yeah I will be down for this for sure.

That's exactly what I thought of as well, haha.

This looks very nice.  Everything seems nicely polished, especially the text in the textbox and inventory screen.

very cool work! Saw this at MagFest .. was quite intrigued .. glad to see progress!

Love the Star Tropics feel! Game looks sooo good. Nice work!

BUMP!! Cause I want this thing so bad!!!

So right now, we're in the middle of rewriting a lot of our support tools. This'll take a couple of months and then we'll be back into core development of the game. We're almost completely done with the first dungeon and have some graphics sets for the remainder of the game. We believe we're maybe a 1/5th done with the whole game, give or take. I think it'll realistically be at least 2 years, if not a bit more before the game is complete.

Make sure to follow us @gradualgames on Twitter! We usually post updates at least 3 times a week.

That is a lot of patients! I couldn't fathom a project that long.

It's all about how bad you want something. Once I hit a certain age, I realized retro games were pretty much the most important thing to me in life (other than family, etc.) and so it just doesn't matter how long it takes to finish my dream. Even if there's only 10 people left in the scene when I'm done (doubtful, if anything it seems to be growing!) I will never quit.

Looks great. I can't wait to see your progress. Keep up the work!!!

Looks like it will be well worth the wait

Hype bump.

Yeah, how is this going?

Hey, thanks for the bump, guys! I never like making a big deal out of myself, so it's nice to have help from the community. Anyways, the project is not stalled, it has continued to progress at precisely the same pace as always.

For a long time it felt like 2 years were left in the project. I can now say with confidence it is less than 2 years until the game will be released. 1 year ideally, 1 and a half years realistically to allow for testing, adding in "finishing touches," and all the time it takes to wrap up production.

We are fast approaching the halfway point (well, fast for a tortoise ), in terms of the areas of the game. We've probably already passed the halfway point in terms of total time invested in the project (this engine was extremely tough to code). I spent the first half of 2014 completely refactoring JUST dungeon exits, and then rewriting all of my NES dev tools in Python/PyQt cause my old C# suite just wasn't cutting it. Since about maybe october we've been making real progress on the game itself, have completed the second dungeon and are now on the third overworld area (not counting a town, insides of houses, caves...)

Thank you for the update! Glad to hear you are still chugging along!

The videos are of course really interesting.
One says "thanks for playing the demo", there is a demo?

However, impressive work!

The main "sprite" how tall it is? 3 or 4 sprites? It looks like FFVI 24x16px characters, style wise (from what I see in the video, the cape animation maybe need to be slowed down a little bit, but likely I cannot judge well from the video).

I believe this project is a huge work, code wise: 4 ways scrolling, animated enemies, and other complex features.
How vast the map is? How many dialogs? How many foes and bosses? Designing vast different areas, different foes, and many original dialogs takes further time, on top of coding the game engine.

Keep up the good work!

- user

Thanks for the updates Derek! I often think about this game as Nomolos has gotten a ton of milage on my NES over the past 2 months

Derek, can't wait until you finish this one; looks like it's gonna be an absolute smasheroo.

Yes!

http://www.retrousb.com/downloads...

Don't make the mistake I made. I was trying to rush through it quickly like it's a game I've known for years, as that's just the style of player I am (go go go go). But then I thought, "Oh yeah, I don't know this right now, I should take my time and learn it!" haha It's a great little demo!

I played that demo (and commented about it) already!

I was referring to an Owlia demo!

Thanks anyways!

- user

Whoops! haha Well then I second what you said, I didn't know there was a demo for Owlia!
 

There's no public demo...not yet. I'd wanted to make one a while ago, but there were a lot of things that just felt embarrassing. Most of those are fixed now, so, I may have some new gameplay videos and perhaps a demo out in a few months or so.

As for the questions surrounding scope: the size and linear progression is modeled roughly after StarTropics, though I don't think it will take quite as long to complete as that game (and StarTropics isn't all that long really is it? Maybe 10 hours max?). There have been quite a few very significant challenges on this project, both in coding and in terms of creating interesting gameplay mechanics. The game will be what it will be, which I think will be good. Some will love it, some will hate it. I'm okay with that.

Not too shabby at all. This is definitely on my hit list. Im a sucker for RPG's.

cool looks great also looks like the owl does all the work and the human gets all the credit

Thanks for the answer.

And I agree with what you said: please everybody is impossible, since each will have its personal taste.
The important is to have solid and logic mechanics, and many will find the game fun to play.

If a game is fun, that's all that really matters. Good luck, Derek! ^^