Well, I can announce that a major milestone has just been achieved a few minutes ago:
*** THE PRINCIPAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE GAME HAS BEEN FINALIZED ***
(save for testing the floppy disk/D64 version of the game which I'm about to embark on for about a week).
From the beginning, I wanted Realms V to primarily be an SD card or emulator-based game, but also provide support for floppy disks. I think it's important for a retro game like like this to follow such a convention. Moreover, providing actual floppy disks that actually work on the real hardware (with disk labels) for the physical product gives something tangible that you can hold in your hands.
When I was about to create the D64 files for the disk-based version of the game, I found that they actually used more space than the 4 disk sides I had planned for. So I had to implement some compression in order to make it all fit.
In the end, the amount of free disk space on all of the disks that remained was:
Side A Rivaria - 39 blocks free
Side B Underworld - 20 blocks free
Side C Bestiary - 3 blocks free!! (see screenshot above)
Side D Populace - 5 blocks free
I remember listening to a podcast where they interviewed the creator of the original Wizardry for the Apple II and he talked about the challenge of making the game fit on 2 disk sides and how he was cramming everything down to the last sector, and I think I can certainly relate to that experience.
I've also been asked by some on this forum and outside of it if there ever will be cartridge version of the game. The answer is that it is very unlikely. I would have to do a major overhaul of the way I had written the code that I had set out from the beginning. And since the intent was to publish the game in physical form (cardboard box, printed manual, cloth map, metal trinket), if a major bug was found after the game was released and distributed, doing a recall of all of the cartridges to re-flash them with the bug fix would have been a nightmare in terms of time and money lost.
And besides, the digital version of the game will include D64 and D81 versions of the game, the latter which will be very easy to use with an emulator or an SD card reader on the actual machine. The game loads very fast with the SD card and it is a more than adequate solution to avoid disk swapping and slow loading times. That being said, playing the game on floppy disk and waiting for the game to load has a certain charm to it. You can imagine yourself buying such a game back in 1983, using a motherboard expander to plug in two 16K RAM cartridges (or even order a third party 32K expander that was advertised in Compute!'s Gazette) and then loading it from an actual disk. The convention for playing 8-bit RPG games back in the 1980s involved disk-swapping and I am providing that experience for VIC-20 users today.
You can even play the game with a dual disk drive setup to minimize disk swapping if you're into that sort of thing.
A lot of people helped me with this game, for which I am grateful. From this forum:
Rubygolem - designed the dungeons and story text for them.
Darkatx - is doing all of the beautiful physical artwork
Mike - he programmed a custom tool for me that greatly increased the number of colors that could be displayed. I also used his MINIGRAFIK suite to create the graphics for the game.
R'Zo - created all of the great music that you hear when you play.
Hopefully the game will be released soon. I still have to test the disk version to make sure that there are no unforseen issues. But yeah, I feel I have achieved something major today.
... This game will possibly be our companion for a lifetime!
