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

[Ghislain]

I've achieved another major milestone in my game: the 3D first person perspective while exploring the dungeon.

While Realms IV did feature this, it was done with simple black and white wireframe graphics. Here, I can use up to 4 colors in any type of combination that I want. I can set the colors for:

Background
Doors (I use the VIC-20's character color register for these)
Lines (I use the border color register to draw the framing lines around the walls and the doors)
Walls (I use the auxiliary register for these).

So every dungeon will have it's own color scheme. Another feature is that each dungeon floor will have 5 image portraits to add even more to the atmosphere: one for an NPC who will aid you, one for the boss monster encounter and 3 images that will serve as "cut scenes" when you reach a key portion of the map. As well, there will be textual descriptions of what you're seeing in rooms.

[Ghislain]

I redesigned my non-existent Twitter page to showcase Realms of Quest V:

http://www.twitter.com/hitfan2000

I even had the great RICHARD GARRIOTT (creator of Ultima) acknowledge and "like" one of my posts!

[Ghislain]

Realms of Quest V was actually discussed on the Retrocomputing Roundtable Podcast a while back https://twitter.com/hitfan2000/status/9 ... 6114691072

[plbyrd]

Dude, I am pumped for this game!

[Ghislain]

Dude, I am pumped for this game!

Thanks! I'm trying to raise awareness and drum up support for this upcoming game. With little to no actual promotion on my part, about 50 copies of Realms of Quest IV were sold (which is fairly typical for a retrogaming title that gets released nowadays). I figure if I could attract a broader audience using Twitter and the like and maybe something like 70 copies will sell

I've been programming the various features of the dungeon module: stairs, secret doors and magical darkness.

In the last 2 screenshots, the player comes across a darkened portion of the dungeon. A Light spell is cast, and now they can see (take note of the light spell effect icon being highlighted at the bottom of the screen).

[Ghislain]

Today I programmed traps, teleporters and spinners. Here is how a teleporter appears on the screen when the proper spell to detect these is cast.

[pixel]

Confirmed. You are amazing.

[Ghislain]

Confirmed. You are amazing.

Thank you. I'm having a lot of fun making this. After 6 months during the making of Realms III and IV respectively, I really really really hated those games near the end. After 14 months of working on the current game, well at least I'm still having fun!

This morning, I just finished programming the last visual elements of the dungeon: magical zones that kill your players based on their alignment or their sex. Remember those runes/alchemy symbols that I use to represent the alignment/sex/race/class of each player character on the screen? Well, they play a crucial part here so that one knows what goes on when exploring these parts of the dungeon.

realms6.jpg (16.69 KiB) Viewed 5619 times

realms7.jpg (16.66 KiB) Viewed 5619 times

realms8.jpg (17.04 KiB) Viewed 5619 times

I think I've enough of the game completed to at least record and post a video of the overall gameplay, so that will come with my next update.

[Ghislain]

I posted 3 videos on Youtube that depict the overall gameplay for Realms of Quest V.

Part One: Party Creation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxztcVSjLWg

Part Two: Gameplay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94_aXGh8Ivk&t

Part Three: Viewing Player Characters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iJX_6WiJvk

[R'zo]

Looking absolutely amazing! Love the boat graphic.

[Ghislain]

Looking absolutely amazing! Love the boat graphic.

Thank you. I do the best that I can.

Today, I worked on displaying text descriptions (and sometimes an image to appear alongside them) when you explore the dungeons. These are effectively "cut scenes" that provide a more descriptive area that you're exploring along with adding more to the dungeon atmosphere.

[hasseapa]

Pleased to see the speed of moving around the world. It will be a pleasure to explore.

[Ghislain]

Pleased to see the speed of moving around the world. It will be a pleasure to explore.

Thank you. I look forward to actually playing my own game when I'm finished as well. I swear that I must have Alzheimer's because whenever I visit the early parts of the game that I designed, I don't quite remember all of the dialogue I had written.

Today, I took a look at the Core module because I found that I only had about 250 bytes remaining out of the 20KB I had reserved for it. I was a bit worried since I will eventually have to write functions to handle loading game elements from floppy disk (as the game will have 4 disk sides). So I went over the entire listing for it and I got rid of quite a few redundancies and inefficiencies such as getting rid of CMP #0 immediately following an LDA (I know that's ML 101 but I've been mostly concerned on making sure everything works first) and I moved all of the temp variables to zero page addresses and this also saved quite a bit of space because only a single byte is used when addressing the memory there. I now have about 725 bytes to work with which should be more than enough to handle the floppy disk handling routines as well as any features that I will need to implement later on.

I can also look where I re-use the same text and save space by implementing shared strings.

I find that the game runs more smoothly with the memory saving techniques that I've implemented -- even if the game is 100% ML.

[ral-clan]

Hi! I'm really looking forward to this game, and would like to buy the boxed version when it comes out.

Question though: in the screenshot of the room description above, is it supposed to say "wooded door" or "wooden door"? I'm guessing your native language is English (because your posts are perfectly worded - maybe you're French with your name and Canadian(?) location).

"wooded door" doesn't sound right.

[Ghislain]

Hi! I'm really looking forward to this game, and would like to buy the boxed version when it comes out.

Question though: in the screenshot of the room description above, is it supposed to say "wooded door" or "wooden door"? I'm guessing your native language is English (because your posts are perfectly worded - maybe you're French with your name and Canadian(?) location).

"wooded door" doesn't sound right.

Somebody else is writing and designing the dungeons, and I'm very grateful for their contribution and creativity. I will of course make sure that everything gets proofread later on to correct minor things like these

Screenshots of the day:

... I just finished programming the "Meet NPCs who will help you" part of the Dungeon module. And here is another "scene" :