So of the maybe 1000 people who played Gridquest, I imagine only 2, including myself, ever got to the final super ultra secret triple hidden level. And I put a heck of a lot of effort into putting together the sliding puzzle for it, so I thought someone might like to try solving it in MSPaint to test your maze skills. Heres how it works.
You slide on top of ice tiles- you keep moving in the same direction until you hit a wall or a tile you can walk on, the little wooden boards. Your goal is to start at the top where you enter the super ultra secret triple hidden level, and make your way to the chests in the middle which no doubt contain ever delicious cake. You can only move in the cardinal 4 directions and can't stop while on ice. The only way into the center is through the trancy hypno warp purple pad thingy. If you fall into the black squares on the edges, you plummet to your soul crushing death in the underworld and the cake will turn bitter and stale in your absence.
So load up your MSPaint and try finding your way through! It was much more (intentionally) difficult in-game since you could only see 9x9 squares at a time, so you would wind up flying across the entire room and plummeting into a hole, having to use your memory or go blindly on many squares.
Yeah, I'm sure it would be a lot harder when you can only see a small part of the room at one time.
"Golden Sun" had quite a few of these ice puzzles, and I struggled with most of those...
dude i still want a graphical overhaul of gridquest. i remember beta testing it and it was a pretty epic game concept.
i've been meaning to play the entire game but never have time or an overpowering interest to do so. mainly cause the actual grid like movement gives me a headache. a smooth gridbased movement would be awesome (ie. gridbased movement with smooth pixel movement between gridspaces, like pokemon gameboy games.)
I've actually been approached by a handful of people that wanted to graphically overhaul Gridquest. And I definitely welcome it, its not just an easy task the way its set up. I actually made the movement between squares not smooth completely intentionally and those other headache-invoking-grid-thingies. Its because I meant it as a sort of homage to Rogue and the old style of games that would use a grid of ASCII as their display- I tried to keep as much as I could locked into the grid display. I know it doesn't look nice, but its not supposed to per say >_>
I'm studying lots of articles on pixel art for Asunder, however.
So if you haven't looked at any of the games in this years 2011 20 event competition i would recommend looking at "Dungeon Dash".
It is a magnificent roguelike that maintains that grid style movement without the headache. it doesnt matter if its just 2 or 3 frames of movement transition, as long as its not instantaneous, it won't be so headache inducing . I also think its more the fact that the game is so zoomed in and the graphics are so basic, that the grid movement is kindof disorienting. the entire scene can change drastically in one move.
i hope you do get someone to redo the graphics at some point. it would really benefit from it.
I agree with Cecil.
The graphics could be improved, but that's not the real issue - I can overlook bad graphics if a game plays well. The problem is the truly horrible scrolling (and also the generally bad interface).
I never even played beyond the first level because of that.
Honestly, if it had the kind of simple, attractive presentation that "Dungeon Dash" has, then it might have been one of the great klik classics, alongside "Knytt", etc.
As it is, it's nowhere near.
I think the real key there would be changing the screen size, ie going from a 9x9 tile resolution to something larger. Remember, this was made back in TGF where there was a 256 (!) object limit, so 9x9 was about the biggest I could go in odd increments and still have enemies/items/projectiles/bosses. But yeah I'm sure if someone cared they could hack together a 25x25 or so sized screen, the only problem is you'd have to go through all the levels and redo their boundaries or you'd see a bunch of blank spaces
This would be fantastic with a graphical overhaul and with the scrolling fixed. They've done stuff like this for games like Fargoal for the iphone; you should check it out!
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lol jk 
Edited by Pixelthief
. I also think its more the fact that the game is so zoomed in and the graphics are so basic, that the grid movement is kindof disorienting. the entire scene can change drastically in one move.
