I did not cut conversations or characters. I made it all from the ground up, over a period of around two years, alone, for no monetary gain,
24 story chapters, each programming story events, enemies behaviour, balancing dificulty for the battle system, ripping assets by myself, mapping, playtesting, fixing bugs over and over, fixing typos on the script.
There is a solution to fix this: go back in time to 2016 and give me a japanese Docomo Phone with all the episodes previously download and working, to use as a basis, all the assets ripped, the translated script and the music files. Also, a programming guide based on events.
I don't know who you are to care enough about misleading you.
I made this game alone almost a decade ago, mostly for my own enjoyment. It is as close to the source material as a project made as a passion project for free can be. Your best bet to getting something better than this is hope for another team to do it, or for Square itself to bring it back.
I'm not sure about the controller, never used one on this game.
About the story, if i remember right, the only thing missing is Special Episode - Legend, and the post game where the player would have to hunt Zirconiade Along other players.
i can't find much about these anywhere, so i basically don't have resources or a basis on how to recreate them faithfully. It is pretty much lost media, even in video form.
The game can be opened in "edit" mode by using Rpg tsukuru 2003 (or Rpg maker 2003).
Text is stored within events (that are either a sprite or pink squares on the map), and these can be edited easily. The thing is: This is legit a massive amount of text, That would take quite a while to be finished. And there is a catch: Some events are repeated in certain maps. Like, sometimes the player can walk up, left or right, so the same event to trigger dialogue may be repeated 3 times. Probably just editing one event and copy-pasting it in place where the other two are could work.
I imagine that the most practical process for finding and fixing typos would be like:
- playing the game until a typo is found > going back to the editor and finding the map where the event with that specific text is > fixing it and play-testing to see if nothing is broken.
Seems simple enough, but i have to emphasize that it is a time consuming task. For being a cell-phone game, this has so much more text that one would expect.
About the game, i agree. It certainly needs a little more polish here and there. If i had the time, i would probably rework the whole battle system and retouch the pixel art more carefully.
I'm grateful for the offer, but i don't know if i myself can be of much help in a collaboration, as i am busy at the moment, doing online courses, a full-time job and other stuff from real life.
If you want to go forward and do it, i think the best i could help would be input on how some of the stuff was made, or specifics parts where you may want an explanation of why something was worded a certain way. Nonetheless, i appreciate your interest.
Thanks for the kind words. I agree, the controls aren't the best, but I did design the game around it in a way that it would work, so that the dificulty is a challenge but not impossible. Still, thanks for checking it out.
You have to let the event finish before advancing the text in the dialogue box (like let an npc finish his pathway before closing the dialogue box), otherwise the game may skip to the next map and the event that was still happening in the later map will not find the necessary files being requested. I've made this game when i was i beginner in game development, so there were some bad decisions in the way that certain events were implemented.
Right now it isn't possible to change the controls, but i believe there are more buttons on the keyboard that work besides the ones mapped, like, i'm mostly sure space also works as an action button. Can't remember the other ones.
And it's cool to see someone else that also knows Thaddeus art. If you get stuck in some dungeon, just take your time, analyze the puzzles and save alot.
just checked it. Honestly, you don't need to upload it as an engine while having the whole game hidden in there, i think you'd be better uploading the one level demo Obivanhelgen himself did, which is what i used as a basis to work on and learn how it all functions. It has a smaller size and a more concise structure. I have that build saved somewhere with the improvements i made. Let me just check and i'll give you a link. It's actually a one level demo that you can't find anywhere on the net right now, so you would say it is even "rare".
No prob, if you can simplify it for anyone to be able to use it. Still, as you may have seen, most of it just works if all of the switchs needed are present on the maps and organized properly.
The engine, properly saying, it's really just the regular rm2k3 engine, but modified to work as a platformer. He created it and i worked on the finer details, improving here and there, translating most of the code to english, as it was originally in german.
There are no external plugins or any of that, it's all internal code within the game. You can check the files and the code with the regular rm2k3 tool. There are some test maps in there, i believe.
If you want to study how it works and use it to make your game, feel free to do it. Just having credit for the both of us would be appreciated.
if you talk to Tseng, he will give you the option to play Episode Tseng. To play the normal game, you have to pick the cellphone with Veld and go out from the south door.
they're set to escape from the hero direction after defeated. I guess if two of them got to the end of the corridor and the map doesn't have an area for you to manipulate their movement backwards, so you really may be stuck.
The best way to prevent this is probably just keeping more than one save, in case something like that happens.
you prpbably have to playtest and keep multiple saves at multiple points of the game, to be sure that what you translated is working properly when testing in other computers.
Also, you know we're probably getting an official before crisis remake some time in the future with Ever Crisis, right? Just saying that in case you want to rethink all the work you would have to put on this translation.
Maybe it is the version of rpgmaker that you have. I originally made this game in rpgtsukuru 2003. After you've download, you're probably going to need to download the RTP package too.
maybe you're skipping the dialogue boxes a bit too fast. Try going a little slower. I've made this game some time ago, so there is some visible inexperience by my part in the way it was coded, like some bugs that could be avoided, but i let pass.
if you have rpgmaker2003 or rpgtsukuru 2003 on your pc, you can access the text files on the game and edit them. If you feel like translating it, feel free to do it. You can post it too, no problem. It would be alot of work, though.
thanks for trying it out. I'm proud of being able to make this kind of game in this engine. As much as i would like to polish it, i sadly don't have the time. Still, with some practice and some tries, i guarantee you it is beatable.
Glad you liked it. I did some more fixes this year and worked a few extra episodes (Tseng and Reno), but that's honestly all i'm ever going to do, as i don't have alot of free time anymore.
If you feel like it, maybe check the other games i made. They're all free, of course.
