Lost Isle RELEASED

Key hunting! Again! Except this time, I'm pretty sure I've scoured the entire place from top to bottom (or the other way around). I just need one last key so I can obtain the boss key. If you're wondering which two keys I have gotten, it's the ones on floors 3 and 5. Dunno where that pesky last one is...

Ah, after getting the ladder those are the 2 keys you have gotten? Ah, good. That means you haven't gotten the kay that is outside of the level, on a beach, right? You have to get through a short cave to obtain it. To get to the outside area of Lv3 that I am talking about, go to the northeastern part of F1 and exit the level there.......

And C, yeah, I have never played Illusion of Gaia but DFw has and she wanted to have a level like the Sky Garden in Lost Isle.

19 deaths into the game, I finally find level 1. Got four hearts, big shield, and the bow and arrows to help, though. Im puttering around Level 1 now. Good job! I probably know more than most people how long it takes to design (or wing it) these kind of multiple-dmap levels to ensure the player can't get where they aren't supposed to be.

There's a reason that level doesn't rely on finding keys, gentle players. 😉

*Beware the floor?*
That's real mature Peteo. I bet everyone had fun with that one too. So death count: 1 ..Bastard! hehe...somehow I thought beware floor =[translation] run really fast! ...Doh!

Anyway, been all over lv1 at LEAST twice. Found the Big chest but NO KEY!!!! Aaaarrfg!!!! Umm...little help here perhaps. -(I GOT RAFT!)-

Also I freakin love the palletes used thus far in the caves/dungeons. Nice colors, easy on the eyes too. Good effects also. Not many, but just enough for flavor.

First of all, I've really been loving this quest. I have no major complaints so far but a few minor ones. I'll save any criticisms until I finish the game, though if it keeps up the quality of design it will earn high marks in my book for sure.

I understood "beware the floor" instantly (avoid those tiles), but I was curious what would happen so yeah, +1 to my death count (of many, I don't really care about dying). Perhaps my death count is so high because I let myself fall into stuff like that out of curiosity.

Also, I'm having one hard time finding the second level. I don't so much want to be told where it is so much as give me a general hint. I have no idea what section of the world I should be exploring, though I've been almost everywhere since I got the Power Glove. Really, I've spent quite a few hours exploring, and I've found some pretty cool things but not the next dungeon. I am probably missing something small somewhere, but the world is just too big to carefully peruse all over again so could someone just tell me the overworld area I need to prod around in?

Is the Spin Attack not supposed to let you walk perpendicular to the sword charging? That's quite unlike it was in every other Zelda game, but I've never used the ZC spin attack before. It certainly seems like it will limit the potential of the spin, though at least you don't move like molasses when charging like in lttp.

It's in the South east lava area
😊

Although I do believe you need to use that power gauntlet to move a few rocks to find another item to get to level 2.

download adobe acrobat reader instead of some 3rd party PDF viewer.

i didnt realize this lol, i'll download this now and check it out !

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edit: a second page indeed exists ~_~

hey, in the readme, petoe says he was gonna help wolfie before he moves to 100% custom quests... i would have thought MM: DWR was a 100% custom quest ~_~

also the images in the PDF like the enemies and the island, are very crappy in quality, surely you could have made them vastly better in quality with a negligible increase in file size?

EDIT: - I CAN'T PLAY THIS.

the version of Zelda Classic included uses an old timing engine that (as i have stated in the beta bugs area) annoys me greatly.
if darkdragon or someone is able to release a build with a update to only the timing engine update then that would be great. (this issue was already solved a while ago but the version included is older)

Well MMDWR was a 100% custom quest, but what I meant was that LI was my final chance to make a Zelda game before completely moving on non-Zelda projects and never looking back. 😉

And the pictures in the readme are poor quality because we wanted to keep the file size small and to give a bit of a mysterious feeling to the enemies. Since they are a bit blurry, you cannot see all the details in them etc so you have to play the quest to see how they look like in action. 😛

Oh and 19 deaths, C? Holy crap! Since your own quests are pretty damn challenging, I thought you were some insanely skillful player who zero games quests with ease... heh.

Non-Zelda is where it's at. No fringeinfray opyrightcay.

What I really like about Lost Isle is that it is polished enough that my concerns and critiques boil down to design decisions, not problems. (Although the arrow game was a tad buggy; you can mess up the combo animation by hitting them too fast, and one of the arrow flags didn't go away even though the statute went down.)

So, for instance, I'm making a mental note to myself that open-ended is fine and good, but the player should still have some feeling of progress and direction. The overworld is a great size, but I'm left wondering if, perhaps, the player's hand shouldn't be held at least until Level 1.

I see you've tried to do that a little bit by dropping the player a few hints about where to go (the skeleton tells you his friends are in the swamp, the swamp intro tells you to find a temple). The problem, for me, was that the maze was so effective I didn't think I could go anywhere in the swamp yet.

Now, I wouldn't change a thing about your overworld. It's the best I've ever seen. But I'm thinking that a massive maze overworld might work better if there were more than one discrete place to go at one time. Now, this might be the case already, but I didn't find anything except caves until I found Level 1 - and I wandered all over the place. If the player had the choice of completing one of half a dozen levels first, that might make the random wandering more satisfying. Like, say, one level in the Odderra village or graveyard that has no item, only plot information and a heart container piece. Stuff like that.

These concerns don't detract from Lost Isle at all, they're just things to think about for future quests. It really is a testament to Lost Isle's excellence that it raises such high-level concerns about quest design.

Petoe wrote:
Oh and 19 deaths, C? Holy crap! Since your own quests are pretty damn challenging, I thought you were some insanely skillful player who zero games quests with ease... heh.

What? No, I die constantly in my own quests. I just don't mind dying. Continue, continue, continue until you get it just right!

I believe this is a disconnect between me and most players.

ok, well i can play it, just gotta put up with random lag :P im pretty sure i just need to find the first dungeon now 😊

bow
wooden arrow
sword
bombs?

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great work so far, but i think theres a bug with the green ghost 😊 it never said anything for me :P if you enter from the right side and walk across the very base of the [spoiler]windmill[/spoiler] you can walk in a 3x1 grid while the ghost appears, now walk down just 1 square of the entrance to the building to lock you from walking all 4 directions and the ghost wont say anything at all, it just comes and goes.

franpa, not a bug. It's just a random ghost who flies through the screen, giving the village and the whole quest a certain eerie feeling, and hopefully makes you wonder what that ghost was and is the ghost somehow meaningful to the story..... 😉

C, that's what I like as well. Dying dying dying until you get it right! And fortunately in LI there are many shortcuts, so if you happen to die, you don't have to go through a certain part of a level or overworld again. That's a good way to avoid annoyance and when building the quest I constantly kept telling DFW "we need more shortcuts in this quest!!". Of course if the player somehow forgets or misses the shortcut trigger, then dying might get annoying.

ah, ok then 😊

Ran out of arrows. Death count at 2 now. And still can't open the big chest in lv1. Is this so obvious that i'm going to slam my head into the keyboard, or are the keys hidden really well? I hope for my sake it's the second.

heh, any hints on getting a piece of food?

im gonna leave this till tomorrow 😊 and thanks for the info petoe. (aka: Pete)

Gleeok: One of the keys is on the B1 floor. When you come to the B1 floor, from the block puzzle room exit to left and go down 2 times. If you have activated the shortcut in this screen, just walk to the middle of the big water hall by using those wooden pieces that you see on water.
To get the other key, lower water from F1, then go to the southwest corner of F1 and go down the vines. When you come to the dark room on B1, cut the vines to find a hidden door...

Franpa: Oh you wanna feed that hungry guy in the Windmill? Well you have th beat the 2 first levels before you get your hands on some tasty fish.... 😉

keys hidden really well. Both keys are on b1.

And C-dawg, thank you for your comments. I almost consider the caves underneath Oderra for the Bow and Arrow to be a mini-dungeon of sorts. Already straight off the bat, you can explore Chovian Fields, Oderra Village, Dasa Woods, Akavir Swamp, Oderra Graveyard, Yeven Basin, Tahou Woods and a part of the Vasshinghon Flows. That's already a wide area to explore. And as a result you can get before level 1:
7 HC pieces, 2+ potions, 1 bomb upgrade, 1 magic upgrade. I'd say that's pretty darn good for some exploration before hitting level 1. 😉

I found where I needed to go, but I think I also found a minor bug. In the Tahou Woods, there are a few screens on which the map won't come up. They're a bit north of the place you use the Raft. I'm really can't see why the map won't come up on those screens, but it doesn't seem intended.

was left over from a previous beta where room-state carryovers didnt' exist so we had to use extra dmaps with level numbers to get things to work, but since the advent of carryovers, we got it working, but forgot to swap out that you didn't need to go to a new dmap anymore, so thus, two screens can't have map viewing on them.

DarkFlameWolf wrote:Already straight off the bat, you can explore Chovian Fields, Oderra Village, Dasa Woods, Akavir Swamp, Oderra Graveyard, Yeven Basin, Tahou Woods and a part of the Vasshinghon Flows. That's already a wide area to explore.

Oh, no doubt. I'm delighted with the range of exploration allowed. But these areas don't have much to do other than poke around for HCPs. I'm thinking, for future quests, it would be more rewarding if each place to explore had something more meaty to it. A specialized mini-dungeon (caves don't stand out), perhaps a special mini-plot. For example, a mini-dungeon in the graves under the Oderra Graveyard with, I don't know, King of the Worms who describes what happened from his perspective. "Dinnertime!" That sort of thing.

Of course, this is just design philosophy. You can see what I'm talking about in that old Sabotage Dragoon demo. I tried really hard to make sure wherever you wandered, there was something quirky/interesting/humorous/new to reward you for your wanderings.

DarkFlameWolf wrote:And as a result you can get before level 1:
7 HC pieces, 2+ potions, 1 bomb upgrade, 1 magic upgrade. I'd say that's pretty darn good for some exploration before hitting level 1. 😉

Ah crap. Missed that. 🙄

Alright, I've got everything I need before level 4 (except 4 or 5 heart pieces, but I have cheap combat skills so I probably don't need them). But... I can't get into level 4. I'm guessing it's past that rock where if you hit the statue above it with an arrow the rock with disappear but... the arrow won't go through the rock, so how do you hit the statue? Unless I'm actually suppose to access the level by the caves or something...

... also, that graveyard level was bloody (literally) insane. Is it even possible to survive one hit from... well, the slow moving gibdos? I'd look up the name, but I'd rather just call 'em deathtouch mummies, heheh. But really, you know some people of younger age or those sensitive to blood, even though pixelated (it did look quite real almost) could cause seizures or something. I dunno... still, that was CRAZY! Ah well, at least I have... THE ONE WEAPON! TO RULE THEM ALL!... ... now I need "the one defense." ^_^

I still can't find level one. Can someone please help me. Thanks

C-Dawg wrote:
Of course, this is just design philosophy. You can see what I'm talking about in that old Sabotage Dragoon demo. I tried really hard to make sure wherever you wandered, there was something quirky/interesting/humorous/new to reward you for your wanderings.

Windstrike, it is good you brought the goryness of the Catacombs up. It is a very disturbing and nasty place, but on the other hand this is just a 2D game... But I don't know how a younger player would react to that kind of level. Should we have warned players that there might be some content in the game that is not suitable for the very young... Wolfie didn't seem to mind, she told me "Go wild with the catacombs, make it as sick as you can!".
Oh well, hopefully no one sues our asses. :P
And to get to Level 4, you need to move that huge 2x2 block. And to move it you need the Giant's Gauntlet.

annot, the 1st level is at the swamp. You need the Bow & Arrows to get in to the level. If those big pig headed statues are blocking your way, shoot the grey poles into the mouth with an arrow to proceed.

Windstike, they are called Deathbos. The undefined enemy later in the caves are Blood Leevers.
And the boss was called Death Eater. But yeah, the catacombs were quite the interesting level. Glad you were able to deduce the clues to each maze. (either that you did a VERY long trial-and-error session.)

Ooops! I didnt mean to post this. Please deleate it.
This is what you get for playing whith the text editor. Sorry!

Petoe wrote:You need the Bow & Arrows to get in to the level. If those big pig headed statues are blocking your way, shoot the grey poles into the mouth with an arrow to proceed.

You have no earthly idea how long it took me to figure that out.

Arggghhhhhhhhhhh!
So that's what you do?
*pant* *pant* *pant*

(Brightly) So, where do you get the bow?

DarkFlameWolf wrote:was called Death Eater

You know, I would not mind...when C-dawg finishes his run-through, to write a in-depth review of the quest. I'd be very interested in his personal, professional opinion of the quest. (I'd probably print it and frame it too! 😉) But seriously, not rushing him in any way, I know at his speed of play, it'll be a few months before he finishes and has time to write up one. But despite our differences in the past, I still respect him as a questmaker and his opinions. So I'd like to invite him to take his time, soak the entire quest in and try (try) to get everything it has to offer before completing it and letting us know his thoughts. I've always wondered how C-dawg would take to this quest, so now we'll find out whenever he gets done. No pressure though C-dawg! 😉