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Personal Projects / Re: Link's Awakening hack: New Awakening

« on: August 12, 2015, 08:30:45 pm »

I'm sorry; I only just noticed the last message.

-I added a ladder to help the player escape should they jump left off the bridge near Kanalet Castle. I've checked the raft area and I use a different dropdown tile for the waterfall, which I had used to fix an old bug. I'll double-check to make sure everything works.

-I added a hole to prevent the player from getting trapped in the Catfish's Maw area.

-I increased the length of the ledge in the cellar room you mentioned, so it will be a little easier to reach.

-The level 5 Bow is optional. All it does is let you avoid having to buy the Bow normally. I figured it was a worthwhile prize for the shenanigans you have to do to get to the chest.

Let me know anything else you find odd.

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Personal Projects / Re: Link's Awakening hack: New Awakening

« on: July 16, 2015, 01:55:56 am »

A midair jump in Turtle Rock is no longer required (a previous version of the hack required it). Now, you can use a wall jump or wall bounce instead like in Key Cavern. Both of the Turtle Rock ice rooms with tricky jumps can be done by bouncing off of the wall, as well as hopping in midair.

There is one screen among the ice rooms where you can't go both ways without the Wand. But you won't get stuck if you cross over, since it deposits you someplace where you can make your way back to the start of the dungeon.

I'm not sure which part of the triple chest room is causing problems. There are two sticky block situations and a bombable wall--you'll have to deal with all three if you want to get the treasure and also escape.

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Personal Projects / Re: Link's Awakening hack: New Awakening

« on: July 13, 2015, 04:01:14 pm »

You don't need the Ocarina to move the walrus. Marin does that for you, but since you can't get a hold of Marin, use the shortcut from the Face Shrine area to enter the desert. So you don't need Marin at all--you've got the song from the code, and you can get the Angler Key using the shortcut to the desert. The walrus will remain asleep in your game, and Marin will remain at the beach, but you'll be able to complete the rest of the game as normal.

I mentioned the cheat code because you still need to know the Ballad of the Wind Fish--not for the walrus, but to open the Wind Fish's Egg. I just wanted to make sure you wouldn't get stuck later on, if you hadn't already learned the 1st song.

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Personal Projects / Re: Link's Awakening hack: New Awakening

« on: July 12, 2015, 11:17:02 am »

Good news! The dash jump problem you're having is not in fact a glitch. You can actually do the dash jump on a single tile (or even a single pixel!) You don't need lots of room to start the dash. It's quite possible to get across that gap both ways. You just have to press the Feather button a little sooner. To prevent any confusion, however, I'll change every screen with a one-tile dash jump so you get an extra tile to jump.

There is a place in Angler's Tunnel where you can get across a screen without being able to cross back over. You can save and quit to return to the start of the dungeon (any dungeon, actually), but since this might not be common knowledge, I'll change that screen as well, to make it possible to cross it without saving and quitting, or completing the dungeon.

You do in fact need the Flippers to escape Catfish's Maw and Angler's Tunnel, but not any other dungeon (there's a shortcut to the Face Shrine near the tree where you get the honeycomb). I can't provide a dry exit to Catfish's Maw--there's not enough tiles available to make it work--but I'll change the escape from Angler's Tunnel so it doesn't require the Flippers, and you can escape Catfish's Maw by returning to Angler's Tunnel via the normal stairway (the two dungeons are connected in New Awakening).

The Marin glitch is caused by getting the Potion too early. I thought I had prevented the player from reaching Crazy Tracy before completing Bottle Grotto. I'll add a couple rocks to prevent the player from getting the Potion before Marin. But in case you don't have a save from before you got the Potion, here's a shortcut to the desert that doesn't require Marin's help:

Go north from the Animal Village and walk around to the Face Shrine area. In the small maze leading to the southern shrine, you can find a stairway at the south end of a screen. Go down the stairway and you'll drop down to the desert. You can get the Angler's Key from the Lanmola as normal, and escape the desert by dropping off a ledge in the southwest of the desert. You'll fall right in front of the walrus, and then you're free to go.

If you haven't learned the Ballad of the Wind Fish, however, I'm afraid you might need to cheat it in--I don't know if Marin will leave the beach and end up back at Mabe Village, or go to the Animal Village. If she does, you can learn it as normal later on. If she does not, you can use the following Gameshark code: 010749DB. That should add all of the songs to your Ocarina.

Let me know if you feel stuck again.

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Personal Projects / Re: Link's Awakening hack: New Awakening

« on: July 11, 2015, 12:52:38 pm »

The email account linked to that Youtube video has been disabled. I'll have to start up a new one and re-post the walkthrough.

First, the sword. You ARE supposed to get the sword in Bottle Grotto, and you do need the sword to reach the boss, but you don't need to kill the boss with it. The boss is optional; you get the Instrument in the room near the sword of Bottle Grotto. The reward for the dungeon itself is the Instrument, Bracelet, and Sword; the reward for the boss is simply the heart piece. That's why the boss warps you back to the start of the dungeon, rather than outside--only the Instrument warps you outside the dungeon. The boss is only there for the heart piece.

As for the other sword you got, that is in fact supposed to be there. It's one of the many little secrets of New Awakening that I included for inquisitive players or would-be speedrunners. It's a level 0 sword and weaker than the normal one, and you have to use spin attacks to hurt most anything. I think I'll remove it to prevent any confusion--it seems too easy to find, for an item that opens up the possibility of minor skips.

To solve your problem: you don't need the Bow to get past that area in Bottle Grotto (the room that's three screens north and one screen east of the entrance, with the single bat, crystal switch, and floating heart). In fact, you don't need the Bow at all until the last dungeon, the Face Shrine. To flick that crystal switch at the right time, and therefore reach the rest of Bottle Grotto, just throw a bomb over the wall. That'll give you more than enough time to reach the northeast corner of the map. When it detonates, the crystal switch will activate, the northeasternmost block will lower, and you can move on to the next room. You need a bomb, not an arrow.

So you know, you'll have to return to that room again, this time from the south end, and throw another bomb over the raised blocks and wait for it to detonate. This will lower a different set of raised blocks, and open the next staircase in the room to the right.

I will create a new account on Youtube and post a walkthrough of the most recent version of New Awakening as soon as I can. I'll also post a slightly updated version of the hack, with the level 0 sword removed. It was intended for explorers and speedrunners, but apparently is too easy to find. I'll replace it with something else.

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Personal Projects / Re: Link's Awakening hack: New Awakening

« on: February 15, 2015, 01:27:08 pm »

New Awakening's palette error has been corrected! And it has received various new revisions and improvements as well. Version 4.1 is now posted and ready.

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Personal Projects / Re: Link's Awakening hack: New Awakening

« on: December 18, 2014, 08:21:03 pm »

Tetrahedrus has found a possible alternative explanation for the coloration errors I have found in New Awakening, as well as a fix, and because of this, I will likely be able to post a new, updated version that does not suffer distracting palette errors. It's also possible LALE does not have a decay problem at all, and the problem lies elsewhere. Either way, LALE is fantastic and virtually bug-free; Fatories' work is stellar (it's worth repeating).

Anyway, New Awakening may continue to progress.

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Personal Projects / Re: Link's Awakening hack: New Awakening

« on: December 10, 2014, 02:11:08 pm »

There will likely not be any more updates on this project. Apparently hacks created using LALE experience a very slow but inevitable process of decay. Distracting coloration errors have cropped up repeatedly as I have been revising the hack, errors which I can fix but cannot stop. Unless I rebuild the project from scratch, the hack will likely become gradually more unstable until it can no longer display correctly. This is probably the final stage of New Awakening, as further revisions are more likely to damage the hack than improve it.

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Personal Projects / Re: Currently unnamed Link's Awakening hack

« on: September 21, 2014, 10:21:28 pm »

New Awakening is taken already. It's the name of my hack, actually. So back off!

Just kidding. But Re-awakening could work, depending on what Tetrahedrus thinks. I've been wondering myself what a new title could be, since Hard Awakening and New Awakening are the most intuitive hack names, and both are already taken.

Or you could just call it ULAH, and never explain the acronym on the download page.

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Personal Projects / Re: Link's Awakening hack: New Awakening

« on: August 25, 2014, 02:49:29 am »

I have just posted the newest version of the hack. The bugs I mentioned above have been corrected, along with some other more obscure errors I spotted since then. Aside from fixes and minor tweaks, I have added in some new types of puzzles and prevented a fair number of graphical oddities from occurring.

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Personal Projects / Re: Zelda - The Ultimate Quest (ALTTP Hack for SNES)

« on: August 21, 2014, 10:51:52 pm »

I'd like to see the hack, too. And I appreciate the apology. Those things can do a lot of good.

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Personal Projects / Re: Zelda - The Ultimate Quest (ALTTP Hack for SNES)

« on: August 20, 2014, 04:14:21 am »

Bugs can be fixed. Once you've gotten this stuff cleaned up, I think you should get another chance, and not have people abandon interest in this hack because of a bad start.

But you really do need to fix this sort of thing up. You say you need to learn to navigate through the hack, but as a hacker myself, I would say it is the responsibility of the hacker, not the player, to make the game playable and functional. Until then, any value in your hack is not going to be seen.

Don't try to make the player dig for gold. They won't do it, nor should they have to. Give them something fun and you'll get recognized for it. Give them something hard and they'll walk away.

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News Submissions / Re: ROM Hacks: New Hacks Added to the Database

« on: August 18, 2014, 07:29:56 pm »

Sorry for the late reply. The player doesn't get the sword in New Awakening right away; you get it in the second level (it's impossible to miss, also). You get extra bombs and powder to compensate, though, and you're not required to face enemies that require the sword until after you get it. The reason I moved the sword (and also the Wand, which you get four dungeons earlier in New Awakening) is so that the powder and bombs would see some use as weapons rather than having the player rely on the sword the entire game. Usually the player just equips the feather and sword and that's all you use for most of the game, which I felt gets boring after a little while. I also tweaked the enemies to favor more variety in weapon use.

Don't throw it in the trash. I didn't take valuable tools away from the player just to make things harder. The other two Link's Awakening hacks also move the sword, for much the same reasons as I did.

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Personal Projects / Re: Currently unnamed Link's Awakening hack

« on: August 13, 2014, 06:58:47 am »

I can't wait to try out those new dungeons. They look very unfamiliar and interesting.

I don't think you can change the appearance of the floor tiles of the dungeons, aside from editing the colors. The pattern on tiles D and F are set by dungeon (Face Shrine and Key Cavern have identical patterns, but otherwise they're unique for each dungeon). The same goes for the block tiles, A6 and A7, and the bombable block, A9, which are the same everywhere but Key Cavern and Face Shrine, and C0, a one-eyed statue in most dungeons, but a helmet/soldier design in Key Cavern and Face Shrine, and an eagle's face in Eagle's Tower.

But I notice in the screenshots you have Angler's Tunnel's floor tiles with Catfish's Maw's miniboss. Did you move him to Angler's Tunnel?

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Personal Projects / Re: Link\'s Awakening hack: New Awakening

« on: July 11, 2014, 03:11:08 am »

With njosro's help, I just posted the new version of the hack. I have reconstructed Key Cavern and Catfish's Maw and added enough Heart Pieces to compensate for the Heart Piece loss bug (there's also an in-game explanation for the phenomenon). There are about 10 extra Heart Pieces spread throughout the dungeons, though a small number (three, I think) have been removed from the rest of the island. Finally, I reintroduced Marin, the walrus, and Richard into the game, without recreating the Marin crash bug. This means the player can't get the potion until after Bottle Grotto, as in the original game, though I have tweaked the difficulty to account for the loss of the potion in the early game.

Now, the only content removed by New Awakening is a few messages from Old Man Ulrira and possibly the ghost. I have changed some of Ulrira's dialogue, and the text of one owl statue, to give the player the same hints they would normally receive (the new sequence would otherwise screw them up).
July 15, 2014, 07:15:53 am - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)I made a mistake in adding the new Pieces of Heart to the dungeons. In Catfish's Maw and Eagle's Tower, the player can lose access to a key by picking up the Piece of Heart too early. I cannot post a fixed version from China, but I can explain how to avoid the bug.

There is a room in Catfish's Maw with a chest and a Piece of Heart. If you open the chest, the Piece of Heart will vanish. Or, if you pick up the Piece of Heart and leave the room, then the Nightmare Key will vanish from the chest. So they are almost mutually exclusive. So, either open the chest first, or make sure you do not have to leave the room between picking up the Piece of Heart and opening the chest.

There is another room in Eagle's Tower with a Piece of Heart and a droppable key, on the second floor. Picking up the Piece of Heart will prevent the key from dropping. Even without that key, you can still complete the dungeon if you use Manbo's Mambo, the second Ocarina song available just west of the entrance to Angler's Tunnel. However, you will need to solve one more puzzle than would normally be necessary to complete the dungeon.

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Personal Projects / Re: Currently unnamed in-progress Link's Awakening hack (version 0.4)

« on: July 03, 2014, 03:31:47 am »

Thanks for the minimap advice. I just used it to reconstruct Key Cavern in my own hack.

Unfortunately, Jeville apparently has no interest in a joint project, or even a new hack at all, so the joint thing may not work out.

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Personal Projects / Re: Link\'s Awakening hack: New Awakening

« on: June 28, 2014, 10:09:42 am »

I'm studying Chinese here. It's a nine-week intensive language program to cram one year of Chinese study into one summer. I've not had much time for dealing with my hack, but it's the weekend now. I didn't know dropbox was ever blocked in China. I might not be able to post the updated hack at all, not until I get home (that's still 8 weeks away).

The nightmare key in the face shrine is in the farthest northwest room. I put it there, without any puzzles guarding it, to make sure people would get it, but since that got overlooked, I have moved the chest to the room right before Facade. Now it is no longer possible to get trapped.

I'm surprised the moving block puzzle took so little time to figure out. I spent maybe 15 to 20 minutes figuring out how to rig the puzzle so there was only one way to complete it. It went through several versions before I got it to work the way I wanted.

One more thing before I go to bed. I have fixed up the game so that Marin can join the player along the way. I added back in the sprites for Marin and the walrus, then, for the sake of completeness, put Richard back in and made him necessary to reach the Slime Key. I tweaked a few puzzles so Bottle Grotto could come before Key Cavern, and removed all chests with potions in them from the first four dungeons. Getting a potion too early is what causes the game to crash when you meet Marin at the beach; with those potions gone, there is no problem. I played through the game and made sure getting the potion from Crazy Tracy (now at the castle, with the shopkeeper back in town) did not cause the crash.

I also added a shortcut so the player can keep Marin the whole game. Maybe if I rebalance some things and tweak the owl dialogues so they fit the new order, then New Awakening will be truly complete.
June 29, 2014, 08:11:43 am - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)I just fixed the owl dialogues and rebuilt Key Cavern to rebalance the game. New Awakening seems to be reaching its final stage.

[Spoiler:]

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Personal Projects / Re: Link\'s Awakening hack: New Awakening

« on: June 26, 2014, 07:34:56 am »

I have revised the hack and I believe successfully addressed most of your comments. Those I have not addressed, I explain below. A complete list, assuming I'm not forgetting anything:

Moved the compass in the color dungeon closer to the entrance.
Turtle Rock no longer requires midair jumping.
Linked Angler's Tunnel and Catfish's Maw via staircases. I could not tweak the falling stuff to make it look better.
Face Shrine no longer drops the player multiple screens.
Face Shrine now lacks the Hookshot to endless wall jumping trap.
Added a hole in the overworld on map 11. You can no longer get trapped in the way you described; you need the feather to get there now.
Some of Key Cavern's enemies have been replaced with less vicious monsters.
Eagle's Tower's side scrolling section no longer looks wacky and uses weird tiles. It is also much less horribly murderous.
Face Shrine no longer has weird garbage tile ledge thingies. It has its tricks and turns, but the ledges are coordinated to look normal and the floors have been cleaned up.

Stuff I have not addressed:

The rupee chest messages still don't say how many rupees the player gets. There is not enough room in the text and it would take much rearranging to add room. You can really mess up the text if you exceed the vanilla text range and don't adjust all the surrounding text ranges to suit it.
I don't know how to fix the heart piece loss. I've noticed I've lost a heart piece, if not a full heart, so it's not just the emulator. I am not sure what is causing it. I will simply include a warning in the readme.
The Cue Ball enemy is the goofy miniboss that throws the ball at you. There has always been one in Catfish's Maw in NA, with a fireball thing and a spike trap. I've removed the fireball thing and some spikes if there were any before. Catfish's Maw no longer has a Dodongo Snake at all. I replaced that screen with a puzzle type thing.
I have not changed the room in Angler's Tunnel with the hookshot place you mentioned. You don't really need to hop on those spikes.

Spoiler:

You don't need to use the hookshot at all. You can push the square block onto the spikes and bounce off of it with the boots and feather to reach the tile to the right, or, you can hop into the water with the flippers and swim across the gap, if you stick to the northern edge of that tile. You actually swim over the hole due to some sort of engine error, which actually lets you get over a gap without the feather.

Finally, I have tweaked the hookshot-related room in Eagle's Tower.

Spoiler:

You don't need to hookshot across that gap and hookshot backward to extend the bridge. You can hookshot the bridge when standing on it and the bridge will extend backward, behind you, instead. The owl now gives a less vague hint about it. Another room in the Face Shrine uses the same trick, though I have simplified that room as well.

I have not posted the new version yet, as I do not have time to test it. For one thing, we've got a Chinese test tomorrow. For another, my bedtime is at 10pm now, and that's less than three hours away over here. I will make a post here when the new version is up and running.

Zaoshanghao, meiguo.
June 27, 2014, 04:35:36 am - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)I have tested the new version and fixed a mistake I made during the revising process, but there is a problem with Dropbox. If it is anything like the other Internet problems I have had in China, it will take a while to resolve.

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Personal Projects / Re: Currently unnamed in-progress Link's Awakening hack (version 0.3)

« on: June 24, 2014, 05:24:08 am »

New download link worked for me. I played through until I got the dead end signpost in the rapids.

I like the new dungeon, though the new item order confused me a little. I can't complain about lacking the sword, since my hack and Jeville's both withhold it for varying amounts of time. Replacing the Tail Cave boss was a sensible decision, considering the difficulty of the original and the new one. The apparently new coloration for the boss was a creepy-looking improvement over the last. The Flippers were an odd surprise.

One thing that needs to be done is to remove the Like-Like on map 31 of the overworld. It is placed directly in the player's way, the player has no means of recovering the shield from the Like-Like if the Like-Like should rush up and take it. Going back to town is something of a hassle, which I mostly avoided by saving and quitting in the nearby telephone house so I could reload nearby, before trying to get past the Like-Like. I think I lost the shield three times out of four tries.

For a moment I thought it was a game-breaking mistake, since I couldn't go to the castle to get a new shield. Then I remembered that in the normal game, that shop is in town. I've been testing my own hack so long I forgot the shopkeeper isn't at the castle.

I like the textual changes. Link's Awakening has always had some kooky and surreal dialogue, I exaggerated the effect in my own hack, and I like the new kookiness your changes introduce.

It's a pity it's still short. This has been here a really long time and it should be entirely possible to finish it, and do so rather quickly. I strongly encourage you to make a time investment in finishing the mod. I finished mine in two weeks, though it took a little while afterwards to sort out some mistakes. You should be able to churn out a new dungeon fairly quickly.

One thing I don't understand is how you managed to reorganize the first dungeon. The vanilla version's rooms are all shaped like a Moldorm, with a couple empty rooms that make up its eyes. I didn't know you could change that shape. I know you can change the appearance of the mini-map, but not the actual layout of the dungeon. All I knew I could do is reroute the place, changing the doors and the contents of a room. How did you restructure it?

Trying both my hack and Jeville's would probably give you an excellent sense of what you would want in your hack, and what would work. I took a lot of inspiration from Jeville's hack (although much of it was based on things I didn't like about Jeville's hack).

I've noticed a distinct stylistic difference between our respective hacks so far. Jeville has mostly preserved the basic structure of the dungeons while introducing a group of narrowly beatable, highly challenging puzzles, in between otherwise normal rooms. There are little bottlenecks where the player will get stuck for extended periods of time before figuring out how to move on. The place in Bottle Grotto where you need to get a Piece of Power to run against the current of one of those vortex enemies was an excellent example. Only after beating it twice or thrice was I able to do it without save states and not die from the falling damage (falling does half a heart of damage per fall, and with 5 hearts max and a potion to boot, you fall too often to survive). My hack reroutes the dungeons a little more than Jeville's, but also fails to reconstruct them as ULAH does. Like Jeville, I put in puzzles that operate on weird quirks of the game engine, which might be too obscure for the player, and I tend to throw in more of the nastiest enemies. My rooms tend to be very dense, and so they usually have straight walls, which might feel monotonous (I don't know), to maximize the amount of stuff I can cram in. There's also the recoloring thing. I would like to see another recoloring of the game, just to see how somebody else would design it. I don't think the original coloration was done very well. Contrast the colors of LADX with those of Oracle of Seasons, or even Oracle of Ages.

ULAH so far has done a lot to change the dialogue and feel of the early game. The puzzles do some things I haven't seen before--rooms 3 and 16 of Tail Cave are the two examples I would cite--which is very welcome. It also avoids the sudden difficulty spikes in Hard Awakening, nor is the overall level of difficulty really outrageous, like the Face Shrine in New Awakening. The rooms of ULAH's Tail Cave are of similar difficulty, and since none of them is an absolute nightmare, the dungeon plays well. Some previous posters seem to have been frustrated by the new item order, but if you resolve that and design the following dungeons the way you designed Tail Cave--but maybe without moving back and forth from the overworld--your hack would be very unlikely to cause great frustration when finished, and frustrating puzzles are probably the greatest weakness of hacks in general (an early version of my hack had FIVE minibosses in the same room in the Face Shrine!). The designer simply doesn't have the same perspective as the player, and so he or she is likely to design puzzles that players simply do not get.

Please keep up the good work. I've been thinking that in the future we might work together to create a merged hack that combines the best aspects of each one.

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Personal Projects / Re: Currently unnamed in-progress Link's Awakening hack (version 0.3)

« on: June 23, 2014, 06:01:10 am »

Wow. How did I miss this? I thought the only two major Link's Awakening hacks were Jeville's Hard Awakening and my New Awakening. This sounds really ambitious. But I can't download from the dropbox link. It might just be because I'm in China and things have been wonky here Internet-wise here for a while, but could you post a new download link?