Brazilian dev and YouTuber NaiSan has revealed a new homebrew beat 'em up for the Saturn which uses the famous Dragon Ball series as its template (thanks, Sega Saturn Shiro).
"At the end of last year, I gave myself a challenge: to create a beat ‘em up game for the Sega Saturn," says the developer.
"I chose the Dragon Ball universe as the theme because it’s one of my favorite animes and one of the series I love the most. It’s been five months since I started working on this homebrew, and the journey has been full of technical challenges. I found out that the hardest part wasn’t just programming the game itself, but also dealing with limitations and fixing issues in the homebrew SDK — as well as adding features that simply didn’t exist."
Using assets lifted from the GBA title Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure, Johannes Fetz's Jo Engine and the Saturn Graphics Library (SGL), NaiSan has created a surprisingly polished fighter, complete with smoothly scaling sprites.
However, don't get too attached to the Dragon Ball theme. "My plan is to finish this demo, and later use this structure to create an original game with its own characters and universe," explains the developer.