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https://www.smspower.org/Homebrew/SwordOfStone-GG

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The Sword of Stone is a new game for the Game Gear. It is a visual novel with free roaming in a world. You get to play as several characters and progress in the story throughout 7 different chapters. This demo allows the player to try the first chapter of the game in its entirety.

Okay, so I was trying to review all the coding comp entries today, but my gf has been playing Sword of Stone for about 2 hours now so I am kicked off the hardware!

Anyway, I guess that means it must be very playable!!

My thoughts to follow...

Update: Still waiting...

Glad she likes it ! I hope she is not getting too lost in the map.

After a few chapters, you get more familiar with the places.

I should have kept the Save feature maybe :/

I tryied playing this on my Brazilian SMS2 and the colors were all weird, couldn't read a thing. Is it my bad for trying to run a GG game on a SMS?

Yes…

I have carefully followed the progress of the development of this game via the forum. I'm happy to be able to test a playable demo.

The result lives up to expectations! it perfectly exploits the color capabilities of the game gear.
The rendering of the text is well thought out, and the graphic style is original and stands out from what we have seen on the console. The music is also very nice!

This shows that you took the time to refine all aspects of this game. Looking forward to seeing the full version!

Thank you for the kind words !

The text was indeed an important part as it is a text-adventure after all. I wanted the letters to be nice and round (after trial and error) and it is Maxim who actually made me realize that Variable Width was in the realm of things I could achieve, even though this is my very first game. Glad I took this challenge :)

A little preview of this upcoming title ;)

SoS_GG_box.jpg (280.79 KB)

SoS - Cireza / 2MINDS 2024

Okay so I finally got a go myself ;)

Yeah, really fantastic, very compelling playable story. I know you already explained the concept on the main forum thread, but I guess I was expecting a straight up RPG but it's not that and I find it quite refreshing.

The graphics and the storytelling are really fantastic, and it's great to know about the technical journey you've been on in the other thread, I can appreciate the variable width font so much more having seen you going through development!

The main adventure theme is a real bop. It's still bouncing around my head now (you should have entered it to the music comp!)
I'm sure you have more planned, but I'd love a few more tracks - maybe different ones for different nations in the narrative?

I like the puzzle element, like having to get the thief on the team. I'm curious what more elements there will be - presumably at some point I'll be able to fight all the creatures I currently can't? Looking forward to finding out more.

I think I've only got one note, which is that I might like to be able to skip the dialog sometimes. Particularly with fights - after a few wolves I get tired of reading the same thing about pulling spears out of corpses :)

Although it works well on a monitor, I really would like to play this on a true handheld one day, I think it would be a fun thing to carry around...

Looking forward to playing the whole thing through one day!

EDIT: PS. forgot to say - when you have more than one person in your party, the way they walk around together is utterly adorable - love it!

Thank you for the feedback.

When I started the project I wanted to avoid having to learn too many features at once, so I left aside scrolling, compression and code banking. I eventually completed the game and the 32 KB of code are 99,85% full.

Which means I had to give up on small enhancements. I have refactored code several times already to gain space. So I do not think that I will implement dialogue skipping (after the first time), even if it would indeed have been a nice feature. Sorry ! :/

Otherwise it would mean reopening the project, compiling with makesms and relocating a good part of the current code in one bank, as well as adding a new bank (to reach 48 KB of code) and have the freedom to do some changes. And of course, having to go for another round of entirely testing things... And I am pretty deep into making my next game right now, which will be fully featured and make even better use of the hardware! For the Sword of Stone, it will most certainly stay like this.

About the music, there are 10 tracks I think. Music is a topic I have zero knowledge in, so composing things is very challenging. Everything is done by "ear" alone. I try to keep the number of tracks at a low number to avoid the suffering :)

People who take part in the music contest look insanely talented from my point of view, and I would love to know how they managed to make the SMS/GG output some of these sounds lol... It would definitely help me with variety haha, because I feel stuck with something like 4 sounds that do sound different.

The adventure theme has variations (depending on things happening). There is a sound test in the options, but I removed some tracks in the demo.

Hi cireza - another awesome coding entry with fantastic graphics - who is the pixel artist?? But GFX rendered while the player walks around seems "disappointing" after viewing the high-quality GFX in the interactive scenes lol - seriously great job. BTW: if you were to add to this then I think it would be a nice effect to center the player as he walks around and have the background GFX scroll - just a thought. Congrats!

SteveProXNA wrote

Hi cireza - another awesome coding entry with fantastic graphics - who is the pixel artist?? But GFX rendered while the player walks around seems "disappointing" after viewing the high-quality GFX in the interactive scenes lol - seriously great job. BTW: if you were to add to this then I think it would be a nice effect to center the player as he walks around and have the background GFX scroll - just a thought. Congrats!

Thanks. The pixel artist is me, I did everything myself. Scrolling was not part of the goal for this very first game, but it will be there in my next game.

Your game is visually stunning. Splendid, beautiful artwork.

This is an *amazing* project, great art and music and with top notch implementation. thanks for sharing the demo!
(also I just crashed it by selecting the sound test 10, after going down from 0 to 99 to 10... just check it works correctly in the official ROM!)

Thanks for the feedback. This is probably an oversight in my code to skip tracks in the sound test for the demo, will check it on the final rom just in case.

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