ouya that way

[Eponasoft]

Yeah, doing a Kickstarter campaign is in the plans. I just wasn't sure how much interest there would be in an old-school-like roleplaying game for the Ouya (old-school gameplay-wise, not visually).

[T2KFreeker]

I told you man! Obviously there is interest. The guys like RPG's here and on the Ouya as far as I know. I still think that those HD redraws look pretty sweet. I can't wait to see the finished product.

[Jakenut86]

I'd definitely back this project

[Eponasoft]

Just to illustrate why the enemies need to be completely redrawn... I made this mockup.

http://www.frozenutopia.com/hdmockup.png

It's 1920x1080 so I didn't embed it into the forum as an image. The background is a stretched version of Justin's original 640x480 tower background, as above, and the enemy sprite is the skeleton up above... I took that manually resized sprite and manually scaled it up another 3x, then did a 2x pixel resize on the manually scaled up version and pasted three of them onto the background. They look *horrible* as-is... so the original art can't really be re-used here (not to mention the fact that it's all static to begin with... absolutely no animation!). I will probably use something like Poser to do some fill-in art until the new sprites are ready.

[gunhed]

I had no idea that someone made a TG/PCE homebrew game more ambitious then a puzzle game. Keep us appraised - as a PCE/TG fan, you have my support