It's nice to hear that people are still interested in and playing this, and sad to hear the dev apparently left ZC? I think I sort of wandered off from ZC for awhile before he made his final posts/uploads with the last demo and the strategy guide. I don't think I ever got around to playtesting this final demo from 2016, but with how bored I am lately, perhaps I'll fire it up and give it a try? Sounds like there's some sticking points from posts above.
For those that are curious, here's what I remember from the end of active development on this:
The dev had been supplying me with unprotected copies of the demos as he progressed, so I could open them up and look at stuff and play with things, while he was also occasionally uploading password-protected copies as demos to the site. (This made it a lot easier for me to simply "fix" a screen with a proposed modified layout to screenshot and suggest to him, rather than just screenshotting and describing the issue and proposed solution - I vaguely recall that about half the time he just implemented what I suggested, but not always, as sometimes he changed the room a bit more than I did, still resolving it in the process.)
The last two demos I have were dated 8/31/2015 and 9/5/2015, the latter of which he also password-protected (unlike all the preceding demos shared with me) as he seemed confident he'd fixed the remaining bugs I'd reported and was planning on releasing that as the final version, and was going to get cracking on filling in the rest of the strategy guide. He wanted that done to release with the release version of the quest, but then he vanished for the rest of the year and I stopped paying attention to it. (Though I did download that final demo a couple days after he uploaded it, from my file dates.)
The main frustration at the time seemed to be the awkwardness of the installation/launch process, as the step-by-step guides I wrote and posted elsewhere (theguardianlegend.com and TIGForums) still produced a lot of confusion and complaints from non-ZC users, and he wanted it simple enough that no one who was interested in playing would give up simply because they couldn't figure out how custom quests worked, if they were new to ZC.
I actually figured how to create this complicated executable self-extracting SFX archive with a bunch of customization prompts that not only properly installed a copy of ZC with Zodiac already loaded in the first six save slots, but also added it all to the user's Start Menu in a Zodiac group with icon'ed menu items to launch everything, including quick-launching the individual saveslots, opening the manual or strategy guide, or even opening a playlist of the ogg files in the PC's associated application (with them sorted by order encountered in-game rather than alphabetical order as stored in the ZC folder.) Something like this (this is the actual installed location after running it, not the Start Menu submenu):
I've long since forgotten how to set up any of this, though I have a text file saved where I wrote down step-by-step instructions how to set this up in the future in case I forgot, lol.
He seemed to like it but I think he was waiting on the ZC devs at the time to see if they would update it to make loading custom quests less confusing, or make it easier to distribute with custom quests already loaded. (The issue was that in order to distribute a copy of ZC with Zodiac preloaded was that the ag.cfg configuration file would contain an erroneous entry assigning a path to the value win_qst_dir, which pointed to the correct location of the custom quest on the computer where the archive was created, but which would throw an error message in ZC when run on someone else's PC after downloading/unpacking it to a different location on their own PC. I simply fooled around and discovered that simply deleting this row from the config file, after loading the custom quest, but before zipping it all up in an archive for distribution, would avoid that error message when run on another machine, as thankfully, the version of ZC in use at the time was smart enough to just look inside its own folder in the absence of that assignment row in the config file, find the quest file, and default to that, also updating the config file to assign that location to that variable.)
Another frustration was that with how slowly the rooms scrolled in the game, as a sidescrolling action/platformer, it made vertical ascents especially frustrating, so he got the ZC devs to add a custom quickscroll quest option specifically for his custom quest (but usable by other quest creators going forward as well) which massively improved the gameplay. However, I quickly discovered that this same update also introduce a new bug, which shifted the hitboxes for traps (but not enemies/projectiles) off by two pixels both vertically and horizontally (I determined this by opening an unprotected copy of the quest in ZQ from both the earlier version of ZC and the one with quickscroll added, turned off gravity, and carefully checked my exact position onscreen while walking near traps and determined exactly how it was messed up. Now, I don't remember if it was offset up/left, down/right, etc.)
Alas, this meant that a whole lot of rooms that merely meant to require pixel-perfection platforming to pass unscathed now meant the player was forced to take damage to proceed, but after replaying the entire damn game I determined that there were no impossible rooms to pass due to it, just a lot of unfair damage. So he was waiting on/hoping for those two things to get resolved I think, but in the meantime he'd started learning how to code/develop games in other non-ZC environments, and made a short demo of a blastermasterish game, but then resumed working with ZC to produce that Demons of Scheherazade demo, before disappearing again. So I dunno what he's been up to since - I hope he continued working on games though; he's really good at it, obviously. I like to think I'll end up playing something of his (or even already have) and enjoy the hell out of it, not realizing it's something the same dev worked on, lol.
Obviously, the custom save loading never got tweaked (AFAIK, it's been a while since I played ZC but I remember the newer versions were no different in that regard) but I would guess that subsequent versions of ZC that include the quickscroll option eventually ironed out the bug with trap hitboxes.
As far as the last demo (from Sept. 2015), I remember that there were a couple bugs in the main game that I wasn't sure if he felt warranted fixing, and he was unwilling to go through the whole game and redesign the rooms that force damage due to the offset bug, when it might've been fixed later, and with the alternate ending path, I found a few creative ways to hardlock myself and force a reset, and he felt that it wasn't worth ironing out every possible trap on that route, and was fine with it remaining a bit buggy, so long as the main path through the game contained no potential hardlocks (which as far as I know, it didn't, as of the last demo in 2015. Just a handful of minor bugs.) I have no idea how much if any of that stuff he addressed with the final demo as I never playtested it before. The alternate path does force you to complete a bunch of stuff before gaining access to one very helpful movement upgrade that you normally would acquire soon after passing the alternate path entrance.
Anyways, that last version of the player's guide only goes through the first visit to Leo. Doesn't even get to Taurus, Libra, Virgo, Capricorn and the final areas, much less the subsequent returns to Aquarius, Scorpio, Aries, Cancer, Pisces, Gemini and Leo. I wrote an outline for the entire main run, and detailed maps for all of it, plus similar maps to reach the alternate path entrance and bonus area, but I never drafted an outline for the alternate path or made maps for how to navigate all of it, since it was much more non-linear and you could tackle it in several ways, so I think the plan was to just expect players completing that to already be familiar with the game and not need everything spelled out.
Dunno what his intentions are if any on completing this, so I wouldn't really feel okay just posting them all (maps+guide outline), but if anyone's stuck on a particular point, feel free to PM me (though I only visit sporadically at this point.) I'll post anything of note if I do get around to replaying this. And there is a complete LP on YouTube by MeleeWizard covering the main path.