Finally! After a lot of work and a lot of time spent learning a new programming language I am pleased to present a beta of my RPG. I put it in the beta section because there isn't much story to present yet. Thanks to everyone who has helped!

Switched RPG beta
I'll add some of the new screenshots to the first post sometime later today.

Awesome work, I'll make sure to try it out when I get home tonight.

I just downloaded it.

How do you get the owner of the robot to recognize you?

Besides that, great game!

EDIT: Oh, never mind, figured it out. You have to talk to the guy down at the gate and say "no" instead of "yes".

EDIT2: I cross-posted this to UCF.

Also, I just finished the demo. Very nice job on the game.

Some suggestions:

Messages: When messages appear at the bottom of the screen, in stead of having only [exe] and [shift] continue to the next part of the message, why not make any key do it?

Maybe a background color or image in fight mode?

Besides that, great!

You forget that the forum is no publicly viewable as of now :P

I just tried it, very nice. Only suggestion is to make the guy walk slower, he seems to run a lot. Other than that, great job.

No, I dont. I dont want to have to edit the post later, when the forum is back up

That first one is a good idea. I am planning on having something more than a white background during battles. I was thinking something along the lines of a two-toned background (for a floor and an environment).

Yeah, he does. It's kind of strange to see him traveling at running speeds with a walking animation . I'll fix that.

I'm going to suffer an unfortunately long amount of time where I will not be able to do any programming whatsoever. That is the main reason why I put the beta out there today. I will get back to working on this when I can. When I resume, it will be mainly graphics and storyline development. At least I will be able to close some of the 37 files I have open in Notepad++!

From the screenshots on the download page, I see that the sprites in battle could use some anti-aliasing as well.

I'd suggest he actually goes back and plays around with the sprites themselves before I'd go tell him to do something as technical as AA...

... Plus, he'd be doing selective outlining, not AA, if he's going to have different colored backgrounds. AA causes ugly outlines in a non-static environment, whereas selout looks a little more ugly all the time but always works no matter the background.

I didn't work too hard on those sprites. I just drew them on paper, scanned them and cleaned them up enough so they would look somewhat decent. I will put a lot more effort into all of my sprites later on.

this looks pretty great so far =D
a few things seem rather rough still:

the player runs around the screen, and moves more quickly horizontally than vertically. the current vertical speed would look normal if the animations were cut to half their current speed.

the text box is always displayed at the bottom of the screen and the text in it is at the very upper edge. is there some system-limitation reason behind this?

when walking into a new area that has a wall as the next tile immediately past the first one, the player sprite doesn't appear until the arrow key is released.

i love how this is turning out, though. particularly the scripted movement/text cutscenes. how are you managing those?

Yes, quite a few things are rough right now. I just wanted to get things working and save aesthetics for later.

1) I will make the animation slower, I make heavy use of Bdisp_PutDisp_DD_stripe and that is efficient enough that frames are going by way too fast. Horizontal movement is faster than vertical because I have to update more of the screen.
2) That's just a matter of tweaking a few numbers. Again, a function over aesthetics thing.
3) I will fix that. That same issue manifests itself in another way if you walk into something solid and keep the button pressed.

I have a source file dedicated to scripted action that has access to the relevant movement and dialog routines. Each scripted event is controlled by a single routine (there's only the one for now).

Thanks for the feedback!

One more thing; I fully intend to make this game playable at the normal 58MHz, no overclocking necessary. I know that overclocking without notification is not ok but how about setting the clock speed back to normal without any notification? I don't know why anyone who is savvy enough to mess with clock speeds would complain but I though I would ask.