Zelda Classic - its future. 35+ adults only please

[Dimentio]

Acually, please clarify: Why do the opinions of people who "Don't play ZC" matter? That's like asking a boomer their opinion on the future of teenagers: it's fucking retarded. If you aren't playing ZC or developing for it, you have nothing to add to the conversation.

[Saffith]

In my view, the underlying reason for this trend is that scripting has made ZQuest inaccessible to new quest makers. It simply takes too much time for an aspiring quest maker to learn how to make a quest that is a "hit".

Scripting is very off putting to the majority of the people who love ZC especially for newbies. Scripting in my eyes requires a 4 year college education to barely get a hang of it and understanding parts of scripting.

I know just enough about coding to look like an idiot, and it seemed like every new quest, big or small, relied heavily on ZScript.

I don't know why it is that scripting is particularly intimidating to people. Maybe it's because it's relatively abstract, a bunch of symbols and codewords rather than images and sounds. Maybe it's because the compiler rejects invalid scripts, whereas even the ugliest sprites work fine. Maybe it's because doing a poor job of it often results in something too broken to convince yourself is okay, so it's hard to recognize progress. Maybe people just aim too high too soon, attempting difficult projects when they're still struggling with the basics. Whatever the reason, there's really nothing special about it. It's a skill that can be learned like any other.

Sure, most people aren't good at scripting at first. Most people aren't good at game or level design at first. Or mapping. Or screen design. Or writing. Most people's first couple of quests are pretty bad, scripts or no. But they keep working at it, and they get better. Scripting isn't any different. You'll be bad at it at first, but keep working at it, and you'll get better.

Honestly, I think the simple fact that it's (relatively) new is a big reason long-time users feel this way. ZQuest was so easy to use, and now there's this big, difficult new thing messing it all up. But there's a ton of stuff in ZQuest that's opaque and confusing, and it's always been intimidating and difficult for new users. It was only ever easy to use because you had already gotten used to it.

In 2.10, how do you make a treasure chest appear after defeating all enemies? In Data > Secret Combos > Misc, click a combo slot and select a Slash (not Slash -> Item) combo, then Ctrl+click the combo and select the Armos -> Item flag, place the corresponding (they're not labelled) misc. flag where you want it, set the Enemies->Secret screen flag, set the room type to Special Item, and set the screen's special item (not the regular item) to the item in the chest. And be sure you do all that on layer 0, because Armos -> Item doesn't work on layers. Want a custom boss? Just set up a dozen or so mostly identical screens connected by a convoluted series of invisible warps triggered by some combination of combo cycling and defeating invisible enemies. If you were able to learn crap like that, you can handle ZScript just fine.

Acually, please clarify: Why do the opinions of people who "Don't play ZC" matter?

Because they could become people who do play ZC. If there are people in ZC's target audience who aren't using it, why not? What would it take to bring in more users?