Has it really been almost a whole year since Dragon Warrior project for PCECD? Man, time’s really flying along. I haven’t heard anything from Sliver X about Dragoon Omega remix or such. I’m gonna shoot him an email and see if he’s still interesting in that project for the PCE.
On a related note, Black Tiger made a cool replacement title screen for the PCE remix of DW and it looks great. I did some work to divide up the colors (94 colors!) for PCE format. Gonna have to section off some parts into the sprite area. It’s too bad I don’t have my app for the 8×1 tile method up and running. It would have been perfect for this.
Been thinking about PCE dev tools recently. Or more specifically game development tools. It’s one thing to build a large virtual tilemap with mappy or such, but what about more complex levels that require something more akin to a script? Nothing too fancy. Take an automatic scrolling shmup for instance. You have hardcoded logic/rules, then you have a simple script with timers/frame logic, and assets like sprites, tiles, and tilemap strips. This obviously isn’t anything new to the 16bit or even later 8bit gaming world of back then. I’ve seen that some homebrew projects include *some* of the logic and boundaries into the tilemap and probably sprites as dynamic structs to a level or something similar. Fine for smaller projects, but the idea doesn’t seem as clean to me. I like the idea of developing a whole level in a editor and being able to run it through a simulator. The whole thing; enemies, scrolling, effects, conditional logic, temporal logic, animations, etc. It’s probably safe to say that there’s nothing standard like this for some of the other console development communities, other than what’s been inhouse/private.
Sounds great and all, but then that means I would need to write my own editor. Fail. Ok, maybe not “fail” - but it doesn’t really thrill me to death about writing such an app from scratch. All of my PC coding has been for win32 C ‘console’ and SDL. I’m not big on PC coding and I usually don’t need any fancy GUI setups for my apps (yeah! “8 parameters at a time” console apps - GO!). My choices are A) learn how to code for a GUI based app or B) bypass that GUI crap and write my own internal GUI with brute force via SDL. ‘A’ isn’t so appealing with learning all the nuisances of new keywords, rules, interfaces, etc not to mention it would be in C++ or C# rather than C (although that’s minor). ‘B’ sounds like something I normally like to do - build something from the ground up. But it has the downside of time to develop just the GUI part.
I could bypass A and B and go straight to C, which is writing a few console apps and have a in game engine to build out some of the things I need. Basically a fancy in game editor with some support apps on the PC side. I really like the sound of option ‘C’, but I doubt anyone would use such tools. If my logic appears to be convoluted at times, that’s because it is 
If I did option A or B *and* made the script flexible enough, I’m sure someone else might actually use it. If only I could find someone to write one for me… 
