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[theparticleman]

Material Promotional:

Fable Griselda

• Unusual several hour big risks!
• Surpasses the exploration 11 screens.
• Processes the high grade key's compaction.
• Determination 16 kind OF colors.
• Four may know the movement.
• Soon it will be the goods in stock system which carries out.
• Selects screen introduction import which the health and will soon come!

Movie follows





Material Promotional ends:

In case you're wondering, I wrote a description and then used Babelfish to translate it from English to Portuguese to French to Greek to English to Traditional Chinese to English.  I figured that would be more "bootleg-ish" than anything I could come up with myself.

Anyway, as you can probably guess this is a demake of the NES Legend of Zelda.  I think the ASCII thing definitely qualifies as a demake, but I need to work some more on the bootleg aspect.  As you can tell from the video the maps are taken directly from the original so far.  So I'll need to work on that because it's probably not "bootleg-ish" enough.

So far I have the mapping and movement system working (which should work fine for caves and dungeons too, though I haven't made any yet).  But I need to add enemies and inventory obviously a "screen introduction import".

Anyway, let me know if you have any comments/suggestions or if this idea is totally lame.

[William Broom]

Four may know the movement.

[Melly]

ASCII Zelda?

BRILLIANT!

[agj]

Ridiculous! I want to see more.

[Josh R]

Unusual several hour big risks!

I can't wait!

[theparticleman]

Thanks for the encouragement everyone!  I was waiting for someone to reply and say, "That's so lame!  Why don't you do something good!"  So now I'm motivated to go start working on enemies.  I haven't thought about how to do it too much yet.  Have to make sure I get that Zelda feel to it.

Oh, in case anyone's interested, here's my original promo text before I mangled it:

Fable of Griselda

• Many hours of big adventure! 
• More than eleven screens to explore. 
• High quality key press handling. 
• Sixteen high definition colors. 
• Four directions of movement. 
• Soon to be implemented inventory system. 
• Hit points and intro screen coming soon!

[theparticleman]

Now with enemies and a sword!





Unfortunately, now I have to go and mow my lawn.    I like coding better.


P.S.  I've made some other ASCII games (my inspiration for this one).  If you want to check them out you can visit my blog at http://mythicant.com/.  There are a bunch (ok, maybe five or six) there that you can download and play.

[Lukas]

Zelda -> Griselda   -> wrong.

Zelda -> Helga      -> win.

[Melly]

I'm always fascinated by ASCII games and ASCII art. Can't wait to try it.

[UltraJMan]

Usually ascii art hurts my eyes, but this actually seems quite amusing, and incredibly fun to boot.

[Melly]

ASCII is, well, usually used by people with no artistic ability whatsoever that still want to make a good game, and ASCII game players are usually extremely lenient on the eye candy and focus on the gameplay.

I do, however, feel that ASCII games could look pretty amazing with proper aesthetic work gone into them. Oh, and with an alterred color palette, because by all that is holy there's a reason saturated magenta is the default transparency color of most graphics libraries.

[theparticleman]

In this case ASCII isn't used by someone with no artistic ability, it's being used by someone too lazy to do something better. Plus, I've already made some ASCII games for other purposes, so I've got the experience.  And I mean, what other opportunities am I going to have to make an ASCII game other than my own masochistic entertainment?

I'm hoping that the ASCII graphics don't turn out looking horrible.  Please let me know if they do, okay?  Hopefully the game will actually be fun to play too, as UltraJMan said.  (JMan isn't for JumpMan, is it?  Anyone else play JumpMan on the C64?  That game was awesome!)  I'm guessing it won't be the next WoW or anything, but hopefully it'll be fun for a few minutes.  That's how most of my other games have turned out.

Oh, by the by, does anyone else agree with BaronCid's suggestion of a name change?  I'm not married to the name Griselda or anything.  It just case up when I looked up Zelda in a thesaurus. 


P.S.  Lawn mowed!  I'm safe for another week.  Now sprinklers, those are a different matter.  Don't even get me started on sprinklers.

P.P.S.  Thanks for the interest Melly.  That's actually my wife's name.  Well, really her name is Melinda, but I call her Melly sometimes.

[Melly]

By the way...

I'm a guy.









I'll stop talking off-topic now.

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

ASCII is the best format for games ever.

[theparticleman]

You're a guy?  How did you get a nickname like Melly then?  It seems like one of those things that there's an interesting story behind.

Anyway, back on topic, I've made a list of the things I want to get done before the end of the competition.  This list includes:

• Enough map to get through the first dungeon
• Health
• Money
• Enemies drop items
• Buying items
• Title screen

If I have enough time I'd like to implement a whole inventory system, but I think the list I have will probably keep me busy until the end of the competition.  Too bad real life gets in the way of having fun. 

[Hayden Scott-Baron]

Wow, amazing idea. This looks great as well, I wish most ASCII games looked as good as this! :3

[theparticleman]

  ***  The heart is now based on the special motion healthy system!  *** 

Video follows:




(Translation: "Now featuring heart-based health system!"  This time English -> Korean -> English -> Simplified Chinese -> English.)

I added in more hearts than most "heart-based adventure games" have, because it's a little hard to do half hearts using ASCII graphics.  It's a little hard to tell in the video but when the player gets hit they also get bumped back away from the enemy.  It doesn't work exactly how it does in most "get-bumped-back-when-you-get-hit-by-an-enemy-based adventure games" but I figure it's close enough.

I have the money displaying, and it would actually update if you could pick up money.  But you can't.  I have the enemies so that they drop hearts and money when they die, but I took it out for the video because it doesn't work quite right yet.

I don't think I've mentioned it before, but the colors on the actual game look better than they do in the videos.  The video codec I'm using kinda mangles the color.  Oh, well.  Maybe soon I'll have to post the current version of the game instead of just videos.  Anyone interested in play testing?

[medieval]

This is magnificent, I would say 

[dmoonfire]

That looks great! Lovely.

[theparticleman]

  ***  You can play downloading publication!  *** 

(Translation: Downloadable version to play)

It's not complete yet, of course, but I thought it might be good to let people download it and try it out.  At the moment you can walk around, kill guys, get hurt and pick up hearts and gems that the enemies drop when they die.

You can download it here

http://mythicant.com/2008/08/21/fable-of-griselda--try-it-out.aspx

Let me know what you think.

P.S.  It mentions this on the blog post, but I'll mention it here too.  You'll need the .NET Framework 2.0 or higher to run it.  You can download it for free if you don't have it (link after the jump).  Sorry to you Linux and Mac lovers out there.    If you really want to try it out it should work with Mono (they were doing pretty well on their 2.0 compliance last I looked) so you could try that out, but I haven't tested on Mono, so I won't make any promises.