GRIKARUGUN *Insert coin(s) to continue*

[AgentLym]

Oh... my bad. Heh. Well, that makes me feel alot better!

[Gleeok]

Wow! What a game!

Can I have the password? I have no idea how Joe beat the 2nd boss, but I need some scripting help, inspiration, and techniques that could probably be found in your .z file! PM it to me, PLEASE! (Although I could just use the one from your previous game...)

I'll be posting pretty much everything I'm tinkering with sooner or later. You can find alot of what I'm doing in this thread. Plus I'll release the tileset when it's complete also, so it should be easy enough to reverse engineer the game, with a little work that is. If you wan't to know anything specific just ask away, it's really not a big secret.

Oh, and I've got enough results out of the lab mice (for now), so the lv1 cheat is 'help'. They get progressively harder to figure out from there, not that you'll need them, seeing how every one of Link->Inputs is disabled anyway. Next version will be easier guys, I promise.

EDIT: Why the heck can't anyone beat the second boss? Look at the pic of it on hard mode for pete's sake. It was originally supposed to be a miniboss. :p

[C-Dawg]

Can't beat it because I'm down to one third of my health after the first boss. Just can't last that long.

So far I enjoyed the first part of level 2 the best. The part where you had to quickly switch colors to evade the long solid beams of nastiness coming at you from both sides. Pretty, all around.

I'm guessing you did alot of ripping out of gradius, ikaruga (music anyway) and other deals though. Any custom work in there?

[jman2050]

This is certified win. I'm too much of a masochist to go any lower than hard though, so the first boss is killing me XD

[C-Dawg]

You get some credit too, Jman. As I recall, scripting was your idea. Now we've got at least three, maybe more master scripters out there pushing Zelda Classic far beyond what anyone thought it capable of.

The challange for you devs is going to be keeping ZClassic accessible. The tools are there for ZClassic to be a development engine that caters to ANY skill level. Just getting started? Really simple to make your own Legend of Zelda 1 clone game. More experienced? You can add custom graphics and start making your own Zelda 3 clone. Really motivated? You can use scripting to do whatever you want. ZClassic is really, as you say, "certified win" if we can get the initial stuff intuitive enough for entry level people to use.

[jman2050]

Unfortunately, accessibility and power don't typically go hand-in-hand. One aspect that seems to turn off newcomers is how cluttered the interface is, which is I'm I've been pushing so hard to make large mode the standard. Of course, game making is complicated no matter how you slice it. I mean, even if you ignore scripting altogether there's still a learning curve before you can understand how everything in ZC works

Also, DarkDragon is the one who implemented the current scripting interface (I designed the internal engine), so he deserves as much credit as I do.

[Gleeok]

Yeah, you developers deserve most of the credit, especially you jman2050, for this game at least. If you hadn't added the ZScript weapon functions I would have given up trying to make this....In fact I did throw in the towel a few months before said weapons were added. So, thank you sir. You are awesome.

And I'm sorta agreeing with you on the hard mode thing. The plus side is that I've gone through and meticulously redone any instance of enemy bullets, slightly decreased the hit box, and finally added in the hitboxs' offsets. So collision detection is way more precise..and sane. And for the fixed demo I've enabled saving, and made it so you start with a full life bar no matter what game mode.

Can't beat it because I'm down to one third of my health after the first boss. Just can't last that long.

Ahh, see that's the stuff I need to know! But you're supposed to start every level with full life....Is that not happening?

So when you guys are getting to the bosses, is it hard because it's just waaaay to hard, or because your life is low initially? ..I probably should of asked this stuff earlier. <_<

I'm guessing you did alot of ripping out of gradius, ikaruga (music anyway) and other deals though. Any custom work in there?

There's actually more than I care for...I'm not big with custom graphics. I basically just made the tiles 8-bit, then redrew/recolored each enemy 6 times for the different colors. Pretty much all or most the weapon spites and ship/shield stuff are the only thing that are original.


EDIT: Also, Is anyone else getting random crashing?

[C-Dawg]

I was mistaken. The player's health does start at max after each boss, it just goes down to zero almost immediately as I am hammered by unblockable enemy spray.

Got up to the second boss this time. I get the boss' concept - there is probably a pattern, a rythm to the sheild switches to get in synch with the spraying gunfire... but hell if I can keep up with it.

[Gleeok]

I get the boss' concept - there is probably a pattern, a rythm to the sheild switches to get in synch with the spraying gunfire... but hell if I can keep up with it.

When I test the bosses I make sure that there is plenty of strategic options open to the player. With that boss you can stick to the outside and knock down a few of the laser orbs, take out orbs of one color first (this makes it too easy), or concentrate your fire on any single point, to name a few. Consequently, as you can kind of guess, this demo was a bit rushed. I just really needed some feedback for it, so thank you guys for checking it out.


Also a *small* sort of status report. Cool stuff, I think you'll like it.

Basic Weapon Edit functions have been added. This currently includes many subtle changes, but a pain in the arse to add initially. Now when you switch shield modes you get a second option that will fire and absorb shots like the first. Also added four option types, choosable by the player, that include; Spacing type (Will spawn one on each side of the ship, press 'L' to increase or decrease the space between ship and option), Rotation type (Again, press L to adjust the radius), Freeze type (Hold L to lock them in place)..there's still some obscure bug with this one for some reason though... , And Direction type (currently just follows the player).

Also got rid of knockback completely. (Why there isn't a simple "no knockback" rule I have no idea...seems kind of strange, there should be one.)

Multiple ships- I'm pretty certain that sometime soon (very soon) I'm going to simply Get rid of Link completely and turn him into an ffc. This seems like the best thing to do. That way I can use different graphics at my discretion. Anyway, You can now select from two different ships with a slightly different weapons array.

Finished the last stage of level one, and the lv1 end boss known as the Patralike. Takes up the entire screen, has 22 orbiting bodies, the smaller 'eyes' are invulnerable and will block harmful fire and absorb homing lasers while protecting the inner eye, and did I mention they shoot solid beams? Also has three forms. Good luck with that...

I think I will add a mini boss right before the main one also, Something really easy where you probably wont even get hit once, but something really pretty to look at, like some cool touhou type patterns. I have about a 45 second space to fill.

Also re-organized all the screens in ZQ and some code to make it fit in with the extended soundtrack. :) (optional, but shouldn't be more than 100 MB)

Adding an "Insane" difficulty mode :p and adding loops at some point. When you beat the game you can replay it on a harder setting where all the levels are completely different! ...and harder.

Oh, and finished a "Level Clear" screen. Will show you how many enemies you killed in that level and your max chain. Later on it will have remain bonus, boss destruction bonus, and total score.

Maybe a few weeks for a demo.

[C-Dawg]

Multiple ships- I'm pretty certain that sometime soon (very soon) I'm going to simply Get rid of Link completely and turn him into an ffc. This seems like the best thing to do. That way I can use different graphics at my discretion. Anyway, You can now select from two different ships with a slightly different weapons array.

I know it's just another minor step, but somehow taking the game engine's automatic Link functions out of the equation seems like the final lynchpin between using ZeldaClassic and basically just programming your own game. Not much is left of the ZeldaClassic API after that except drawing functions on the screen and easy graphics processing, ya know?

And with what you've learned here, you could probably go out and make a C++ version of your game from scratch. Just need to learn a little bit about Windows programming and you're set.