Major Release ~ Ancient Magic is out.
Ancient Magic
# Posted on Dec. 18, 2010, 5:31 p.m. by Gideon Zhi

Ancient Magic is a fairly generic little RPG for the SNES by the much-maligned Hot-B. See if you can spot their advert for another of their products in the game! Despite its rather pedestrian roots, the game takes several surprising twists towards the end, and is generally worth sticking it out even if the wrap-up (or lack thereof) is a bit of a let down. As a note, there's more game past "THE END." Also as a note, do set your window speed to "fast" in the in-game options menus - it'll improve your experience dramatically.

A godawful amount of work went into this, probably more than was worth it. If I can find the time sometime in the next week or so, I'll put up some kind of postmortem showing off before-and-afters of a bunch of the interface rearrangements. Fun fact, in the original Japanese version, you couldn't see your max HP or MP in battle! You can in mine, though!

And now I'm going to bed.

Progress ~ Ancient Magic betatest wrapping up
Ancient Magic
# Posted on Dec. 15, 2010, 5:53 p.m. by Gideon Zhi

Release is imminent. Like, within-the-next-24-ish-hours imminent. I hope. I'm still hoping to get three more patches out this year, and this is one of 'em! There's still time!

Progress ~ Ancient Magic finally reaches beta
Ancient Magic
# Posted on Aug. 24, 2010, 2:43 p.m. by Gideon Zhi

Ugh, this game's programming is one horrible spaghetti mess! But it's finally in playtesting, which means that the end is in sight. Have a copy of the new title screen, and of one of the tougher issues (fade-in sprite text stored nine times in the rom! Ugh.)

Progress ~ Ancient Magic: Script Fully Inserted
Ancient Magic
# Posted on May 1, 2010, 8:35 a.m. by Gideon Zhi

A few days ago I finally managed to get Ancient Magic's auto-format routine working nearly 100%. What this means, in effect, is that I add a single control code at the start of a string, and the game itself adds line breaks where appropriate. This is complicated by Ancient Magic's text system for two reasons. First, there is no standard "line break" command like most games have; instead, the game has a "print cursor position" command, which takes X and Y parameter bytes. Second, the routine likes to recursively call itself, most notably to differentiate between the speech patterns of the male and female main characters. These have been fully retained in the text translation, and the routine is currently navigating said recursive jumps with about 98% accuracy. Of course we need 100%, but it's really cool to see nonetheless.

The *nice* thing about the super annoying Cursor Position command is that it lets me tweak menus like crazy, and take advantage of the double-spacing that ten-ten marks usually occupy. I've also managed to add max hp and max mp indicators to the battle window, which the original game did not have!

I don't know how much longer this will take, but I'd like to have it being playtested in a week or two. No guarantees on that, of course.

Progress ~ Ancient Magic's Script is Translated
Ancient Magic
# Posted on May 2, 2007, 8:55 p.m. by Gideon Zhi

Eien ni Hen turned in Ancient Magic's completed text translation a few days ago. I've just now inserted the first of five major text blocks; they all need some formatting insofar as screenspace constraints are concerned, and they're an absolute nightmare of control codes, but there should be relatively little truly difficult about putting them back in. Just a lot of boring grunt work, sigh.

Have a screenshot or two. This guy's name is Feyr, by the way. Haven't gotten around to putting that particular text chunk back into the game yet.