Hello, it's been a while
Any new videos based on these updates? All I can find is a walkthrough started 12 years ago and ending 1 year ago.
Latest playthrough I know about is this one from 5 yrs ago recorded by Sinatar. It used an earlier version of my EN translation and prompted me to fix some of the issues.
And there was a sequel??? Of sorts?
The sequel was a point-and-click 2D Adventure game with turn-based combat mode. It was also released completely in English and you can find it under the name "The Fifth Disciple".
Sinatar also did a playthrough:
I have no clue what the "timelapse" videos are supposed to be, they seem to be simply sped up footage of game playthroughs :D
OH? I wonder how many maps were made?
A list taken from
https://web.archive.org/web/20230212123139/http://skeldal.vyletnici.net/main.php?page=download
Name (filesize) - Author
---
Skřetí říše (12.8MB) - Ondřej Fabián (one of the "timelapse" videos you found)
Magika + Sféra (14.1MB) - Ondřej Fabián
MUD world (561KB) - Ondřej Novák
Stíny Skeldalu (341KB) - Ivo Janák
Heroes (763KB) - DeDy Doležal
Dungeon (338KB) - Martin Mikš
Bludište (185KB) - Daniel Bartoň
City (199KB) - Vladimír Ševeček ml.
Dark Land (960KB) - Pavel Klempa
Dark Side (3,4MB) - Jiří Dostál
Norgavova hrozba (2,3MB) - Jiří Müller
Tarnwor (4,5MB) - Michal Kuba
None of the custom adventures are in english mind you. Apparently there are differences between adventures made with the original DOS version of Skeldal and the Windows version of Skeldal, so some of them may not even run properly.
I played Skřetí Říše which is okay except for the ever-present insta-death events. Not a big deal thanks to saves, however in the final chapter trying to save crashes the game, and the final chapter is filled with insta-death events, so the ending is very annoying.
I also played Magika + Sféra, which was a slog thanks to enemies becoming bigger health sponges every chapter, and also thanks to nonsensical puzzles.
The game would randomly show you a piece of advice, vague at best, useless at worst, but often this advice was a one-time message displayed over your character portraits. If you entered combat during a message (which happens very often), the message is lost and you have to reload a save to read it again. I remember in one of the levels there was a room with no exits and four lava lakes. Walking into lava instantly kills your whole party, and the advice said to go west, so obviously I tried walking into the West lava lake (I died), then to all lava lakes but facing West (I died four times). The solution was indeed to walk into the Western lava lake, but for some reason you must be facing South for it to teleport you to the next room.
The company seems to be sort of dead.
Yes, Napoleon Games died in 2022. I read somewhere that they were making mobile-only games in their final years.
There was probably some weird stuff going on too - apparently the original creator of Gates of Skeldal and company owner "Jindřich Rohlík" legally changed his name to "Jindřich Skeldal".
I saw ios for 7 mages but NO DICE currently. Seems it was removed just like steam.
AFAIK it was delisted from all stores.
I bought it on Steam so I can still download it there. But that's probably a discussion for the 7 Mages topic here:
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...lobber-where-you-play-a-party-of-mages.98998/
My only gripe with the english translation is that its files are a mix of small letter, capital letters and overall mishmash, so it immediately breaks on any case sensitive system, like Linux.
This seems like an easy thing for Linux users to remedy via a regex find/replace bash script.
Or is the problem that you don’t know what the case should be, and the game just complains about not finding files? There must be a way to treat subdirectories as holding case insensitive files in Linux, but you may need to make a symlink / junction.
I havnt really looked into it too much, because the primary reason was a possibility to run it on certain linux gaming handheld platform and it turned out there would be also quite big controls related issues without changes in code (which I cant do), so I gave up quite quickly. It was rather just a matter of somewhat interesting possibility for other people. Because I personally do not need the english patch, I just ended up playing it via Dosbox
Skeldal is originally a game for MS-DOS, the upper-case filenames are a remnant from the original game. I don't use Linux at all, so I didn't even know this is an issue.
Mainly, I didn't even know you could run Skeldal natively on Linux systems, but it seems you can - this repository has some instructions about compiling it:
https://github.com/nextghost/skeldal
Owner of that github repo said (
here) that this source code is from 10 years ago and "If you use Linux and you aren't afraid of tons of bugs, try playing it.". He also mentions licencing issues, and that he wasn't able to contact Jindřich Rohlík about the licence yet, and says that he doesn't have time to work on this project right either.
