Soul Harvester: The Curse of Illmoore Bay II
- physical : no
- rom : yes
- genre : Platformer
- licensing : unlicensed
- code : soulharvester
- Date(s) : 2026-wip
Data retrieved from www.videogamesage.com
Soul Harvester
Hey all you Sega lovers! We have something in the works that I think you'll really enjoy. This project was slated for after Affinity Sorrow was completed, but life circumstances push this forward now.
History: Back in 2017 after my mother had passed away, Javier and I begun working on The Curse of Illmoore Bay. This game really helped get Second Dimension off the ground and a lot of people started taking us serious as developers. Fast forward to Affinity Sorrow. The graphics were 99% complete so we started planning out future titles. We attempted to get Illmoore on SNES, but the Eyra SNES port took so much wind out of me that I canceled that project. We also tried getting a NES version of Illmoore made (I believe Segio did some music tracks for it), and we have the graphics done, but couldn't get anywhere with it. We started brainstorming on a new Illmoore title, and Jav ran with it and made like 80-90% of the graphics for it. We shelved it as work was still being done to Affinity (it still is, just life setbacks caused delays).
That being said, I'd like to introduce our game:
Soul Harvester: The Curse of Illmoore Bay II
I started coding this about a week/week and a half ago. I have maybe 20 hours into it in total, but a ton has been accomplished in that period. Here's a video of it in action in its current form:
Things that separate it from its predecessor:
Levels are no longer restricted to left and right movements only. Vertical scrolling as been added
Ziplines!
Climbing up ladders
Larger levels to explore
The skills and upgrades won't be like the first game as we're not playing as a spirit/ghost. You'll still have (or have to find) the medallion to shoot your projectiles, but there won't be any summons, transformations, flying, etc. Instead, it'll be focused on powering up the medallion, upgrading your armor and weapon, and acquiring new moves to help you cut those baddies to pieces.
Levels won't be linear either - you'll be able to choose which world to play next. Whether you'll have the tools to make it through easily or not will be your fate.
We want to focus on world building/exploration and story craft to really enrich the game.
This game is being developed in SecondBASIC (www.sbasic.net) and a map tool I created:
image.png.b97324db977322ec569402fd188cb1a8.png
This tool let's me load up the level tiles, create meta tiles and set attributes, and exports right into the game engine. I can load up multiple tile sets and create all the maps in 1 project. I'll also be able to place enemies and objects on the map as well. In this screenshot, you can see a blue box outline and a series of red lines. The blue box is the "viewport" which shows you what will be on screen, the red lines show where each screen ends. This helps with placing objects/enemies to know how much will be loaded up at one time and to space things out more appropriately.
So what's been done so far and what needs to be done?
The finished list:
Base map engine w/ collision & meta tile attributes
All level graphics and parallax backgrounds
Enemy design
Story outline
Most game mechanics decided
Things to be done:
Opposite zipline in the base engine (should be easy to implement)
Creating all of the levels
Enemies + Enemy AI
Objects
Ability/power-ups
Cut Scenes
Bosses + Boss AI
I'm still debating on if we should do SRAM save games, passwords, or neither. I would love to hear some feedback on that.
We also want to do a special stage or 2, but I don't want to spoil those just yet.
Anyway, I hope you like what you've seen so far!
Screenshots
