153 replies to this topic

[runa]

This quest is the best i've ever played. Even better than Lost Isle. Good job,LtM and Nick! I hope this project won't die. The Forest Palace is the best dungeon I've ever played. And am I the only one who thinks Manhandla is harder than Aquamentus?

[trudatman]

pretty excited to play this, but I am posting this as a request. there are some five threads about this quest, but none of them seem to have their first posts updated with the most recent version of the demo. please put the most recent demo's link in the first post of each so finding the thing isn't a quest by itself. I love the idea of not being able to stab to collect items. never made sense. I have never really enjoyed a (custom nor official) quest made in the tileset type y'all have chosen, so I am fully prepared to be disappointed that a quest with so much work put in uses such an ugly set. I'm trying to reserve other comments for after playing the thing, so... where is it?

[Kite]

pretty excited to play this, but I am posting this as a request. there are some five threads about this quest, but none of them seem to have their first posts updated with the most recent version of the demo. please put the most recent demo's link in the first post of each so finding the thing isn't a quest by itself. I love the idea of not being able to stab to collect items. never made sense. I have never really enjoyed a (custom nor official) quest made in the tileset type y'all have chosen, so I am fully prepared to be disappointed that a quest with so much work put in uses such an ugly set. I'm trying to reserve other comments for after playing the thing, so... where is it?

Uh... the most recent version was the one that was at the expo and that is directly linked in the OP of this thread (though I admit the link isn't too obvious). You cannot get more recent than that. The expo thread also links to the latest version in the first post.

As for that other stuff, continue to be disappointed if the tileset is really going to be that big of a deal. We're not changing it.

And am I the only one who thinks Manhandla is harder than Aquamentus?

The first time I fought Manhandla after LTM made it, I honestly thought it was harder. But I'm a bit biased since I had a long time to practice fighting Aquamentus.

Thanks for the comments, everyone. We haven't done any work on Fairy Dream since the expo, but I promise we haven't forgotten about it. We had planned to take a break just for a month, but several things suddenly came up. Still, we definitely intend to resume work on this soon.

[trudatman]

what? I think you meant post two in the expo thread, but I must say I am not unconfused. I guess it is this one: http://celestialreal...yDreamDemo1.zip

saw that it had bugs fixed and that the first post didn't seem to have been edited (maybe that's because it was and you are staff... I don't know) and assumed I needed Demo2, which the updated links didn't seem to be....

Edited by trudatman, 19 June 2012 - 05:22 PM.

[Kite]

Sorry for the confusion. We did edit the first post at some point. Global moderators and above have a setting that is automatically active to hide edited notifications. I tend to forget to turn that off when I want people to see if a post was edited.

As it is, both links are the same thing, just on two different servers.

Edit: Actually, we didn't edit the post. We just replaced the upload on the server. Still, the Celestial Realm link and the PureZC link are the same file.

Edited by Nick, 19 June 2012 - 05:31 PM.

[trudatman]

gotcha. much confusion over nothing. thanks!

played most of the way through the first guild quest. y'all are great with scripting.

How would you rate the story? (0-5)
0. awful. tedious. boring. excruciating. I read that it gets better. it couldn't get worse.
How would you rate the dungeons? (0-5)
3. blocky. tough to see what is going on with the walls and edges and bridges and height levels. great scripting and pacing.
How would you rate the puzzles? (0-5)
5. not too hard, yet. too many puzzles made a game frustrating, but not as much as cutscenes and wordiness do.
What did you think of the quest’s difficulty? (Ignoring the difference in difficulty between the Aquamentus and Manhandla.)
5. starts easy, as it should.
Which would you prefer: making Aquamentus easier or making the Manhandla harder?
Aquamentus was fine; died twice, only due to the sword arch accidentally taking out the pots (that were clearly placed as cover) because I am used to stabbing, not swinging the sword. didn't get to the Manhandla, yet.
What did you think of the use of scripts?
superb. six out of five. here is where your talents lie. almost flawless.
What did you like most about the demo?
the time I had with actual gameplay, few and far between as it was. played for at least an hour. controlled the hero for maybe twenty minutes. not cool.
What did you dislike most about the demo?
the text bombardment. for what? puns? witticisms? snarkiness? the first text that seemed necessary was the explanation of the side quests. seriously. think about it. not even the scene with the girl complaining to her moblins needed words, as the tileset isn't so bad that the actions and scenes were that confusing. so many grammatical annoyances. so many lines of uselessness to read. not funny. not worth waiting through. and, yes, I got all of the jokes. I never laughed.

loved the still fairy under the pot. maybe she should drift just a little. loved the sword not picking up items. it shouldn't have in past Zelda games. too cool. I suspect it was an issue compounded by the controller setup I had preprogrammed, but EVERY time a chest was opened or a cutscene ended, I was stuck in the subscreen, furiously mashing buttons and hoping to get back to the action. if I had more than two weapons, it would have been infuriating trying to keep them in the button selection box I wanted them in (or out of). why does Link have green skin tones? does he become blue later on? it should be just his clothes, unless that is part of the plot. trees with no alterations for edging broke the flow of the riverbanks. going in and out of cave entrances looks glitchy. almost always, punctuation that followed colored text was white, but once it was not. compass directions where usually capitalized, but once they were not. assuming the text isn't going away, there were a few errors. what follows is what I think each part should have said.

"stink really bad... that you"
"he died from two freaking gels"
"couple of moblins... you can take them"
"thank me for forcing"

overall, quite good. not pretty, but functional. I hate the tileset, but I love the scripted actions. there is a lot happening in this quest, but the good parts are hidden beneath mounds of lame text that the player can't turn off. at least the cutscenes were short. I will probably play again when the next demo is released, but I had better do it in a more patient mindset, so I don't get so annoyed by the blah, blah, blah. y'all are clearly capable of producing the best ZQ game ever. I am a function over form guy, but I think you should go for prettier, less square/blocky and less two-toned graphics. I hope I didn't come off as too harsh. I liked the game enough to play through the annoyances (until I got bored by the first (forced?!) sidequest and I loved the scripted masterpieces within the quest.

Edited by trudatman, 19 June 2012 - 07:31 PM.

[Kite]

Unfortunately, you probably shouldn't play the final quest or the next demo (if there is one).

We are attempting to accommodate people by adding things such as better string skipping options in the future (since I do realize there are strings that drag), but if you hate the plot as a whole and wish it didn't exist to the point of dropping the quest after getting into the first guild quest, there is honestly no point to play the quest as a whole because it revolves around the plot and will continue to revolve around the plot.

I'd like to note you can skip some of the longer cutscenes by pressing Start twice. But since you don't seem to like even the shortest amounts of our dialogue judging by what you have said, I doubt that is satisfying enough. And that's fine. It just means that you are not the target audience, which is why I've warned you ahead of time to not play the final quest.

There are no hard feelings here since we really were not expecting everyone to like this. I just don't want you to waste your time expecting this quest to be something that it's not going to be.

I know I pretty much solely replied to your complaints on the story here, but Fairy Dream is first and foremost a story based quest. So it's obvious that I would focus on replying to complaints to that since we spent most of our effort that wasn't in the little details there. We'll look over the strings for errors again, though.

As for your complaints on the graphics, like I said before, continue to be disappointed. We're not changing it because if we were to use a tileset like Pure (which we did before switching to Gameboy and using the Gameboy design philosophy), it would take 10 years to complete Fairy Dream because we would be far too focused on screen and graphics perfectionism to the point of never being satisfied. I am being optimistic about that estimate.

Thanks for replying with your thoughts, though. We do appreciate your honesty.

[trudatman]

apparently I was too harsh. it is hard to express tone and intent in text.

I probably didn't get far enough with the plot to appreciate the story. my suggestion is to cut back on the excessive repetition so folks aren't just watching a Zelda movie with occasional puzzles to solve. it seems like everything Steve said was rehashed and repeated. I think y'all should attempt to trim the verbose dialog.

when I indicate that i think the tileset is clunky and confusingly ugly, it is just to express a preference for prettier scenes. some of the dungeon rooms were tough to understand, like if one floor was higher than another and if the higher one could be waled under. in one room, the bottom edge that you could walk under looked just like a closed-room screen's bottom edge. not sure if that makes sense, but I'm trying.

"waste my time?" the game isn't a waste of time because so much wonderful stuff is happening. "warned me not to play?" or what? that seems to be quite combative and I didn't mean my words to inspire that reaction from you. please accept my apologies if you felt I was antagonizing in my posts.

I guess my main point with the tiles is that I think y'all should use what you have developed here in a project that uses the participation of one of our better scenemakers and screenshot masters. of course you want to complete the thing. of course it is too late to change it. I just mean your next project could be simpler and use your scripts and a flowing and organic tileset.

my main point with the wordiness is that you aren't asking the player to participate in the slightest for a full twenty minutes. pressing a button to repeatedly (seemingly to infinity) acknowledge having read some text was a chore that could just be skipped altogether. if the puns, jokes, silliness and repetition is necessary, at least consider taking away the button pressing, so the "player" can just sit back and watch the intro movie. I find it insulting to asked to hold the controller in anticipation of gameplay just to find that I am only being asked to hit the same button every ten seconds for twenty minutes. just roll the next line without me and get to the action before the day is over!

maybe lost in these suggestions is that this is a solid game. when the action finally started, it flowed like a professional game (ignoring the grammar and typos) that kids and adults could find just challenging enough to hold their interests. I expect it continues to flow, but I think y'all made a mistake in demoing the story that the user will assumedly have to sit through again in the final version. with a demo, I expected to play in the time I had alloted myself, and that was admittedly my mistake. by the time I was actually playing, I was tired of the characters and bored with the pacing, even though it had started to ramp up.

please don't be offended or annoyed by my critique. I am trying to help you see what some players see. some people love the cutscene era (Playstation one, I'm looking at you), but the ones that don't may never get to the actual plot that I suspect was right around the corner. I truly enjoyed the gameplay parts of the game and I look forward to an updated demo or a completed quest. please don't ask me to avoid it and please understand that I very much appreciate the revival y'all have brought to the community. you both deserve to be staff and to be lavished with praise for your serious efforts in this project and others. don't let my criticisms cloud those facts.

thanks for reading this. my best, sincerely, guys. good luck completing this thing. it will obviously be one of the most highly preferred custom quests ever and I am not alone in hoping that you will release it unpassworded so the community can strongly benefit from the awesome work you clearly will continue to sink into this thing.

[King Harkinian]

it will obviously be one of the most highly preferred custom quests ever and I am not alone in hoping that you will release it unpassworded so the community can strongly benefit from the awesome work you clearly will continue to sink into this thing.

Yes, that would be nice to have it unpassworded, mainly for the scripts. I've tried learning zscript so many times but it never sinks in and I just don't get it. All of the cool things you see in the real gbc zelda games that aren't in standard Zelda Classic seem to be included in this quest. Even if you don't release this quest without the password, I would hope to at least get the scripts, or tutorials on how to do the same thing, or better yet, look who's working on this quest. This quest is being made by people high in the ZC community, and if they were nice they could try to convince the devs to add a few of these things in later versions of ZC.

[LinktheMaster]

I'll go ahead and say now that we won't be releasing the quest unpassworded. There are some things we want to keep private, and releasing an unpassworded quest with scripts just... isn't that useful. We import scripts (meaning they aren't stored in the buffer), so you wouldn't be able to import any further scripts without losing what's there, for example.

However, we will be releasing a large number of scripts. We'll even be releasing some currently in the quest in the coming months when we have time to organize them and create documentation for them. So don't think people won't have access to stuff that's been made for Fairy Dream.

[imanualtongi]

Wow. This is looking fabulous!
I honestly have not been this hyped for a game (retail or shareware/freeware) since Ocarina of Time.
LinktheMaster, Nick.. I hope you enjoy making this quest, and i hope you take as much time as you want on it.

[Kite]

Minor Update

This is a minor update to let people know a few things, such as the fact that we are alive and still intending to finish Fairy Dream. There will be a spiffier update like usual once we have done some more work and get a video together.

Message Speedups

Both A button message speeding up and B button message skipping have been enabled and seem to be functioning correctly after a few tweaks (other than a text wrapping bug that should be fixed in RC4). This and the cutscene skipping with the start button are the most we can do to speed things up in this story based quest, so hopefully that will satisfy everyone.

Future Demo Update

We are going to be releasing an updated demo of Fairy Dream within the next few months. This will cover pretty much the same area that the current demo covers, but it will try to fix several of the issues people had with the original demo. Of course, there will also be some new stuff to explore on the side since we don't want to leave people with absolutely nothing new to do.

Thanks for the continued support everyone. We hope to have the next update out soon.

[Zolias]

I JUST noticed this... How could I JUST notice something this epic? Only saw the trailers and already getting excited. Sure, the visual style isn't my favorite, but still... I'd rather play a game I'd enjoy PLAYING rather than one I enjoy SEEING. I did have one possible idea, though... maybe after this is completed and fully running, and maybe after a few bug fixes which are usually expected in most fan games (after all, can't get them all right away), maybe make a DX Version that has a better visual style, basically using the original as a sort of skeleton/muscle/organ setup. That way you can get all nitpicky with visuals (aka the skin) and keep everything else the way you want.

Whether or not changing tilesets affects the scripts, I have no clue; I never made a quest and I doubt my brain could handle the function for doing so; it'd just explode, clearing at least a 5 mile radius...I think. Scripting would at least double the radius. Just an idea for maybe after you guys get a (well-deserved) break for completing this.

[kurt91]

I rather like the choice in tileset. My favorite Zelda games were the Game Boy ones, and with how the scripts are set up, it feels just like a new Game Boy Zelda game. The graphics just help create that effect. I think that if anything were to change with the graphics, it would only be adding more colors to them, but keeping the art style the same.

[Kite]

Update 9: New Subscreen, Aquamentus, and General Status

Oh wow. A full update. It even has a video. It has certainly been a while.

This update is going to mostly revolve around status updates, but there is one new feature that we are going to go over: the new subscreen.

Here's a video:


http://www.youtube.c...h?v=mozzvjTD1Oc

New Subscreen:

Items Page of Custom Scripted Subscreen

Fairy Dream is going to feature a fully custom subscreen done through scripting. Our primary reasoning for doing this was to make the save ability far easier to access since being forced to remember obscure button combinations such as L+R+Start is kind of annoying. However, there are several other reasons for switching to this system.

The subscreen is going to feature multiple pages (though only one is shown off in the video): selectable items, non-selectable equipment, a custom scripted map system, and sidequest information.

The item select page featured here lets you select and move items similar to the Oracle games. This means that we can be extremely lazy and not have to manually place items everywhere you can organize your selectable inventory however you want.

Aquamentus:

There really isn't much to say here. Despite the complaints about it being too difficult, LinktheMaster and I have pretty much decided that Aquamentus is only getting minor tweaks. As the video (which uses the same Aquamentus script that is in the current demo) shows, Aquamentus is not that hard if you shift your method of thinking. You can't approach this boss and tank it like you would a typical Zelda 1 enemy. When it stomps, you need to either run for cover or fake it out. This is a pattern that you can figure out after watching it for a bit.

We might tweak the 3 fireball streams to have less of a spread, but that's all we are changing with Aquamentus as far as difficulty. This might not be the best news for people, but that's just how things are going to be.

Manhandla, on the other hand, is probably going to have a significant amount of changes. But we'll go over that in some other update.

General Status:

As I mentioned before, Fairy Dream is gearing up toward an updated demo release in a few months. You may be wondering why we are bothering with that, though.

One reason for this is that we rushed the existing demo to get it out in time for the expo debut. You can tell this due to how sparse Hyrule and S. Town are. We had several things planned to flesh those two areas out that had to be scrapped due to time constraints. Since we intend to do these things anyway, we might as well release a more polished demo that also tries to fix some of the complaints people had about the original demo.

Next Update:

We've pretty much dropped a consistent update schedule due to all of the other things we are doing. But we will keep you all posted on progress when it happens. Thanks for the continued support, everyone!