GRcade

Pedz wrote:No problems, I was joking anyway. It's something I was talking about in a few people's streams to try and get more GRcade stuff into the Twitchcast as as it stands there nothing GRcade about it other than the odd meme, so this was a great thing to have there and with Taf working on a game it was another person to talk to if he wanted to obviously. I decided to make a document on the PC with topics to chat about and add things as they came out. I think the stuff in the document I PMd you and other for the Twitchcast today as I was hoping we could get it going. Everyone is busy though bar OR

Yeah, Saturday is when I made the document. I guess we both had similar ideas at the time.

Victor Mildew wrote:

Pedz wrote:No problems, I was joking anyway. It's something I was talking about in a few people's streams to try and get more GRcade stuff into the Twitchcast as as it stands there nothing GRcade about it other than the odd meme, so this was a great thing to have there and with Taf working on a game it was another person to talk to if he wanted to obviously. I decided to make a document on the PC with topics to chat about and add things as they came out. I think the stuff in the document I PMd you and other for the Twitchcast today as I was hoping we could get it going. Everyone is busy though bar OR

Yeah, Saturday is when I made the document. I guess we both had similar ideas at the time.

I'm not busy, I'm just sure people are sick of me talking about Borderlands or driveclub

OrangeRKN wrote:

Ironhide wrote:Played the whole thing yesterday and thought it was really impressive that one person made it in their spare time. Also I thought the total lack of combat made a nice change, it also made playing via onscreen keyboard relatively stress free (aside from the times I accidentally hit capslock and the game stopped responding until I clicked it again).

As a side note, I really like the b&w pixel art, must have taken ages making the tilesets.

I hadn't considered capslock! It was a really easy fix so I just updated the live version - input is now case insensitive so it doesn't matter if capslock is toggled or not. Thanks for mentioning it!

deathofcows wrote:It's like a Majora's Mask for Link's Awakening (remixing the world and the peeps). Ending was nicely enigmatic and mysterious too.

Also the crispness of the black and white art-style on a monitor (compared to whatever old Gameboy I originally played LA on) really holds up!

I'm glad you liked it! Regarding the ending here is a quick explanation of the story (at least as I intended it):

Link's Awakening was set within the dream of the Wind Fish, with Koholint Island and all its inhabitants existing only within that dream. If you perfect clear Link's Awakening DX (by completing it without dying) Marin is implied to have been reincarnated in the "real" world as a seagull. Unawakening is the dream of Marin-as-a-seagull, trying to recreate her memory of her home*. On the player's arrival Marin foresees how they will help the people of the island and end her dream, just as (as Link) they originally awoke the Wind Fish, so she attempts to prevent completion of the trading quest by tearing the recipe page from the library book and throwing it in the bottle into the sea. Of course this washes back up on the beach and the player is able to complete the trading quest regardless. Accepting the inevitability of waking and the impossibility of reliving the past, Marin decides to wake up and the game ends (possibly fun detail - if you have the console open in your web browser for the ending you will see the game code ends by throwing the error "Error: The dream has ended").

The game is called "Unawakening" as an obvious reference to Link's Awakening and this being a tribute that recreates much from the original game without fully replicating it, but it is also a reference to the ending. The final owl dialogue says "The morning draws near... The seagull unawakens." The seagull is, of course, Marin, although the exact identity of the dreamer has been an unfolding mystery throughout the game (much as the island being a dream is unveiled throughout Link's Awakening). While one usually just awakens from a dream, the fact that Marin originally existed only in a dream means that for her, her form within the dream is her real one as opposed to her existence as a seagull in the "real" world. Hence she does not awaken, but "unawakens".

*Another of the owl's dialogues references this when he says "The dream is nought but a reflection... The dreamer but a shadow of a dream." and this is meant to be evidenced by the reduced screen size, sprites and palette. The dream of a seagull should naturally be less well realised than the dream of the deity-like Wind Fish. Marin is also something of an analogue to myself as the developer and gives me the perfect narrative excuse for why my game is worse than the original it is based on - I can claim it to be intentional! (While of course we all know it was inevitable )

deathofcows wrote:What a neat and elegant premise, with great symmetry to the original.

Jenuall wrote:Thank strawberry float Marin didn't start moaning about the coarse sand on the beach at the end!

2m53.56s (no screenwarping)

Karl_ wrote:.

Jenuall wrote:.

Lime wrote:Also, just curious as I haven't studied the code fully- why are the text lists for the dialogue boxes in reverse order? It's a while since I've coded so I might have forgotten some coding best practices with lists - plus I'm more used to Python than javascript!

OrangeRKN wrote:

Lime wrote:Also, just curious as I haven't studied the code fully- why are the text lists for the dialogue boxes in reverse order? It's a while since I've coded so I might have forgotten some coding best practices with lists - plus I'm more used to Python than javascript!

The relevant dialogue gets copied into another array that acts as a buffer. As you advance through the dialogue each new line gets popped from the buffer. Pop removes and returns the last entry in an array, hence the reverse order.

There is almost certainly a neater way of doing it but it works at least! Similarly all the dialogue arrays have a blank "" as the first entry to avoid an error on trying to pop from an empty array (iirc).