My only concern with the maps is making them too large. Since we're talking about 16x16 sprites across a 96x64 board, spanning areas out too much would make the player feel lost. Although I overdid the narrowness in the first project, I'm trying to compromise a bit more this time around, but not span them out too much. (plus, the maps I showed you are just examples I threw together to show off the tiles -- they're not actual maps in the game)

I sort of took Ranman's advice as, "you need more paths branching out, and more places to go." I've been trying to do that with some of the dungeons, like adding treasures that are somewhat out of the way, or adding a couple of forks in the road that lead to dead-ends. They're definitely nothing like the original project.

EDIT: Oh, and plus there's optional areas, like optional dungeons. I didn't want to inject too much linearity!

Also bear in mind, the original project uses a Zelda-style scrolling. Pretty much every corner of every screen has to be blocked off to avoid collisions with off-screen objects. It's difficult to explain, but if you examine the maps, you can sort of see what I mean. It should help to make the world feel a bit larger than it actually is, considering you have to go from screen to screen to screen, and then back a few screens if you miss something.

As for the second, I'm planning to do a full, regular map scroll, just like in console games. It feels a bit less restrictive to work with, as I don't have to worry about off-screen collisions.

Speed of development?  Do you want to get this done before Christmas to be eligible for this year's POTY or something? ^^

I don't think Ranman would be jealous anyways since POTY is done for each line of calculator, 83+/84+, 86, and 68ks.  then windows programs too.

fyi:
min RAM requirements for the following:
RGP: 1559 bytes
Graymapper: 1968 bytes

btw, that's not including plotsscreen and appbackupscreen, which are already used.

yeah i think ultima v is sure to win or extremly closely win POTY ^^

Umm well really it doesn't matter what size you do. 5x5, and 4x4 would both be implemented the same way basically, aside from a few things.

And don't worry about the maps being too big, as long as your game leads the player in his destination it should be fine.

Ooh much betterm I think the background should be white instead of light gray though, it may be hard to read on some calcs with crappy LCD drivers (grayscale being fuzzy and all)

if you have a 8xp file no problem cuz i cant upload bmp/jpg/gifs to my calc

I try to edit with grayscale colors that are closest to how they would actually appear on the calculator, so hopefully what you see is what you get.

(85x85x85 for the darker gray, and 170x170x170 for the lighter gray)

CalcGS likes to use extremely dark grays, though.