Hello!
I've been pretty excited about a quest that I've been working on for about ... more than ten years now.(And I haven't made a single screen yet!) Needless to say, it's been going slowly, but I am quite persistent. Right now I just feel like writing down some of the history of this project, and this is as good a place as any for story telling.
Back when 2.10 was the big new thing, I began a quest I called "Zelda Cross" which was a pretty basic Zelda story. My goal at the time was to really push the boundaries of what ZC could do: I used every screen, DMap, item, string, tile, etc... It was a huge world, but pretty bland in hindsight. I made a lot of screens using makeshift LttP tiles with a custom palette.
(Screen design aside) -- If there's one major lesson I've learned from Zelda Cross it's this: avoid symmetry like the plague! It's ugly and boring. I look at a lot of quests and screens by other people and I see two kinds of screen design: Boxes and sheer randomness. Both pretty much suck, in my opinion. Boxes are a sign of someone who doesn't put any effort into it, and randomness is a sign of passable effort, but neither are great. Aim for something in the middle: "clustering and pocketing.")
I was proud of it, but then the 2.5 betas added two features that I thought were really worth abandoning the quest: Layers and 8-bit color mode. I felt that I was good enough with tile design and animation that I could really put these things to good use.
The quest I'm working on now is basically the great-grandchild of that one, so -- iteration 4, I guess. Iterations 2 & 3 were palette development. I've completely recolored and redetailed every tile in my tileset (a good 200 pages of tiles) 3 times already. The good news is: I'm done with that part. I've reached the level of detail and palette finesse that the final quest will represent. In fact, right now I'm building tiles for all the different areas of the game.
Speaking of which. I've got the whole game pretty much planned out. I have 2 whole notebooks filled with maps, to-do lists, names, ideas, enemy plans, etc. I've got all the game dialog pre-written in a text file. I have the story laid out in a detailed timeline of events and history, covering all the major characters.
So, basically, you might understand why I'm excited to make some significant progress on the quest this summer. I've put together some nice looking test screens, and it feels good to finally have working tiles!
Thanks for reading.
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