Them Bones is dead, Long live Them Bones!
Them Bones was ambitious... too ambitious. What started as a bunch of freeform mapmaking using vanilla classic tiles became something a bit more complicated. As new assets, mapping techniques, palettes, and my general competence with Zquest snowballed, the quest became a Sisyphean task of constant revision. Progress came to a crawl as I spent days redrawing hundreds of screens in an attempt to bring them up to snuff. I eventually lost all drive to make the damn thing. It was a big mess of flawed rancid spaghetti, so I tossed it. I capped a few of the more interesting screens, and took note of the ideas that actually worked so I could recycle them, and proceeded to nuke all backups of the quest, save a new base file that preserved all of my custom tilework and palettes.
Now with all of my tools set out in a reasonable and organized manner, I can set out to do it right this time around. The tileset is a heavily modified classic set I like to call "Slanty Classic" mostly just custom edits of base tiles that had accumulated over 8 months of development, all recolored individually to fit a logical color scheme. As of this writing, It also contains a few color-arranged feature tiles from Cambria (plants, woodbridges, indoor furniture: all features sorely missing in vanilla classic), some loose tilework from Shane (au), as well as some pretty cool scrolling clouds from Anthus.
The game will still feature convoluted first-person dialogue with branching trees, intricate voids, cool colors, as well as a few features I'll hold off on mentioning until they are fully-cooked (Kung-fu... Mansion?!?).
The bulk of completed work has mostly been under the hood over the past month and a half, but I've started on some limited mapping as I test out some new color palettes, which I'll post here as a quick teaser. If you want to follow the dev progress in real time, head over to the Z-Zone discord, and join the #BoneZone project page channel.
Edited by TheManHimself, 21 January 2022 - 02:13 AM.