SHRINE’S LEGACY

Positive Concept Games

     «Shrine’s Legacy» is a game project developed by Positive Concept Games, a pair of highly dedicated game developers with one goal in mind: bring back to the old glory of classic RPGs to modern gamers. In this game, you incarnate two common (yet uncommon) characters who are in charge of saving the world from an ancient evil force which is about to return and fulfill its enslaving of mankind. The initial shared images brought us back to our teenager times, when similar titles were the ones dominating the game market because of their thrilling stories, profound game systems, challenging stages and many more. In a world where games have turned so easy so that speedruns are constantly being published, we were fascinated by the hints of a game who would most likely be more than just a game to beat.

     To know more about this title, we definitely need to have a speech with its amazing creators: Alan and Joseph, from Positive Concept Games. Let’s interview them and get to know more about this project:

PROJECT ANALYSIS

OVERALL IMPRESSION

     This time, we swapped from good 3D elements from our last game to a 2D environment with a much better playability than the previously commented game, and also with a much more interesting development team. With really polished concepts even at such an early stage of development, Shrine’s Legacy is a title we recommend for people looking for a graphic book to read, interact with, enjoy and discover its secrets. Players need to know that they will not see greatly different game mechanics, but what they will experience in exchange for that is the real concept of gaming, and the most positive concept of gaming: to enjoy.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

     If you want to know more about this project, contact the game developers, or simply have a deeper look at available material about Shrine’s Legacy, do not forget to check these sites:

KICKSTARTER PRE-LAUNCH PAGE

Games from Nowhere

SHRINE’S LEGACY

Positive Concept Games

«Shrine’s Legacy» is a game project developed by Positive Concept Games, a pair of highly dedicated game developers with one goal in mind: bring back to the old glory of classic RPGs to modern gamers. In this game, you incarnate two common (yet uncommon) characters who are in charge of saving the world from an ancient evil force which is about to return and fulfill its enslaving of mankind. The initial shared images brought us back to our teenager times, when similar titles were the ones dominating the game market because of their thrilling stories, profound game systems, challenging stages and many more. In a world where games have turned so easy so that speedruns are constantly being published, we were fascinated by the hints of a game who would most likely be more than just a game to beat.

To know more about this title, we definitely need to have a speech with its amazing creators: Alan and Joseph, from Positive Concept Games. Let’s interview them and get to know more about this project:

Hi! Can you please introduce yourself to the audience with the name you want us to know?

A: I’m Alan Gabbard, Creative Director of Positive Concept Games.
J: And I’m Joseph Duke, Technical Director of Positive Concept Games.

What is the name of the game?

A: Shrine’s Legacy.

Are you part of a development team, or a lone developer?

J: We’re a two-man team, consisting of me and Alan, for now. We wouldn’t mind adding a dedicated pixel artist sometime down the line though!

Tell us a bit more about the basics of this project. What kind of game it is? Who is it aimed to?

A: Shrine’s Legacy is a SNES-style 2D co-op action RPG. Inspired by games like Zelda: A Link to the Past and Secret of Mana, you use magic in real-time to fight enemies and solve puzzles. We are trying to bring back the golden age of RPGs to a modern audience and fans of that bygone era.

What can you tell us about what makes your game different from others from the same genre?

J: Unlike most action RPG games, Shrine’s Legacy features a couch co-op mode, allowing you to play through the entire adventure with a friend. It also has a Final Fantasy inspired story, with a lot of focus put on character development and lots of twists and turns in the storyline.

How long has this project been on your mind?

A: We have shared ideas with each other as early as 2008 about a story we called The Sword of Shrine. A lot of that time was spent learning game design, exploring ideas, and developing the story.
In 2016, The Sword of Shrine became Shrine’s Legacy and started coming together into the game you see today. This year we quit our jobs to work full-time and our pace has only quickened since then.

What can you tell us about the current state of development of this game?

J: We’ve currently finished two out of seven of the games major dungeons and three bosses. We’re at about the 20-25% mark in terms of raw content, but the 75-80% mark in terms of features/mechanics and player abilities.

Do we have access to any demo or content to have a hint about the project?

A: Yes! You can get a free demo containing both dungeons we’ve finished thus far using the following link: https://bit.ly/38N6VYB

Can you estimate a release date, considering your current workflow?

J: We plan to do a Kickstarter in February to allow us to continue working full-time on Shrine’s Legacy. If all goes according to plan and we reach our funding goal, we plan to release Shrine’s Legacy Q1 2023. If the Kickstarter isn’t funded, we’ll search for other avenues of funding, but it could lead to the game being delayed.

Will the game be localized to other languages?

A: We are absolutely planning to localize Shrine’s Legacy to other languages. However, there’s a lot of text in our game, so that all depends on how well our Kickstarter campaign goes and how well the game sells. We’ll probably focus most on translation after the game’s initial launch.

Where can we check more information about the status of the game’s development?

J: The best place to learn more about our game is our Twitter, where we post almost every day (our Twitter is @ShrinesLegacy).
For more casual direct contact with us, we have a Discord we use every day. (https://www.discord.gg/KxnRukD)

Would you like to share something else with the readers?

A: Please give our demo a try, we are confident you will enjoy it if you like Super Nintendo games like Zelda: A Link to the Past.
We also have a Kickstarter pre-launch page up which can notify you when our Kickstarter goes live (estimated to be February 2021). Kickstarter link: https://bit.ly/36ycIyq

PROJECT ANALYSIS

Demo release trailer

At Estyx Translations, we had the opportunity to play a short demo which has currently been released to test the game, in order to have an initial look to the game (which was discovered on Twitter and attracted our attention by its look to good old-school RPGs from the consoles we used to play as kids).

And that was certainly what we got with it. Don’t be fooled by 2D graphics (you should not do it nowadays anymore, in fact) and with what seems to be simple game mechanics during your 10 minutes of gameplay. You start with a guy who seems to be having fun, life being happy and everything working fine. You wander around the map, get an idea on how towns are distributed, you complete a few secondary missions and have some fun. And then, all of a sudden, everything turns into chaos, and you are the only one ready to take the challenge to save the world, together with a misterious partner. Calling this a «repetitive» lore means being born in this era of high-quality graphics and no message at all. Because this is a game especially made for the ones who wanted to become heroes when growing up to save the world, and this is what you are bound to do here. Once you know what you have to do, would you continue playing, or will you quit?

Well, I hope you decided to continue, because from here onwards, things are just getting better and better. First, you notice how interesting the realtime fights are, combining different aspects which made us think of many RPG classics (in fact, the first one we thought about was «Secret of Evermore», a great game from SNES dating back from early 90’s) with the complexity of fluids animations, game effects and highly detailed pixel art. At some stage you simply cannot stop playing it, you want to see more of it. The story gets better and better, and you feel what the main characters feel: the heavy weight of saving the world, a difficult weight to carry. As one of the main dialogues from RPGs with inventory weights say, «Ugh, this is too much to carry!». But you know what? The guy goes on, pushed by the will to protect the innocent and make his family proud of him.

Then it’s just a matter of time to get amazed with the various game aspects you have. From classic puzzles to great secondary characters with amazing dialogues, a music which totally matches the atmosphere of the game and which has been made with the love only the same game developer can bring to it, the amazing artwork and the story behind some of the game features, the really funny co-op gameplay (which we have only seen via a streamer of the game, but certainly had lots of fun with how free both characters are to complete their tasks)… The list goes on, including incredible boss fights with mechanics which are far from a simple hack’n’slash, lots of secrets to discover in the maps (with the developers even challenging players to discover some of them to reveal further game contents…and it was not easy for players to find the featured secret), and many more.

The Discord channel from Positive Concept Games is a great place to share your thoughts about the demo (which as the interview highlighted, is already available to be played), and not only those suggestions are very well taken into account, but also the developers are constantly interacting with their supporters and provide much more value to the project than the simple fact of having a game to show. Respectful, cheerful, yet highly professional, these two guys will reach far with such a humble yet enormously creative attitude, and they do know what it takes to reach to the top. They simply need more time to do so.

OVERALL IMPRESSION

This time, we swapped from good 3D elements from our last game to a 2D environment with a much better playability than the previously commented game, and also with a much more interesting development team. With really polished concepts even at such an early stage of development, Shrine’s Legacy is a title we recommend for people looking for a graphic book to read, interact with, enjoy and discover its secrets. Players need to know that they will not see greatly different game mechanics, but what they will experience in exchange for that is the real concept of gaming, and the most positive concept of gaming: to enjoy.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

If you want to know more about this project, contact the game developers, or simply have a deeper look at available material about Shrine’s Legacy, do not forget to check these sites:

OFFICIAL WEBSITE

KICKSTARTER PRE-LAUNCH PAGE

Alberto Gómez Herrera

– November 30, 2020 –

Games from Nowhere

SHRINE’S LEGACY

Positive Concept Games

«Shrine’s Legacy» is a game project developed by Positive Concept Games, a pair of highly dedicated game developers with one goal in mind: bring back to the old glory of classic RPGs to modern gamers. In this game, you incarnate two common (yet uncommon) characters who are in charge of saving the world from an ancient evil force which is about to return and fulfill its enslaving of mankind. The initial shared images brought us back to our teenager times, when similar titles were the ones dominating the game market because of their thrilling stories, profound game systems, challenging stages and many more. In a world where games have turned so easy so that speedruns are constantly being published, we were fascinated by the hints of a game who would most likely be more than just a game to beat.

To know more about this title, we definitely need to have a speech with its amazing creators: Alan and Joseph, from Positive Concept Games. Let’s interview them and get to know more about this project:

A: I’m Alan Gabbard, Creative Director of Positive Concept Games.
J: And I’m Joseph Duke, Technical Director of Positive Concept Games.

What is the name of the game?

A: Shrine’s Legacy.

Are you part of a development team, or a lone developer?

J: We’re a two-man team, consisting of me and Alan, for now. We wouldn’t mind adding a dedicated pixel artist sometime down the line though!

Tell us a bit more about the basics of this project. What kind of game it is? Who is it aimed to?

A: Shrine’s Legacy is a SNES-style 2D co-op action RPG. Inspired by games like Zelda: A Link to the Past and Secret of Mana, you use magic in real-time to fight enemies and solve puzzles. We are trying to bring back the golden age of RPGs to a modern audience and fans of that bygone era.

What can you tell us about what makes your game different from others from the same genre?

J: Unlike most action RPG games, Shrine’s Legacy features a couch co-op mode, allowing you to play through the entire adventure with a friend. It also has a Final Fantasy inspired story, with a lot of focus put on character development and lots of twists and turns in the storyline.

How long has this project been on your mind?

A: We have shared ideas with each other as early as 2008 about a story we called The Sword of Shrine. A lot of that time was spent learning game design, exploring ideas, and developing the story.
In 2016, The Sword of Shrine became Shrine’s Legacy and started coming together into the game you see today. This year we quit our jobs to work full-time and our pace has only quickened since then.

What can you tell us about the current state of development of this game?

J: We’ve currently finished two out of seven of the games major dungeons and three bosses. We’re at about the 20-25% mark in terms of raw content, but the 75-80% mark in terms of features/mechanics and player abilities.

Do we have access to any demo or content to have a hint about the project?

A: Yes! You can get a free demo containing both dungeons we’ve finished thus far using the following link: https://bit.ly/38N6VYB

Can you estimate a release date, considering your current workflow?

J: We plan to do a Kickstarter in February to allow us to continue working full-time on Shrine’s Legacy. If all goes according to plan and we reach our funding goal, we plan to release Shrine’s Legacy Q1 2023. If the Kickstarter isn’t funded, we’ll search for other avenues of funding, but it could lead to the game being delayed.

Will the game be localized to other languages?

A: We are absolutely planning to localize Shrine’s Legacy to other languages. However, there’s a lot of text in our game, so that all depends on how well our Kickstarter campaign goes and how well the game sells. We’ll probably focus most on translation after the game’s initial launch.

Where can we check more information about the status of the game’s development?

J: The best place to learn more about our game is our Twitter, where we post almost every day (our Twitter is @ShrinesLegacy).
For more casual direct contact with us, we have a Discord we use every day. (https://www.discord.gg/KxnRukD)

Would you like to share something else with the readers?

A: Please give our demo a try, we are confident you will enjoy it if you like Super Nintendo games like Zelda: A Link to the Past.
We also have a Kickstarter pre-launch page up which can notify you when our Kickstarter goes live (estimated to be February 2021). Kickstarter link: https://bit.ly/36ycIyq

PROJECT ANALYSIS

At Estyx Translations, we had the opportunity to play a short demo which has currently been released to test the game, in order to have an initial look to the game (which was discovered on Twitter and attracted our attention by its look to good old-school RPGs from the consoles we used to play as kids).

And that was certainly what we got with it. Don’t be fooled by 2D graphics (you should not do it nowadays anymore, in fact) and with what seems to be simple game mechanics during your 10 minutes of gameplay. You start with a guy who seems to be having fun, life being happy and everything working fine. You wander around the map, get an idea on how towns are distributed, you complete a few secondary missions and have some fun. And then, all of a sudden, everything turns into chaos, and you are the only one ready to take the challenge to save the world, together with a misterious partner. Calling this a «repetitive» lore means being born in this era of high-quality graphics and no message at all. Because this is a game especially made for the ones who wanted to become heroes when growing up to save the world, and this is what you are bound to do here. Once you know what you have to do, would you continue playing, or will you quit?

Well, I hope you decided to continue, because from here onwards, things are just getting better and better. First, you notice how interesting the realtime fights are, combining different aspects which made us think of many RPG classics (in fact, the first one we thought about was «Secret of Evermore», a great game from SNES dating back from early 90’s) with the complexity of fluids animations, game effects and highly detailed pixel art. At some stage you simply cannot stop playing it, you want to see more of it. The story gets better and better, and you feel what the main characters feel: the heavy weight of saving the world, a difficult weight to carry. As one of the main dialogues from RPGs with inventory weights say, «Ugh, this is too much to carry!». But you know what? The guy goes on, pushed by the will to protect the innocent and make his family proud of him.

Then it’s just a matter of time to get amazed with the various game aspects you have. From classic puzzles to great secondary characters with amazing dialogues, a music which totally matches the atmosphere of the game and which has been made with the love only the same game developer can bring to it, the amazing artwork and the story behind some of the game features, the really funny co-op gameplay (which we have only seen via a streamer of the game, but certainly had lots of fun with how free both characters are to complete their tasks)… The list goes on, including incredible boss fights with mechanics which are far from a simple hack’n’slash, lots of secrets to discover in the maps (with the developers even challenging players to discover some of them to reveal further game contents…and it was not easy for players to find the featured secret), and many more.

The Discord channel from Positive Concept Games is a great place to share your thoughts about the demo (which as the interview highlighted, is already available to be played), and not only those suggestions are very well taken into account, but also the developers are constantly interacting with their supporters and provide much more value to the project than the simple fact of having a game to show. Respectful, cheerful, yet highly professional, these two guys will reach far with such a humble yet enormously creative attitude, and they do know what it takes to reach to the top. They simply need more time to do so.

OVERALL IMPRESSION

This time, we swapped from good 3D elements from our last game to a 2D environment with a much better playability than the previously commented game, and also with a much more interesting development team. With really polished concepts even at such an early stage of development, Shrine’s Legacy is a title we recommend for people looking for a graphic book to read, interact with, enjoy and discover its secrets. Players need to know that they will not see greatly different game mechanics, but what they will experience in exchange for that is the real concept of gaming, and the most positive concept of gaming: to enjoy.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

If you want to know more about this project, contact the game developer, or simply have a deeper look at available material about Shrine’s Legacy, do not forget to check these sites:

Alberto Gómez Herrera

– November 30, 2020 –