
So the dungeons are different in every game you play,” Christopho explains. “The player has to traverse randomly-generated dungeons until he loses. There have been a number of games created with the Solarus engine including fellow fangame Zelda: Book of Mudora.Īnother game made by a community member, the roguelike Tunics! (opens in new tab), really shows off what Solarus was capable of. He’s created a series of a video tutorials to help other fans using the tools he’s built, garnering something of a following for Solarus on YouTube (opens in new tab). Nowadays, Christopho says people are using Solarus everyday, asking questions and contributing to the engine’s development. After five years had passed, Christopho’s team found themselves with three disparate yet completed projects-the Solarus engine, the Solarus Quest Editor, and the finished game, Zelda: Mystery of Solarus DX.
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“The main feature of these tools is to avoid programming, but in the end I realized that it makes it harder to really control what I was doing."Īfter several years of trial and error, Christopho opted to make his own project in C++ with SDL-a remake of Zelda: Mystery of Solarus.
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“We tried The Games Factory and then Multimedia Fusion, which are more powerful software to create a game without any programming,” Christopho says. The birth of Solarusįor the growing team’s second project, they decided to branch away from RPG Maker due to the tool’s limitations.

“But people loved the tribute to Zelda: A Link to the Past, started to help me improve the game, and soon enough, we were a team that decided to make a second Zelda fangame,” He recalls. “Of course, it was hard to make interesting enemy fights on paper.” “What surprised me the most is that actually, the game I drawn on paper when I was a kid, and then the first RPG Maker version, were really far from official Zelda games,” Christopho remembers. The game was largely a success, though it did suffer from the flaws you might expect from someone’s first independent game project-Christopho cites long, gruelling mazes, poor boss design, and limited four-directional movement. He eventually released Zelda: Mystery of Solarus, his own fangame based on his childhood drawings and designs in 2002. At that time, I did not imagine that it would be possible for this to become a real videogame one day, but I remember having a dream about it.”įast forward to 2000: Christopho at last had computer access, and began creating Zelda games with RPG Maker 2000. I made my brother, my sister, my parents and my friends play it.

“I did not have a computer, so all of this was on paper! But there was a world map and various dungeons and mazes. The Solarus Quest Editor (opens in new tab)
