Ok, I know this is not really a projects, but today I am announcing that I am currently translating the final Illusiat 12 game into english. I think it should have been done before but at that time I got the reuben grayscale idea so I putted the project on hold. Now I am resuming developpement on this translation project. Altough the in game graphics use ASCII sprites (home screen), I think that with the in games features it's worth the effort of translating the game from french to english. Let me explain a bit...
Illusiat 12 is a turn based RPG with one vs one battle and epic storyline, like Reuben Quest. Altough the storyline is very stereotyped, it's true to RPGs. Actually you are a mage who have to save the world
. However here is the list of features:-Average of 30 hours of gameplay. YES, TRUST ME! 30 hours of gameplay!!! And it can even reach 40 hours (or maybe more) since the game has some secrets, side quests and hidden passages, but basically those who are experienced in RPG gaming should beat the game in a average of 30 hours. I have difficulty beating the game in only 25 hours and I am on a Silver Edition Calc!
-15 swords. Like in secret of Mana, Every time you beat a boss, you get an orb. Then you can go to the swordsmith to forge your sword with this orb! Also the final sword have a lil nifty power (a secret)!
-Lot of bosses. Actually only mini-boss give orbs, not the bosses so there is more than 15 boss (I dont remember the number since the game is huge and there are a lot)
-Cool magic animations. Altough they are ASCII, I made them enjoyable enough so they are almost grayscale, especially the bolt animation
-9 magics, there are 4 others, but they can only be used by bosses late in the game
-breakable limits. Those who played Final Fantasy X might know what they are. When you get for example Break HP limit, you are allowed to exceed 9999 HP for a maximum of 99999, with MP you can exceed 999 and go up to 9999, the LV one extend your limit from 99 to 255 and the damage one extend your limit from 9999 damage to 99999. However monsters alerady have broken those limits be4 you so they can cause more than 9999 damage when you can only have 9999 HP. Near the end of the game you are around level 210 and 230.
-Lot of world to explore. I haven counted the amount of rooms yet, but there are over 500 or 600 I'm sure
-I dont know if I forgot any features so I might add them here later I have some reminders
Basically if you find the code to be not as optimised as my recent games (actually there might be some ERR:MEMORY after 5 hours of gameplay so you need to save often) and the game seems to run fast, but not as fast as it could be in BASIC, you have to think about the fact that the game was written almost 2.5 years ago, back in december 2002. Also it's written in PURE BASIC, absolutely no ASM libs have been used in the game, the only thing that required me an ASM program (which was the french APP and MirageOS) was the lowercase letters and the special greek character, but it's still BASIC since no ASM programs are included with the game. Also since the game have many features and is pretty long, it's also very very very huge. It takes 78 KB of memory on my SE, that's almost half of the TI-83+ archive, but I think installing it is still worth the effort. If I would make this game in xLIB with graphical sprites it would take at least 1.2 MB of archive memory I am sure due to the massive amount of maps and data
So basically thats my curreent project I am working on, this might take me a while, translating 20 KB of text from french to english but I think it's worth the effort, since the game graphics are hiding many great features. AND REMEMBER ONE THING, THERE IS NOT ONLY GRAPHICS THAT MAKE A GAME GOOD
Jeff Hanneman-Slayer (1991 Black Magic Video)
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