Wow, they still have ridiculously low character limits for naming, even on PS2 games? You'd think they'd learn, by now. >.> (/joking)

That is nice, though. I think 8 would cover most names. =D

~DS

Dragon Quest isn't flashy: It's just good.

my hacks coming along nicely.. googie hooked me up with some patches that allow for animation so i will be including animation in the final game   levels are about a 1/3 done now.. still need to work on them more

will probably be putting out a vid sometime soon too

I've been working on couple of projects involving Final Fantasy. They are not very far along, but I'm looking towards the future, so I've made some mockups of the changes I plan on making to the layout of the battle engine. These mockups are all about the layout, not the graphics themselves, so I'm using the original tiles and sprites.



The two projects I'm working on are called Final Fantasy Engine and Final Fantasy One Half. The first one will lay the groundwork for the second one and that's what these mockups are all about. The Engine project is planned to have two stages. In stage one, I plan to strip the game of all "content", leaving only the raw engine code behind and apply a few fixes for bugs I have heard about and discovered. This is what I'm currently working on and it's coming along nicely.

The second stage will be more involved and this is where these mockups come in. I plan to enhance the engine to provide the features that my future One Half project will require. One of these is a reorganization of the battle engine layout to look nicer, accomodate longer text, display additional information, etc. As these will be heavy changes, I want to be sure my layout is nicely done before I dig into the code. That's why I made these mockups and am posting them here.

The first is the basic command menu, ready to enter a command for the first character. The character status area has been enlarged and relocated. The command menu and enemy name list have also been moved around. Finally, the battle background and character sprites have been relocated to accomodate these changes and look better.

The second screen shows the secondary command window, where less often used commands are placed. When you move right from the main command menu, it will appear. In all other ways, it's identical to the first shot.

I'm looking for critiques of the layout from both an asthetic and usability standpoint. Is there anything that looks out of place or badly done? Also, will these display properly on an actual NES? I made sure not to use the last line so that it wouldn't be cut off on an NTSC unit, but is there anything else that could be an issue?

Apostrophe could go up, yes. Period could use to go down a pixel as well.

I really like what I'm seeing. Now I'd like to see it implemented into the actual game. Excellent work.

~DS

A couple of more or less interesting shots:



The (obviously not yet inserted) new description screen for Kururin Paradise's Chu-Chu Panic minigame. The "Chu-Chu Panic" caption text was made in a hurry to have a halfway completed screen to show, so it's likely gonna change soon.



Crappy and broken half-width font in Naruto RPG (also GBA). Started messing around with the game a year or something ago - long before Path of a Ninja or whatever the new DS game, which basically is Naruto RPG 1 and 2 for DS in English, is called. Script dumping and insertion is pretty easy, graphics compression is standard GBA BIOS LZ fair, however at least the menus desperately need a variable-width, or at least half-width font or it's truncation hell, especially for the technique/Jutsu names.

Well, this one most likely ends up being dropped entirely, with the aforementioned Path of a Ninja out in the US, but it's been my first ASM hack of a bigger scale and, eventhrough it's broken, I'm kinda proud of it, so there

what game is that? is it a hack of the mario game for the original gameboy, or something else hacked into a mario game?