HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN

I have always loved the Zelda series for its interesting settings and labyrinthian puzzle box designs. You know the ones. Those dungeons that really let you get lost in them, to later give that ever sweet sense of accomplishment when you slowly start mastering the space. (It's such a shame Nintendo doesn't make those anymore btw). So when my dad gifted me a copy of Gamemaker, all the way back in college, I looked for a far off goal to chase and quickly settled on building a Zelda fangame. Not to ever finish, but as a direction to keep my tinkering on some sort of track. So I've been working on that little program in the nearly two decades since then, as way to blow off steam from school (and later work) in the odd weekends. But the engine kept growing and growing, till it was nearly on par with the original alttp to be honest. With few new features left to chase.

So while stuck during the Covid period I decided to up the stakes massively and pivoted to going professional. I've since been committed to building a full sized quality game, with all new own assets, and an original story and world.

There was a successful Kickstarter held in April, and the final release for the game is scheduled for the end of 2026.

WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?

Two challenges come to mind, from around the time I switched to an original IP.

The first was finding good and trustworthy people to help with extra assets and translations. That whole process of trying out people (over on Fiverr) was frankly very draining. There have been dozens of misfires and shockingly even one case of a high-rated creator reselling edited assets. I can program, and do a decent amount of pixel-art, but a composer (for example) I am not. So long distance text based communication about terms I knew nothing about did not make things any easier. It all worked out eventually though and I adore the people I now work with.

The other thing that nearly broke me might surprise you. It was having to create a new mountain tileset in the perspective of SNES Zelda. I was really attached to the iconic look, but nobody makes tiles like that. I now know why :) It looked so simple to do at first, but those tiles can link up in so many ways that I kept having to restart from scratch. I also had the hardest time wrapping my head around the angles of light. It was a real make or break moment for my new ambitions, and took weeks upon weeks to overcome.

ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?

1. I know it is a bit hypocritical, but: start small. Learn to complete something before going for a bigger idea. The reason is because you will get to experience what it actually takes to finish a project. So including things like dealing with scopecreep, translations, advertisment and so forth. I had other relevant workexperience going into things, but will happily admit that first hand experience would have been much better.

2. If you find good people to help out, be kind to them! They are more valuable then you might realise.

ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?

If people want to learn more about my project then I've got some interesting links to share. I keep a day-by-day log of my progress over on Discord, post weekly on the socials and publish bigger progress updates over on the Kickstarter page. There is a free demo out already, which I constantly update. And people are welcome to give the game a wishlist over on Steam ofcourse, if they like what they see or want to help me out!

Steam page (incl demo): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2738140/Horn_of_Balance/

http://Itch.io page (incl demo): https://hornofbalance.itch.io/horn-of-balance-pre-ks-demo

Kickstarter page: https://kickstarter.com/projects/hornofbalance/horn-of-balance

Discord: http://discord.gg/redHXyZ2Gc

Other socials:

- https://twitter.com/HornofBalance

- https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@HornofBalance

-Martijn

❤️