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SOEDESCO will release the Unreal Engine 4-powered 16-bit Zelda-inspired game, Airoheart

Bullet Club

Member

SOEDESCO will release the Unreal Engine 4-powered 16-bit Zelda-inspired game, Airoheart​

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SOEDESCO has announced a partnership with Pixel Heart Studio to publish the upcoming Zelda-inspired Airoheart; a pixel art adventure with classic real-time combat created in Unreal Engine 4. The game has been in development since 2018 and was successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2020.

Founded by solo developer Samuel North, Pixel Heart Studio is proud to have Airoheart as their first title:

“Knowing so many great games to come from SOEDESCO in the past, it was surreal to hear from them. I’m feeling blessed to have partnered up and to work with their lovely team behind the scenes.”

Airoheart adapts both the deep and emotional storytelling of the Final Fantasy series, as well as the style and charm of the early Legend of Zelda series. From the much-cherished top-down pixel perspective title of the mid-90s, it features old-school real-time combat, puzzles and platforming sequences in a huge open world.

Enjoy a gameplay trailer for this game, and stay tuned for more!




Source: DSOG
 

RhyDin

Member
I love the concept, but releasing a ripoff tribute game like this (and ALTTP is my favorite Zelda game) without some kind of co-op feature in 2022 is pretty lazy. Do something fresh with it, all these sprite designs are practically straight up theft.
 

Bullet Club

Member
I mean, it’s clearly a ripoff. But it looks neither cheap nor particularly bad to me, and it’s not like Nintendo are gonna be releasing any new 2D Zelda games anytime soon.
Agreed. Yes, it's a ripoff, or homage, to A Link To The Past, but it still looks like it's going to be fun to play. As long as it's cheap, it should be good.
 
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Reactions: TLZ

Trimesh

Banned
Agreed. Yes, it's a ripoff, or homage, to A Link To The Past, but it still looks like it's going to be fun to play. As long as it's cheap, it should be good.

I wonder how big it's going to be? The original SNES game is a fraction under 1MB for the whole thing, code, graphics, audio - I would guess that the UE version is going to be a hell of a lot bigger...
 

NinjaBoiX

Member
lol, the opening bars of the theme are lifted straight from FF7, the cadence and everything.

There’s “taking inspiration” and just ripping off, this looks like a cheap cash grab that won’t be worth anyone’s time.
 

TLZ

Banned
Looks like it won’t be worth anyone’s time”, obviously just my opinion based on the trailer.

Chill…
I notice people get defensive when their fav games get "ripped off". I, on the other hand, love it. More of the same please.
 
Is this someone’s “self insert” or “OC” pretending to be in lttp, the game?

This looks low budget af like when certain countries that make bootleg products of stuff churn out some 1 in 108 games cart. They have some bootleg cheetahmen obama sonic but it’s really just lttp ORIGNAL CHARACTER DONUT STEEL sprite edit. Might as well have made fucking christian western chandler adult chronicles
 
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Fredrik

Member
Looks like they’ve added a dodge move at least but it’s still kinda embarrassing to show to the whole world that you lack so much creativity that you need to copy this much. Could’ve been a ROM hack.
 
Cute, but why does everyone always make rip-offs? If I want to play A Link to the Past I play the original game. I'd love to see someone make something original instead.

I swear every time an indie games is released, it's always inspired by this or that for the most part. Uninteresting.
 

Robb

Gold Member
Been a while since I played LttP, but this looks like a straight up rip of the sprites from that game.
 
Cute, but why does everyone always make rip-offs? If I want to play A Link to the Past I play the original game. I'd love to see someone make something original instead.

I swear every time an indie games is released, it's always inspired by this or that for the most part. Uninteresting.
Because for a lot of these games the main reason they get made is that the creators and backers explicitly want more of a specific game or type of game that is no longer being made by the original developer or rights holder. These people don't want to make a rip-off, they want to make a new 2D Zelda game. They don't have the license and Nintendo is known to sue unlicensed fan projects even if they're free, so they just call it something else.
 

Fredrik

Member
Cute, but why does everyone always make rip-offs? If I want to play A Link to the Past I play the original game. I'd love to see someone make something original instead.

I swear every time an indie games is released, it's always inspired by this or that for the most part. Uninteresting.
Yeah. I think it’s alright to copy gameplay, everybody does that in some ways. But doing that while also copying the visual style and seemingly even animations and sprites from the look of it is a bit much.
Who are we saving? Zelba, princess of Hayrule?
Why not show a prototype to Nintendo and try to get the rights to create an actual new proper 2D Zelda? Maybe they love it 🤷‍♂️
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
So they ripped all the assets .. changed a few pixels and called it “ inspired “

Won’t touch this rubbish.
 

kalecsan

Banned
the deep and emotional storytelling of the Final Fantasy series, as well as the style and charm of the early Legend of Zelda
The difficulty of Dark Souls, the timeless gameplay of Tetris, the clever QTEs of RE4, the...
 

Rykan

Member
I love the concept, but releasing a ripoff tribute game like this (and ALTTP is my favorite Zelda game) without some kind of co-op feature in 2022 is pretty lazy. Do something fresh with it, all these sprite designs are practically straight up theft.
Yes please have your studio of 5 people redesign every single aspect of your single player series inspired game to feature co - op or else you're lazy.
Reasonable.
 
The way it resembles LttP is so on the nose that Nintendo could probably DMCA it, or at least attempt to like they did with Kaga's Tear Ring Saga, which arguably looked a little less like a Fire Emblem than this does a Zelda.

This is running on UE4, so SURELY more can be done with the graphics. Make a different artstyle, please.
 

Arioco

Member
UE4? The same UE4 that powers games like FFVII Remake, Days Gone and Returnal?

Well, with UE5 and the power of Lumen and Nanite they should be able to make a Super Mario World ripoff. 🤷‍♂️
 

Tschumi

Member
Well thank Christ for that.

ann b davis alice nelson GIF by HULU


Edit: looks fine, is it just me or did they not need ue4 to make this?
 
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This is inspired in the same way Chinese car companies are inspired by other car makers.

Inspired by Land Rover
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Inspired by BMW
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Inspired by Chevrolet
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Inspired by Rolls Royce
LuJpF3i.jpg
 

CamHostage

Member
UE4? The same UE4 that powers games like FFVII Remake, Days Gone and Returnal?

Well, with UE5 and the power of Lumen and Nanite they should be able to make a Super Mario World ripoff. 🤷‍♂️

It just happens to be in UE4, which is a mostly-okay development system for making 2D projects in addition to the more familiar 3D projects. (UE4 is also a development system for making plain or even ugly games instead of groundbreaking or AAA games. It's just an engine. It can make great games, bad games, or just whatever games.) DSOG got a little over-anxious in singling out UE4 in their write-up (really, there's not much purpose to mentioning the engine used as even the developer is not using it as a key selling point, given that anybody who looks at it will, as you have, be mystified what UE4 is doing for this project,) but it's not a special thing the developer is doing here in using UE4 for 2D, it's just not done very often.

Many of the processes you'd go through to make a 3D world are applicable to a 2D game level; your objects, your context triggers, your routines, your AI pathing, your mathematics, your implemented physics, your plugins, your assigned sound effects, etc, it's all in the same general terminology no matter what you're building, and not even on a "lesser" scale when it's not full-3D (a 3D project could be quite streamlined or basic, while a 2D project could be massive and complex,) just kind of different ways of doing things. UE4 is also a cost-effective and familiar development system which deploys dependably to essentially every viable platform and has a modern development suite system for inter-office collaboration and is known by a good portion of professional developers on the market, so if your shop is familiar with UE4, you'd give at least a look at UE4 as one option out there for what you're considering building. As is, UE4's support for 2D is not richly backed, and few developers have chosen it over something like Unity (there's The Siege and The Sandfox, also Octopath Traveler, but not a lot of professional 2D producers have chosen UE for their games,) but it's a viable choice if you know what you're doing and do your homework on its quirks, and it's not "overkill" to use an engine built for elite projects on something so simple as this game. It's just an engine.

In time, there will also be 2D projects made in UE5. Whether anything in the new engine update will make any difference to a 2D project remains to be seen (you might be able to do some fun stuff with Niagara, at least?), but just because UE5 will power the next AAAA blockbuster doesn't mean it's of no use to pump out a Zelda clone.



(This isn't really stock-level UE4 2D, but it kind of shows a bit of how a game would be built in it.)
 
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Bullet Club

Member
looks fine, is it just me or did they not need ue4 to make this?
According to their Kickstarter it made things easier.


A huge new open world...​


Airoheart is being developed in Unreal Engine 4. Giving us the ability to streamline the creation of a huge open-world via it's integrated Paper2D systems, and create sophisticated levels via it's powerful TileMap Editor...

What you're seeing, barely scratches the surface in a lovingly hand-crafted world filled with rich history, bio-diversity and charm. We really can't wait for you to explore it!

f8326a5d26a803c5811bd2e7605d7156_original.gif


We are aiming to fill our environments to the brim with critters, creatures, people, activities and environmental lore.

--

The devs are Australian BTW.

 

S0ULZB0URNE

Member
Why? LTTP is a 15-20h game, and that always seemed like the ideal length for an ARPG to me. Although I did enjoy BoTW, by the end it was really starting to wear out it's welcome.
I want longer in 2022.
My issue with games of yesteryear is length.

If BOTW had dungeons it wouldn't of got stale so fast and I got over 50 hours out of it with more left to do which is healthy for single player only games imo.
 
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