Hi everyone,
I’m Gökhan “Neo Miles”, the developer behind NOSTRA, a story-driven dark fantasy RPG with tactical side-view combat, made in RPG Maker MZ. The Steam page is live, and the first playable demo will be at gamescom 2026 in Cologne (Aug 26 to 30, indie hall).
I’ve been quiet about the project in maker circles so far, and this seemed like the right place to open up about it, because everything in the screenshots below runs inside MZ, and most of this thread is about how.
The world
Nostra is an island continent, ringed by an ocean from which no ship has ever returned. Three kingdoms hold an uneasy peace, each proud, each wary, each certain the others will break it first. Beneath the politics, something older has begun to stir. Portals open where they should not.
You start far away from all of it, in a village that has never mattered to anyone.
Combat
A turn-based side-view system built around three resources: Boost (spend to amplify), Ward (a shield layer) and Runic Power (the game’s casting resource, there is no “MP” in Nostra).
Every skill is choreographed through an Action Sequence script: movement, timing, VFX, camera moves, screen shake, hit stops, voice lines. Battle backgrounds are 5-layer parallax stages with their own camera, so encounters are framed like scenes instead of standing in front of a flat image.
NeoEngine
Everything in this project runs on a plugin framework I wrote for it, called NeoEngine: currently 82 plugins, organised in a strict 5-tier load order (utilities, foundation, systems, scenes, VFX/polish, tooling). No commercial plugin suites, no borrowed plugin packs. Every system listed below is a NeoEngine plugin written for this game, which is also why they can share state instead of fighting each other.
A rough map of what’s in there:
World & atmosphere
- Day/night cycle with dynamic lighting: per-map light placement, indoor/outdoor handling, persistence
- A weather director: seeded, world-global weather that evolves over game time, with a forecast HUD. Not a per-map on/off switch
- Directional shadows driven by the sun angle, plus point-light and object shadows
- Water shimmer and real reflections for characters and parallax objects, with per-object mirror control
- Multi-layer environmental audio with positional, zone-based soundscapes, and footsteps that answer the ground you walk on
- Sub-tile pixel movement and collision, terrain layers with bridges you can walk over and under, soft occlusion cutouts so you never vanish behind a tree
Life & content
- An NPC system with pathfinding, daily schedules, behaviour profiles
- An entity layer for ambient life, aggro encounters with pack sizes, chests and interactables with weighted loot tables
- Item generator: affixes with roll ranges, uniques, sets, sockets/gems/runewords, magic-find and boss drop rates, plus an identify rite for unknown gear
- Class arcs and skill trees with multi-rank nodes and safe skill-point accounting
- Quest system with journal, tracked objectives, and a cross-map waypoint router that pathfinds through map exits to put the arrow on the right door
Presentation
- Custom scenes throughout: title, save/load, menu, gear, skills, items, shop, quests, options. No default MZ windows left in the player-facing UI
- Dialog with painterly character busts, bubble and card modes, and a speaker resolver
- cinematic player, boot intro, tutorial spotlight tours, item toasts, region titles
- Full gamepad support with remapping and rumble, an on-screen input-device tracker, 1920x1080 native
Editing the game from inside the game
The one thing I’d genuinely recommend to anyone building a bigger MZ project: at some point I stopped building content in the editor and started building the editor into the game.
The NeoEngine Editor, a docked panel with modes for parallax layers and objects, terrain and collision, entity and encounter placement, NPC schedules, lighting, environmental audio, music, game sounds, UI layout and shadow anchors. You place, drag, scale and preview everything while the game is running, with the real lighting, the real weather, the real time of day. Hit Save and the mode writes its own JSON next to the project data.
That shot is the parallax/object mode on the starting village: 498 placed objects, grouped by category, live in the running game.
Scope
| Classes | 4 |
| Specializations | 36 |
| Skills | 400+ |
| Loot | procedurally rolled: affixes, uniques, sets, sockets |
| Resolution | 1920x1080 |
| Engine | RPG Maker MZ + NeoEngine (82 in-house plugins) |
Steam & gamescom 2026
Steam page (wishlist): Steam：NOSTRA
The store page is live with the gameplay trailer, screenshots and full English and German text. Status is Coming Soon. Wishlists are the single most useful thing for a project like this, so if the screenshots did anything for you, that’s the button.
gamescom 2026, Cologne, August 26 to 30, indie hall: NOSTRA will be playable for the first time at my own booth. The demo is exclusive to the show floor, an extended public demo follows afterwards. If you’re at the show, come by and take up the sword. I’d love to watch maker people play it.
Links
- Steam: Steam：NOSTRA
- Website & devlog: https://runecraftstudios.com
- Discord: NOSTRA
Thanks for reading.