I didn't even remember making this screenshot. There's a larger one avaliable from the old HTML site cache, but it didn't show this much stuff.
I even have the final title screen I was gonna use with the (c) and stuff:
Yes, there were two ROL4 projects. One during Fall 2004 and another one during Summer 2007. Now if only I never lost all the program files for this game... a few years ago I remember people asking me if I knew how to allow customizeable window borders/types in a RPG config menu. The Reign Of Legends 4ever had this (12 different text/menu window types)
This game never made it further than a walking engine. The walking engine was exactly the same as Zelda Dark Link Quest, except minus the whole action-RPG stuff and maps were larger. You could talk to NPCs and text boxes worked. Changing a certain variable would display a different type of text window. The map had about 40 screens alerady if I remember and the title screen was alerady in RIGView format. There were also battle screenshots concepts (original then updated one):
Since this game was gonna be massive and 83+ compatible, I refused to use Omnicalc so I can have as much space as possible (the same reason why Illusiat 13 doesn't use either Celtic III nor xLIB) for the rest. Because xLIB APP wasn't even out yet at that time, this forced me to use an hybrid of ASCII+graphics to balance speed. Back then I didn't knew about Text(-1, so I relied on Zapi ASM lib to copy the homescreen content to graph buffer, then graph screen, so I could display the graphical text boxes there (or enemy sprites).
The other animated screenshot (that didn't show the menus and text boxes):
And finally, the proposed title screens by myself. Most people voted the one shown earlier in the post. These were the 4 choices proposed in order of creation:
Unfortunately, thanks to Arcane_Wizard mostly and a couple other UTI comments regarding the use of ASCII graphics, I lost motivation and quitted developpement after two months then moved on to grayscale experimenting with Omnicalc, then Reuben Quest series. This project was never revived afterward, simply because at the time I moved on to graphical games. A few years later, Earthforge died and the only backup I had elsewhere was my old computer hard drive, which crashed a year later. I forgotten to keep a backup of this program anywhere else. Not long afterward, some people asked me if I knew how to have an option in RPGs in the config menu that allowed the user to choose his own text windows like in Chrono Trigger for example. Unfortunately, the ROL4ever code that did that was now gone for good.
However, seeing this first longer but smaller screenshot brought me some nostalgia, which prompted me to post this. Now you can see from which game Illusiat 13 was inspired from, coding-wise. (The Reign Of Legends 4ever was my last ASCII project until Illusiat 13 started). The only difference with Illusiat 13 map engine is that each map screens are now broken into separate chunks instead of having huge maps of 4x5 screens of 16x8 tiles.
(screenshots went at regular 83+ speed, btw)
