(This post has been updated on June 11th 2012)

This is one of very few RPG Maker/GM/TGF type project to occur on Omnimaga it seems, as this is only the third topic to be ever posted in this section (There are more but they're mostly news or they got lost elsewhere on the board)


Basically, I decided to do an RPG Maker remake of The Reign of Legends 0, which I released in 2003. So far, I am unsure if I will add music, since it would be rather weird to have 9-10 MB music inside a 15-30 minutes long game, but I might eventually add some if this game was to ever be expanded or something. It will feature the entire map layout from the original game and the graphics will remain true to the original, but they will be scaled down to 16x16 and the game running in a 256x224 resolution, so it looks close to something from the NES or SNES. It will also be translated to English.

Due to the low quality of my pixel art back in the days, the game graphics might appear to look weird to you, but for the default game remake, I wanted to keep it as close to the original, while giving it a proper retro feel (even menu borders will remain the same):


Here are the most up to date screenshots, as of June 11th:








Also i remade the characters since they looked awful lol (even more at 16x16 resolution). I used Charas to remake them.

So yeah, basically this was kinda a side game that went along the ROL series, although none of the ROL games are related. ROL0 came out a few months after ROL1, but under two months before ROL2, and unlike the rest of the series, you don't fight monsters along your way: You just find items to unlock doors and activate switches.

As I do not have any long terms plan to learn any computer programming again, this is why I decided to use RPG Maker 2003 again for this game. Anyone is free to port it to an actual language or even calculators once the game is finished. At least I guess there will be a few improvements, though, such as speed (the original runs at around 3-10 FPS even on newer computers), animated water and character walking animation and the addition of scrolling.
 

As for future plans, here are the possibilities (although they are not guaranteed):

-Revamped mode: A game option would allow you to switch between the original, scaled-down graphics and new ones -Scrapped. Only new graphics will be available

-Expansion: It's possible that at the end of the game, in future versions the story would progress. In that case there would probably be monsters and the title might be changed. -Not started, but now officially being expanded

-Actual storyline

-Music: More chances of music if an expansion occurs. In the event where no expansion would occur but music got added anyway, there might be two versions of the game released: one with music and a smaller zip file with none. -Some music has been done so far.


Hopefully this game is made available for more people to try in the near future (since RPG Maker 2003 games runs on newer OSes too) . It is nothing huge, but I thought it would be cool that those who cannot run the original can still have a small idea of how it looked like, assuming they can run RM games in the first place (most likely, since they did on every computer and recent Windows OSes I tried). Hopefully in the future someone can also port it or something.

By the way, part of the issue about the game not running on newer systems is DAXCTLE.OCX. There's no way to get it to be registered in command prompt, unlike in XP (it gives an error about it not being compatible with 64 bit systems). In Illusiat 5 PC it's even worse, though, because not only its OCX depedency doesn't work on 7 64 bit either, but you also need to register it to play the game, which costs $40 or 50.

They're easy to find, just hard to get to work. On XP, in some cases I just had to include the file with the game or register it via command prompt. The best thing for VB games is to not use any third party activeX controls or whatever. However without them, sprites just flickers like there's no tomorrow when moving around.

Most of the afternoon and evening has been spent on working on the title screen remake and animation. This is how the title screen looks like with the old style graphics and the updated logo (the latter which was inevitable with an English translation of the title). I used some standard font, except I manually modified the E to remain true to the original ROL1 logo.

Also I was working on music in the last few days, which kinda slowed down progress a bit. The entire game map is done but of course events still need to be coded, along with the text entered.

Hmm I'd hate to say this but I don't particularly (?) like the tiles, but that's your choice.
EDIT: Wait, are those tiles view-from top? I thought they were a house.
EDIT2: Uhm you should make sure the brick tiles are not recognisable as tiles If you want, I could help you with graphics?
(Aww this could sound very offending but that's due to the language barrier, no offense meant.)

no, it's great this way, really fits the game IMO.
+1.

really love the song! nice job on it

ew no scrolling
The bg music gets a bit repetive, but is pretty good. You should make some more songs