personal daily artwork challenge 26 prompt: "horse"

Footage from the project I alluded to with the artwork of Rok's house nine days ago. If you thought it looked like layers for a parallax-scrolling 2D game, you thought right.

It's not a fetish game. There's no inflation in it (well maybe a little). It is meant to be just like Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link for the NES, but better. Z2 has amazing game feel and is a pretty good game overall. Its reputation for being overly difficult is, in my opinion, by and large the result of poor enemy design. Some of the enemies like Octoroks and Stalfos are designed really well, with patterns that let them combine with each other and with the terrain to make a combat challenge and are a joy to fight. Others like Goriya are so aggressive that they demand your full attention just to survive, and so can't be combined with anything. And some like Iron Knuckles are supposed to be tests of swordfighting skill with you trying to get your attacks past their shields and keep your shield between you and their attacks, but they don't telegraph their attacks or leave openings to capitalize on in a way that you engage with the cues. Still more like Maus ARE designed well and are fun to fight... until they're coming at you from ahead and from behind and it becomes impossible to avoid damage.

That's... a lot of critique from me, for a game I said was pretty good. But you get the idea, it's a good game with some fatal flaws that prevented it from shining as brightly as it could have.

I didn't show it in this GIF but I've gotten quite a lot done already. Rok has every sword (or, knife/morning star/spear, as he'll use in my thing) move that Link had--high attack, low attack, upward thrust, downward thrust--plus a tail whip that nullifies attacks coming from behind, currently four magic abilities to spit fire, shoot an upward thunderbolt, heal himself and transform into a mouse (more on that later), and can walk backwards. So far I've created 13 unique enemies, plus behavioral variations for many of them. I've reached a point where I can't make that much more progress without trying to build levels and addressing any issues I come across and making new level parts and scene commands as I need them. There is still a lot left to do, but it makes sense for my current agenda to be to make some new environment art like this (but less busy in the foreground when it comes to locales with actual danger), build some demonstration stages, and get people to play a demo for me and tell me what they think. You could say I've been working myself like a horse.