*ALL PHYSICAL COPIES ARE SOLD OUT*: REALMS OF QUEST V (Digital version is available)

[darkatx]

The manual artwork was supposed to be done last week from my last estimate.

Still working on it...



Hopefully, the artwork should be completed some time in the next week? This is clearly Ghislain's Magnum Opus and the manual is twice the size of his predecessors.

I now see the world in black and white.

[rubygolem]

That wanted poster for Nikaedor is a nice touch.

[Ghislain]

120 hours ... This game will possibly be our companion for a lifetime!

Well, this is the type of game that was quite popular with young teenage boys back in the 1980s who had a lot of time on their hands. To play it and solve it, one will need to effectively hole themselves up inside of a cave for a month or two and dedicate all their time and attention to it

[Ghislain]

The manual artwork was supposed to be done last week from my last estimate.

Still working on it...



Hopefully, the artwork should be completed some time in the next week? This is clearly Ghislain's Magnum Opus and the manual is twice the size of his predecessors.

I now see the world in black and white.

I can't wait to see the manual and the box with your artwork appearing in physical form in my hands. The key to the game are these physical assets that replicates the old classic RPGs from back in the day.

Thank you for the kind words. My publisher has been playtesting the game and he's been driven to madness. One has to be a madman to spend 2000 hours over 2.5 years to produce this. And I am that madman

[Ghislain]

That wanted poster for Nikaedor is a nice touch.

Ah you noticed. Does he make an appearance in the game? I guess one will have to play to find out.

My apologies for not posting regular updates here. I've been posting them on my Twitter feed at @hitfan2000.

Here's an exclusive screenshot from today's playtesting session, just for Denial!

[Ghislain]

I achieved a major milestone -- after playtesting the game for several weeks, I finally solved Realms of Quest V! I did it in about 50 hours of gameplay while I had access to all of the maps (effectively, I had a cheat guide handy since I am the principal designer. But rubygolem did design the dungeons). So based on that, I think it can be said that there's at least 100-150 hours of gameplay for a fairly competent old school CRPG there.

I might have made the game too big. There's 20 cities and 20 dungeons to explore. Each city has at minimum, 10 people to talk to. Each dungeon floor is 25*25 squares.

Here's some screenshots of my final playthrough session. The main quest involves uniting the legendary, but fractured Tablet of Uthar for the Grand Empress, Lady Carmilla Bane. I won't reveal what happens at the end and if you want to see it, you will have to buy the game and solve it!

[Ghislain]

I re-watched the first episode of Game of Thrones the other night. I think I might have been influenced by it when I made characters for this game, at least in terms of archetypes.

[Ghislain]

Well, I can announce that a major milestone has just been achieved a few minutes ago:

*** THE PRINCIPAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE GAME HAS BEEN FINALIZED ***

(save for testing the floppy disk/D64 version of the game which I'm about to embark on for about a week).

From the beginning, I wanted Realms V to primarily be an SD card or emulator-based game, but also provide support for floppy disks. I think it's important for a retro game like like this to follow such a convention. Moreover, providing actual floppy disks that actually work on the real hardware (with disk labels) for the physical product gives something tangible that you can hold in your hands.

When I was about to create the D64 files for the disk-based version of the game, I found that they actually used more space than the 4 disk sides I had planned for. So I had to implement some compression in order to make it all fit.

In the end, the amount of free disk space on all of the disks that remained was:

Side A Rivaria - 39 blocks free
Side B Underworld - 20 blocks free
Side C Bestiary - 3 blocks free!! (see screenshot above)
Side D Populace - 5 blocks free

I remember listening to a podcast where they interviewed the creator of the original Wizardry for the Apple II and he talked about the challenge of making the game fit on 2 disk sides and how he was cramming everything down to the last sector, and I think I can certainly relate to that experience.

I've also been asked by some on this forum and outside of it if there ever will be cartridge version of the game. The answer is that it is very unlikely. I would have to do a major overhaul of the way I had written the code that I had set out from the beginning. And since the intent was to publish the game in physical form (cardboard box, printed manual, cloth map, metal trinket), if a major bug was found after the game was released and distributed, doing a recall of all of the cartridges to re-flash them with the bug fix would have been a nightmare in terms of time and money lost.

And besides, the digital version of the game will include D64 and D81 versions of the game, the latter which will be very easy to use with an emulator or an SD card reader on the actual machine. The game loads very fast with the SD card and it is a more than adequate solution to avoid disk swapping and slow loading times. That being said, playing the game on floppy disk and waiting for the game to load has a certain charm to it. You can imagine yourself buying such a game back in 1983, using a motherboard expander to plug in two 16K RAM cartridges (or even order a third party 32K expander that was advertised in Compute!'s Gazette) and then loading it from an actual disk. The convention for playing 8-bit RPG games back in the 1980s involved disk-swapping and I am providing that experience for VIC-20 users today.

You can even play the game with a dual disk drive setup to minimize disk swapping if you're into that sort of thing.

A lot of people helped me with this game, for which I am grateful. From this forum:

Rubygolem - designed the dungeons and story text for them.
Darkatx - is doing all of the beautiful physical artwork
Mike - he programmed a custom tool for me that greatly increased the number of colors that could be displayed. I also used his MINIGRAFIK suite to create the graphics for the game.
R'Zo - created all of the great music that you hear when you play.

Hopefully the game will be released soon. I still have to test the disk version to make sure that there are no unforseen issues. But yeah, I feel I have achieved something major today.

[orion70]

Really great news! Can't wait to purchase the most expensive collector's edition of your game (I'm already saving money for it)

[norm8332]

I still plan on getting my copy! It looks like it came out great.

[Ghislain]

Thank you all!

darkatx is now working on the cloth map. He is almost finished. This is the latest iteration of it.

[orion70]

Wow, Denmark is now southeast in the map

[Ghislain]

The boxed edition of Realms of Quest V is available for pre-sale orders. Click here to order: https://doublesidedgames.com/shop/commo ... f-quest-v/.

Realms of Quest V is a role-playing game for the Commodore VIC-20 that is influenced by classics from the 1980s such as Ultima, Wizardry, Bard’s Tale, Phantasie and Telengard.

To play the game you will need a 32k ram expander. Joystick is recommended, but not required.

Featuring:

Over 350 multicolor graphical images that depict the monsters, characters and scenery portraits
16 races, 16 classes, 2 genders and 3 alignments
A party can have up to 10 player characters, plus 10 summoned monsters.
An overland map that exceeds it’s predecessor by a factor of four!
20 Cities and 20 villages
Persons that you can talk to and interact with
20 mazes and dungeons to explore
100 hours of game time
PAL / NTSC compatible!

Game package contains:

Cardboard Box
Game on 2 floppies (4 sides!)
Extensive Instruction Manual
World map printed on cloth
Greater Rivaria Coin
Digital version (D64 and D81 versions included)

[mingle]

This looks seriously good...

You deserve a huge round of applause/pat on the back/free beer (or whatever else you prefer).

Truly an amazing work of dedication, determination and creativity!

Cheers,

Mike.

[orion70]

pre-order... DONE. Full box version of course. I just want to add my humble thanks to Ghislain for this huge effort, which will remain as an absolute milestone in VIC's history. A great summer is coming!