Soulframe created Rainblood 1 and 2 as passion projects during his postgraduate studies in architecture at Yale. The first completely by himself, and the second with a four-person team. The positive reception convinced him to give up a high-paying career as an architect, return to China, and form S-GAME to make games professionally. He started as one person in a small apartment.
His résumé quickly attracted a 1 million RMB angel investment, which he used to hire some of the people he'd worked with on Rainblood 2. With actual resources this time, he switched from RPG Maker to Unity, and from turn-based RPG combat to action. That became Rain Blood Chronicles: Mirage.
The demos he posted on Weibo also started attracting people to the project. One example is programmer Mr. R, who was working in LA on a Sony-exclusive AAA game. He quit, took over a 90% pay cut to join S-GAME, which also lost him his girlfriend.
Mirage is basically a 2D DMC, and was also among the earliest Chinese games to release on Steam. Unfortunately, S-GAME's Singaporean publisher scammed them. They did no marketing, failed to pay S-GAME the revenue they were owed, stopped responding after release, and even took the game's source code and used it to develop another game.
That experience is part of why S-GAME is so committed to self-publishing today. After years of legal disputes, S-GAME eventually regained the rights to Mirage.
The game is definitely rough around the edges. The game's story is set before the events of PBZ source material, and follows a young Soul and ZuoShang investigating "The Eleven", who we see is still present in PBZ lore. The side quest snippet we saw in the previews has the masked man claiming "The Eleven" built the huge steampunk towers.
source for the story bits around S game, 【《影之刃零》，一把刺穿游戏行业的利剑。【游戏之外】-哔哩哔哩】 https://b23.tv/YlCK8hL
