one of my big priorities with this hack has been to preserve as much of the original sprites as possible

if you’ve never played Oracle of Ages, this character was originally a plot NPC, so he has a small number of sprites for things like walking and swinging his sword and being defeated (because his role is mostly to try to attack the villain then get swept aside)

so I definitely had to hack the “collapsed” sprite into the actual canon one, even if it meant having to reverse-engineer the animations

now, I say “as much as possible” for a reason

he definitely doesn’t have sprites for things like being in mine carts or falling down holes or swimming, so I’m having to edit all of those one by one, based on the original Link sprites

and, interestingly, Ralph is originally like a 16x24 object? his hat actually peeks up into another sprite! so rather than trying to completely reengineer the game to put that on the player character, I crushed the hat down into a 16x16 sprite

I do eventually want to find someone to redraw the big like hand-drawn art sprites that the game uses for a couple of cutscenes, but I need to figure out how to define the engine/system constraints for whatever poor artist I hire for that

like the GBC itself has like “four colors per 8x8 tile” or something but I know the game cheats by creating a couple of sprites to patch extra color in here and there, and I haven’t dug into how it does that yet

honestly, what motivates me more than anything is… as a kid, I always wanted to make this romhack. never had the skill (because lots of the graphics are compressed, and reverse-engineering that from scratch is beyond my capability (or time resources) even now)

I’m going to do this for kid-me, back when I was a kirlia

I almost want to cut the script rewrite because it’ll be a lot of effort, but I do at least need to change the character names to make it still make sense, because I swapped two characters

not sure how I’m going to write around the whole thing where Ralph is a descendant of Queen Ambi. I almost want to make it more elaborate, like “she used to have the Triforce of Courage before you were born!” or “if she didn’t exist, you wouldn’t have come here” but anything like that would probably just make the plot too complicated for its own good

I could just keep it the same, but the whole idea is that Ralph and Ambi look similar, so I could do nothing and maybe just hang a lampshade on it, or edit Ambi to look a little more like Link…

…now that I think about it, does the game even establish how long the time gap between past and present is…?

okay yeah early dialogue says 400 years. that’s tricky to work with