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[SirNiko]

The upside to the slopey wall effect is that it is very easy to see the door on the southern wall, even when you're right up against it and the angle is at its smallest. What the effect loses in realistic perspective it gains back in functionality.

I'm inclined to say leave it like it is. It is unmistakably Zelda 3. Just pay attention to the level design to accommodate for the odd shapes and you should be fine.

[Elliott D.]

Thanks for all of your input on the perspective thing.

When playing Link to the Past for the first time (and ever since honestly), I never saw this as an illusion of perspective. I always just saw sloping walls. The interesting thing about the tile system I'm using now, and the length of the slopes, is that I can actually match the tile-sets from the original rooms 1:1, taking the Zelda screens as straight top-down.

As far as promoting the illusion goes, the textures I'm using now were just copied from the original sprite-sheets. They show the bricks getting smaller closer to the floor. I think I will make my own textures and ignore this effect; keep the sloping walls, but let the actual camera perspective make the bricks smaller.

I had made some more progress on Monday night, and I meant to finish it off and post it last night, but I didn't open the project. Maybe tonight though!

I've got rooms loading when you exit a door, and I've remade the first two rooms of the Eastern Palace again. It's clear I need to work a bit more on the doors and keep global states for buttons and things; you can exit a room and come back, be stuck behind the door you opened on the way out, and have to drop off the edge of the doorway to get reset.

Stay tuned.

[Elliott D.]

Build 13

First 2 rooms of Eastern Palace, with doors and buttons "working properly".

[team_q]

Hey cool stuff dude!

[Sean A.]

Build 13

First 2 rooms of Eastern Palace, with doors and buttons "working properly".

I found a glitch where if you walk to the sides first in the starting room and go through the doorways and fall off you respawn between two locked doors.

[SirNiko]

The glitch is that falling off the bottom of the screen from either side respawns you at the center door.

You might need to have a counter remember the last door you entered so that is your respawn point.

[Elliott D.]

In accordance with Zelda, I should be recording the last place they stood on solid ground. Just remembering the door might be an easy fix before I get to that.

[Elliott D.]

Made a moment to work on this.

Morph ball stand in added again. Press C to morph. morph ball movement is velocity based (faster, feels different)
Added shadow casting (tell me if this killed the performance for anyone {tons of shadow-casting tiles now})
tweaks to some physics, prolly imperceptible.
Unlocked the aspect ratio, so should look less weird if you right click and make full screen.

Build 14

I'm open to suggestions for what I should do next; shooting back in? bombs? an enemy?

[SirNiko]

Works fine on mine, ATI Radeon 5700 card in case you need the reference point.

If you jump and then immediately morph ball it looks like you get increased jump height. It might take a try or two, you have to time it just right. It's hard to tell if that's significant. That could be remedied perhaps by killing your vertical velocity when morphing.

Getting the arm cannon working is probably more difficult than bombs, but I feel like that's a more important goal. Getting Samus shooting and killing some basic foes would be a good next objective.

[Elliott D.]

Power beam and bombs are back in; you can destroy the pots (kind of blandly)
Will make pot destruction more fun and add another room for next time.

Build 15

SirNiko:
I have switching to the morph ball add a little vertical velocity just to give it a bit of friction. It's really what I have in place of any sort of animation. I think I might want to cut the velocity and replace it with this little pop; I think that might be what happens in Super Metroid if you morph in the air.

[SirNiko]

For some reason Samus feels like she's too high off of the center of the screen. I don't recall feeling that way before. I want Samus to be a little lower, if that makes sense.

Bombs and blaster feel good, though the blaster is really plain. Some spark-like particle effects when she shoots and when the blaster hits a wall would really make it look nice.

You can do a bomb leap if you plant a bomb and just just before it detonates, I suspect that's the result of the jump velocity getting added to the bomb velocity. You might consider keeping it, though it looks a little too easy to use for sequence breaking.

Looking like good progress. Might consider getting a basic enemy into the game now and work out Samus killing things and being killed. Once you have that you've got all the basics that you could develop a fully playable first dungeon.