Just a quick question... Do you have any intentions of porting this over to NDS or GBA? I assume you would need to change the resolution of the screen in order to.
Not gonna happen. It's not a case of "porting" it over so much as starting it again from scratch in another (proper) language. Besides...
And the screen resolution... is it equal to TMC's?
Nope, it's far bigger.
I forgot to say that the only thing I disliked is the resolution. I guess it's needed for the horseback battles, but if it's possible for it to be changed, please change it to the GBA resolution.
The GBA's screen resolution is too small for either the horseback battles to be at all playable, or for some of the boss battles I have planned. Since it's never going to be played on a handheld, I'd prefer to use a ratio closer to that of the SNES, and one that you could play fullscreen without distortion. So 320 x 240 seemed about right. It was literally that arbitrary, but I don't really see any reason to change it now, especially since I've tiled so many rooms to fit that resolution.
This. Game. Is. Freaking. AWESOME!
When do you expect we'll see the fire temple?
,;Sk;,
Wouldn't like to say. It took me longer than I'd anticipated to get this far and I don't want to over-promise and under-deliver. I want to revert to my original plan for the next playable release, which is everything up to and including the first dungeon - and that's still quite a bit of work, even having finished the dungeon itself some time ago. I don't plan on releasing the dungeon as a stand-alone demo, I want it experienced in context.
I had a problem with the resolution when making the game fullscreen - so just a suggestion for the final product, give options on aspect ratios and screen sizes and all that, because I really want to play in full screen.
I'll make more options available from the title screen.
I liked the demo but it seemed really fast. You get the Shadowgazer too suddenly and then your kind of like "ok I have it, now what?"
Aha, but you only know what the Shadowgazer is because you've been reading this topic! It's introduced as an innocuous, superstitious trinket that Zelda can use to watch over Link. That's why the game refers to it as "Zelda's dreamcatcher" - she knows it's magical but has no idea of its significance, and Link certainly doesn't, she just gave it to him as a token of their friendship. There's only one person alive who knows what its true purpose is, and they will be mightily pissed when they learn Zelda's just given it away...
You did a good job with the rocks and such (could you PM me as to how you were able to arch the rocks, I wanted to do the same thing in my game but with a special type of arrow).
Will do.
As far as play, it didn't seem (so far) that there was much purpose to the night/day system except that people were in different places. Of course this will be useful later on right. In your demo the day faded nicely to night but your demo had "The ship Din's Fire has left for Calatia..." so I'm wondering if we'll ever see the nice fade?
The passing of day and night is absolutely central as it will dictate when the NPCs sleep i.e. when you can save them from their nightmare. I don't want to give too much about how that translates into gameplay just yet, but yeah, there is a point to it.
And the fade at the beginning? Call it a camera trick. It's an illusion, used just for carefully orchestrated cinematics. Trying to get the tilesets to
fade between eachother during play is unfeasibly demanding (both on the system and on me!) An
instantaneous switch is easy. Think about it: if it faded in real time, I'd need to show the boat pulling out of the harbour, for example - things like that, that are just too impractical; and it would be a ridiculous amount of work to have NPCs adhere to timelines where they stop what they're doing, walk inside their house and go upstairs and get into bed, all following the clock. Having that nice cut-off point where they're either awake or asleep is just cleaner and infinitely easier to work on. The idea of using the Port Authority announcer to cover the switch just fortuitously fell into my lap. The day and night stuff is all about the gameplay not graphical niceties...