I’ve always liked action adventures over turn-based adventures, and so I like Zelda games more than Final Fantasy, at least in terms of gameplay.  So I thought, why couldn’t you have an RPG that was more Zelda-like?  Perhaps sort of like Final Fantasy Legend 2 for Gameboy.  And then I thought, you always have a party of 4 or so in an RPG, but could that be made, how you say, REAL TIME?  And such was born the idea for the Zelda RTS.

You have your party of 4 characters or so, and you control one of them like in a normal Zelda game, but control the others more like RTS units.  You press a key and time freezes, sort of like in Mass Effect’s menu thingy, and you can give commands to your units (or maybe time doesn’t freeze, or maybe that could be a difficulty level setting), such as telling the mage to cast heal, or the archer to target a guy.  And then you the swordsman can battle like in any 2D Zelda game.

This is what I’m shooting for this week.  Yesterday I accomplished:

• Resized the tiles to better fit the game
• Got moving from screen to screen working, would like to add a transition effect at some point
• Figured out how to deploy the game (I’m using ImpactJS)
• Attacking units and killing them (though no death animations yet)
• The beginnings of the dialog system
• A good start on a state system and swappable AI
• Tinkering with weapons and finding some of what works and doesn’t

I found that setting a timer and working until I hit 8 hours really helped me to get stuff done.  I clocked in at 8 hours and 46 minutes yesterday.  I’m going for the same today, and will be streaming a good deal of that on my channel at http://twitch.tv/dvcolgan.

And some screenshots:

I’m hoping for an Earthbound-esque feel.