It's interesting to me. From the outside, implementing z3 scrolling seems easy. "How hard can it be?" Turns out it's insanely time consuming, and hard, and if the quest itself isn't fun, and only has that going for it what's the point?
I'm obviously not a dev, but I don't think z3 scrolling could be done with the current engine, at least not easily, or by any sane human.
To the people who have made scrolling prototypes: how do you draw the screens? I always wondered. Are they drawn entirely by the script, or does the script just "group" 2x2 screens together? I'm just curious.
(Emphasis, mine.)
True, but many of us are quite, quite, mental.
I was going to use it for a sort of in-community parody quest, and I discovered that I was spending countless hours reworking every single enemy, combo, and possible collision, then discovering yet more that I needed to do. you want a treasure chest? That's easy.
Oh? What's this? You want an item to be inside the treasure chest?
Well, the screen item isn't reliable for that, because the chest could be on one of four screens. Away we go to screen->D. Oh, Screen D had ten indices. Away we go to splitting scrfeen->D into 20 indices and using sections of each, and other indices for flags, then Screen->D for layers of that screen.
Item drops were also quite a bunch of fun.
I eventually dropped the idea, and decided that if the quest would ever be done, and enjoyable, it didn't need this special effect. It was meant to be a novelty to fit in with the parody theme, and I could have done that with overtones of scrolling. The biggest visual issue in ZC, is the screen size, because the passive subscreen eats up 56 pixels of vertical space. Otherwise, the screen dimensions would be no different than Z3.