The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

Greetings to anybody who might chance to read the blog for this project. I'm going to try to provide little updates about progress on a monthly basis, seeing as I already write about it in my personal journal on that time frame. Before I can tell you about progress, though, I'll have to get you caught up on where the project's come from up to this point.

I started working on The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates (though it didn't have that name at the time) way back in...wow, early 2004. Not sure of the exact date, all I have as an indicator is the first personal journal entry in which I mentioned it, but it's been over a decade already. x.x It started out as just, "Say, wouldn't it be cool to have a game starring the characters from Triforce MUCK?" :D So I set about making it happen. I'd completed a decent-sized project in RM2K before, so picking up RM2K3 wasn't too difficult. For this game, though, the provided skills system wasn't enough on its own, oh no. I wanted every hero to have their own Final Fantasy 6-style special ability, some of them lifted straight from FF6, some of them much more original. Naturally, this meant that I had to do some special scripting in the monster group event pages, but I was studying computer science and had plenty of general programming experience, so a little scripting was no big deal, right? ;) Well, the more I implemented things, the more I found out that the native skill system of RM2K3 wouldn't play nice with the special abilities I was trying to create...and through a long process of gradual replacement, I eventually just about completely took over the battle system and created a custom one which only uses skills to turn on switches for my scripting to react to. Even the monsters' actions are carried out by this system.

And then I had the bright idea of having random dungeon (or as I call it in-game, quest) generation. X) That sure was a scope bomb. For those of you who are particularly familiar with RM2K3, yes, there is an existing random dungeon generator available as part of the attributes of a map, but I wanted something I could have a bit more control over. I eventually figured out a method of moving the player between single-screen rooms, the rooms all being pre-designed, but their layout in relation to each other and connections between randomized. In reality, it's all just one huge map in RM2K3, but the player sees a seamless transition through a doorway from one room to the next as the game teleports them around. It looks a lot like the dungeons in the original Legend of Zelda, actually.

I really wish I'd found out about DynRPG a lot sooner than I did, I could've saved myself a lot of work and accomplished certain things much more cleanly if I had. x.x Even now I'm figuring on reimplementing a lot of the combat system to crank its numbers and make its decisions using a DynRPG plugin rather than relying on RM2K3 scripting so much. It'll allow me to be more object-oriented in my approach and not have to worry about accidentally overwriting variables used elsewhere in the system, and hey, since DynRPG plugins can read and write files, as demonstrated by bulmabrief144's File Control plugin, I can probably retrieve a lot of combat data from spreadsheets (or at least text files exported from spreadsheets) rather than putting it in custom script like I currently do. :D As long as I'm doing shout-outs, thanks to Cherry for making DynRPG in the first place, PepsiOtaku for carrying on the DynRPG updates torch and creating the ATB Overhaul plugin from which I figured out a way to avoid a nasty bug in RM2K3's combat system, and Kazesui, whose DynPointer plugin inspired me to make DynParams. That's a plugin which allows you to overwrite any RM2K3 script command's parameters BTW, absurdly useful if you know what you're doing.

Anyway, in a very brief only-touch-the-most-important-points way that brings us up to a little less than a month ago, when the Release Something! Day XIII event was being held. I'd been intending to post up an alpha build demo of Forgotten Gates soon anyway, so it was nice timing for me. Surprisingly enough, I got not only feedback from several people, but an actual Let's Play video of my game from thesacredlobo. :o He found a bug that's been my main concern since then: if you hold down a button while a battle is ending, there ends up being memory corruption amongst the variables. :/ Tracking down this bug is proving difficult; it behaves a bit differently when I place in Message commands to track when variables change, or even when I run the game on different computers--could very well be affected by processor speed. Seems like something which might be another bug in RM2K3 itself as opposed to my scripting, especially since I can't for the life of me see why my script would care about a button being held down aside from one bit which I'm pretty sure I've already neutralized as a possible cause. I'll have to download the KazeDebug plugin and use it to more finely trace what's going on before I give up on it, though. Props again to Kazesui.

Having said all that, I may not make much progress, if any at all, by my next monthly progress report deadline, because I've put aside Forgotten Gates to do a project in Unity 5. As you might have heard, it's recently become freely available for personal use, and let's face it, skills with a system that can make games for everything from web browsers to Nintendo 3DS and Wii U are a lot more marketable than RPG Maker. X) My project is a simple Bomberman clone which I'm hoping won't take terribly long, but I've always had difficulty gauging project time and I probably should go through some more of the Unity tutorials as well.

At any rate, thanks for taking an interest in Forgotten Gates. :) It may take many years more to complete, but I haven't tinkered with it on and off for the past eleven years to drop it now, trust me.