Soul Blaze | New Sega Dreamcast Game Published from Blender

rogper · March 7, 2026, 8:36pm

Hello Friends!

I was not sure if this qualify as artwork, but should qualify as News

Soul Blaze, a brand new Sega Dreamcast game that was made using Spiral Game Engine that uses Blender as UI and to export the game from Blender directly to the Dreamcast.

Soul Blaze took 2 years to produce and is now running to this year Dream Disc game Jam and if you still have your Dreamcast up and running you can try it yourself: https://darkpath.itch.io/soul-blaze

Give it a run and please let us know what you feel

Who are us:

Game engine and programming was done by Miguel Angel Alosete;
The Animation art and design was from me;
Original Soundtrack was done by Subin Karkani (@karkani user here at BA).

So far we had some positive feedback from “The Sega Guru”:

If you try the game and do this kind of video please let me know, I would love to see it

Hope you enjoy!

Ace_Dragon · March 7, 2026, 9:35pm

What is the Spiral Engine and how does it differ from the family of other engines that seek to do what the BGE originally aimed for (UPBGE, Range, and Armory)?

That there is an actual, complete game is obviously a plus, but which Blender-centered engine would you pick if you wanted to experiment with that sort of thing?

rogper · March 7, 2026, 11:23pm

Hey @Ace_Dragon! Nice to see you!

Spiral works in a similar way to Armory Game Engine.
The main difference is that it’s tailored for the Sega Dreamcast.
It’s a modern game engine intended to make only Sega Dreamcast games

For WebGL and PC games, Armory is great. I like it very much too, so I would pick it for that.

But I think we have more potential with the Sega Dreamcast
There are already too many people making PC games, we can’t really compete with them… but we can make a better Sega Dreamcast game than anyone has ever made.

jeffrey.thrash · March 8, 2026, 3:23pm

This game looks incredibly cool! Normally when someone makes a “modern” homebrew Dreamcast game, it’s just a shmup or a slightly nicer-looking port of a Genesis/Mega Drive homebrew title, basically pure 2D and hardly anything that really shows the Dreamcast’s 3D capabilities if it had been supported at least a few more years. Yet here you are making a small-but-atmospheric game that specifically gives off a combination of Blue Stinger and Dreamcast Rayman 2’s vibes to me!

I’m curious about what hardware limitations you ran into while making this for a console from 1999 (or 1998 if you count the original Japanese release). Did you have to limit yourself to 128 x 128 textures, similar to the actual limits commercial Dreamcast games at the time had, or did you manage to find places here and there to at least do 256 x 256 or even 512 x 512 textures, similar to PS2 games much later in that console’s lifespan? I noticed in the video that the player character actually casts shadows, something we take for granted in modern games, but seems genuinely impressive for the Dreamcast, where even first-party SEGA games merely settled for using a “Blob Shadow” or, in Shenmue’s case, some weird low-poly “shadow” copy of the character to sort of imitate real-time shadows. How did you manage to get away with “proper” shadows and would the game run at 60 FPS or so without it?

rogper · March 8, 2026, 6:30pm

Hello @jeffrey.thrash ! Nice to meet you… I’m not at home, so I’ll start by the end

The game is locked to 30fps. Would do perhaps 40fps without the shadows.

For shadows we use a methode called shadow volumes, something that was used in games like Doom 3 but never atempted on the DC (afaik). We can project them from anything, but it’s better use a simpler model to facilitate the real time processing… but is real shadows coming from the projection of object contour on the floor. I encouraged Miguel to use this methode but was him that made it happen.

Textures!? DC fears no texture size it has 8 Mb, but by using compressed textures is more like 48Mb of texture memory (much more than the 4Mb from the PS2). We use mostly 512×512 textures. Sand, sky, houses… that’s all 512×512. Some sprites like Chimeney Smoke is 1024×1024.
vegetation is 256×256, coins are 128×128 I think (may be 64×64).

I made models for unity games in 2009 more limited.

Dreamcast has yet 16Mb of system ram, that’s for animations, ai, code, the 45000 triangles in scene (Rhyo alone uses 3000) etc and still 2Mb just for the sound.

It can do bump map, environment reflections and even normal maps, but at great performance expense, needs face duplication (process the same face twice), so we didn’t use those to keep the draw distance huge.

We were limited mostly by the Dream Disc rules that imposed a 70Mb limit. We had the FMV at 512×256 with stereo 41000hz (runing perfectly fine from the CD) but that alone used 110Mb of disc space… so we did it at 352×176 and trough heavier encoding got it to 40 Mb.

Dreamcast cds top at 1Gb, but if we can do a 4 discs game, we can top anything from the PS2.

Hope I didn’t forgoth any question thank you very much for placing them. I’m really happy you enjoy.

rogper · March 8, 2026, 7:03pm

We can do better than Shenmue.
… not as an hobby, this mini-game took 2 years to make, a full game would be like 20 years… but working full time on it we could.

jeffrey.thrash · March 8, 2026, 9:55pm

No, I think that covers everything and then some, thank you. That’s very impressive about the large texture sizes in particular, I see you’re really trying to push the hardware beyond what even SEGA themselves could do before they pulled the plug on the Dreamcast and their hardware business entirely in 2001.

I believe Sonic’s own textures in Sonic Adventure 2 managed to get away with only being 64 x 64 sizes based on what I’ve seen on Textures Resource, and SEGA seems to have gotten a lot of mileage out of those specific textures as I’ve also seen those exact 64 x 64 textures also used in the GameCube “Sonic Adventure 2 Battle” port, Sonic Adventure DX, Billy Hatcher, etc. Though I suppose to be fair, Sonic Adventure 2 was a much, much bigger commercial game that tried to shoot for 60 FPS in gameplay (the original Dreamcast version could only muster 30 FPS for cutscenes, while the GameCube port managed 60 FPS for cutscenes while unfortunately reducing the lighting quality to do so–same for the now-delisted remaster on Steam, PS3 and Xbox 360).

I’ll probably give the game a download for my emulator (a bit too lazy to dig through my parent’s storage and do all that stuff required to get this game running on actual hardware, but I’m sure you went through great effort to ensure Soul Blaze runs great on both actual hardware and emulators) next weekend when I have a bit more free time, because we can talk all day about the technical stuff surrounding the game, but the most important thing is that the actual game looks like a fun way to spend a weekend at the end of the day. And that’s ultimately what’s most important about making games, right, making something that simply looks like fun?

jeffrey.thrash · March 8, 2026, 10:12pm

Honestly, part of “old” SEGA’s downfall around the turn of the century could be attributed to them not putting enough time and polish into making their games fun and not having any major “fun”-ruining glitches or plain bad game design, compared to their competition from both Sony and especially Nintendo at the time. Shenmue was an interesting curio when I finally got around to playing it in the early 2010’s, but like most early 3D Sonic games (and even more modern 3D Sonic games like Sonic Frontiers, if I’m being honest) and most of SEGA’s games at the time in general, Shenmue had that unpolished “jank” feeling that kind of overrided the parts that did age well and ensured I wouldn’t play the game more than twice spread across almost a decade before I became too frustrated with it and moved on to something else.

I’m sure Soul Blaze will be more enjoyable than Shenmue or than pretending ANY 3D game from the turn of the century has aged perfectly, simply by virtue of benefiting from modern-day game design principles and that you presumably spent a LOT of time getting the all-important game design just right in those 2 years. And there’s no shame in making a short game, or product in general, in the modern “attention economy.” It just means I can more easily squeeze in downloading and playing Soul Blaze in-between the 10-100 bloated epics that now define the modern AAA gaming industry.

It’s sort of like how, for better or worse, my YouTube Shorts tend to do better view-wise than my “regular” YouTube videos, even if my “regular” videos are not that much longer at around 1-3 minutes. You really have to EARN people’s limited free time these days, and perhaps to avoid burnout, you may want to, for your next project, try something even SMALLER in scope than Soul Blaze and see if you can get out a visually-impressive Dreamcast game in only one year, instead of two, that way.

Ace_Dragon · March 8, 2026, 11:17pm

These days, a lot of social media is more about creating the digital equivalent of hard drugs as opposed to actually creating a community that is healthy and productive. Youtube as of 2026 actually compels users to create clickbait and make provocative statements due to monetization now being based on engagement and not viewing.

I am sure that this will get some attention in the growing homebrew community for the various consoles, but I would not expect the videos themselves to be the way to fund such projects. Nice people who just want to talk about interesting projects and what they have learned along the way are being tossed aside unfortunately. Sadly though I do not have a Dreamcast (even though I wanted one as a kid because we had the 2D Sonic games for the Genesis and I wanted more Sonic). We wound up with Crash and Spyro instead.

rogper · March 9, 2026, 8:42am

2 notes about Soul Blaze:

Emulators:

You can run Soul Blaze on Flycast but you need to use a real Dreamcast BIOS (and to be legal it has to be your Dreamcast BIOS). Soul Blaze uses things that no one used before, so no one has emulated them yet We are a bit ahead of emulators, the hardware can do more than people have emulated. Both shadow volumes and the .roq FMV will play slow and glitchy on default Flycast.

Bugs:

The game can be finished in 30 minutes, but it still has bugs. We were forced to deliver the game for Dream Disc 25 on the 28th of February, so some known bugs are present. Homebrew-wise it is pretty good, but if you compare it with Sonic Adventure 2, yeah, it’s not even close . We’ll keep polishing the bugs until the Spiral release, so you might prefer to wait for that time

rogper · March 9, 2026, 8:52am

You ware correct in every word.
We don’t have time to be Youtubers, or we do a game or a movie (I’m doing 2 short animations also that you can find in this forum) or we do Youtube… not compatible tasks.

I can do Animation and 3D, but know nothing of programming (well I do can read and even understand code but not invent it), sound composing , money or youtube (all read but not invent ).
Miguel is an expert programmer;
Subin is an expert sound composer.

So we need:

A money expert that doesn’t know about all the above tasks but likes games
A Youtube expert that doesn’t know about anything other than Youtube.

You now may wonder why I mention this thing about one person not knowing the others skills being good, right? That’s because I’m old and work with teams since 2009… trust me on this!

rogper · March 15, 2026, 4:38pm

We just relase a minor update that allows for the game to run on ReDream emulator.

FMVs and Shadows volumes still don’t work, but that can only be solved by the emulators creators… it’s just new features that the emulators never had to use.

rogper · March 20, 2026, 5:45pm

We have animations running on the VMU’s:
https://x.com/NekoEye/status/2035047421097414993?s=20

They were made with Blender too.

rogper · April 7, 2026, 10:39am

And now Soul Blaze even has an Ad: