Summary: In this Section, we'll learn almost everything to know about using combos to draw a screen. While we will be omitting advanced things such as layers, this is a pretty comprehensive section on tricks to drawing screens fast.
Key points
- Understanding the basic points of Fill Types, Draw Blocks, and Replace
- The W key and walkability
- That there is more to a combo than just the graphic (walkability, etc.)
Now, it's actually time to begin building something with the program. It may be very simple, and it may not even be playable, but it will definitely be a start!
Start by going into ZQuest. When you do, you should end up with a blank blue workspace. If you do not, go to File and select New. (Hereafter written as File -> New) The program will ask for a name; type in anything, as it really won't matter.
Does your program look like this now?
It should!
Now, let's start drawing on this boring blue screen in the middle. Click ANYWHERE inside of it, and ZQuest will automatically create a screen.
This gray stuff doesn't look too great... Well, it can be fixed easily. Just hold the mouse button down and draw on it all to make your screen look nice and tan! Well, maybe not really nice, just tan.
That took a little bit of time, didn't it? Well, no more than a minute, but if you had to do this every time you created a screen, ZQuest would get pretty boring. That's why you DON'T have to do this every time!
First, press the Delete key, and either click Yes or press Enter to delete the screen. This time, we'll fill the screen up with our pretty tan in less than a few seconds.
Hold down the Ctrl key and click on the blue screen.
I can see it now... "Dang Happyman, that was REALLY fast!" I'm sure you also want to know what just happened when we Ctrl + clicked on the screen. Well, here's your answer. Holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on the screen enacts the current Fill Type. And now you're wondering what that is! Alright you curious little monkey, I'll tell you.
First, right click on the screen. You'll notice something in the menu with the caption Set Fill Type. Open up that submenu for a list of five options.
As you can see, right now it is set on Flood. Flood simply takes the current combo and changes every combo on the screen to that one. This allows you to completely destroy an elaborate screen with one Ctrl + click. Since Flood is not undoable, you need to be careful of this.
As for the other fill types, even I don't know what Fill2 does... Normal Fill is the same thing as that paint bucket tool you always use in graphics editors.
Now that we have this clean slate for drawing on, let's begin! Choose a combo on the right, like a grave... or some sand... or perhaps a tree! Yes, I will be choosing that small tree.
With that combo, just start drawing. It's important you get a feel for how sensitive the ZQuest mouse is. Keep in mind that since you are most likely using windowed mode, it is much harder to draw because the screen is so small. If you place a combo where you didn't mean to, select the plain tan one and erase it. Anyways, here's my lovely drawing with trees.
No, this is not art class and you do not need to show your drawing to me! Just keep following along.
Now, press the C key. What does this do? Well, lots of things. One, it can serve as a temporary back up. Try Ctrl + clicking somewhere on the screen.
Oh no! As I said before, Ctrl + clicking can be dangerous! Now we've lost our lovely drawing... but wait! Because we pressed the C key, we can restore it! Press the V key.
C and V are - you guessed it! - copy and paste respectively. These VERY handy options can copy a screen to another location or "backup" the current screen in case these accidents happen. Most questmakers like me have learned to love copy and paste.
Now select the ground combo and Ctrl + click on the screen; you don't need this screen anymore.
How about we try to draw a large tree this time? No, not like I did! I mean the large two by two combo trees you see there on the right. Don't see it? The mouse in the image does.
There are four combos to this tree total (2 * 2 = 4...), and you WOULD have to draw each one separately... WOULD, but ZQuest saves the day with ANOTHER handy dandy do-it-yourself-speedy-quick option at hand.
Select the top left part of the tree (you can check the toolkit to make sure you did), and right click somewhere on the center of the screen to bring up that menu again. For reference, let's call it the Draw Menu.
Now think and see if you can get this yourself. What option here would allow us to draw that 2 by 2 square of combos and make that entire tree instantly? It's not in a submenu; it's visible right there in the image.
Yes, the answer is Draw 2x2 Block! Click on that, and the tree suddenly appears!
Alright, that's through, so go ahead and erase this. Select the ground combo and Ctrl + click on the screen to return to that blank slate again.
This time, let's select the cliff tile on the bottom center. The mouse shows which one if you're having trouble finding it.
Wait, look! The combo the mouse is pointing to has an imposter a little bit to the right of it!
Now, do you remember what I said about combos earlier? That you could make two identical looking combos with one being a wall, and one not? That's exactly what this is! The combo the mouse is pointing to is a wall that cannot be walked on, but the other one can be walked on, like a secret path. Cool, huh?
Just be sure that you do not get confused by this. Here, let me show you a way to avoid it.
First, draw the cliff tile on the top couple rows of the screen, like this.
Now we have to make sure we used the right cliff tile in drawing this, the one that cannot be walked on. To do this, we can check to see if we can walk on that combo. Press the W key.
The cliff turned pink! An additional observation might be that this is the same pink that we saw in the toolkit to mark what Link could walk on. So, as you might have guessed, the W key simply shows where Link cannot walk using that same color of pink. Press W again, and the pink will go away.
Now, if your cliff didn't turn pink, you must've used the wrong one. Then Link can walk on the cliff when playing and maybe able to do things you didn't intend him to do! Checking things with the W key is often fairly important.
There's one problem I see here. Have you ever seen a green cliff? The Legend of Zelda? No, I meant real life! Huh, a moss-covered cliff? Well, I don't care! We're going to make a brown cliff!
But how do you use this brown? Try pressing the + key.
Whoa, the combo palette turned from green to brown! Well, what you just did was change something called a Color Set, or CSet for short. They're a bit too complex to go over in detail now, so I'll do a very brief summary. There are several color sets that you can have at a time. Right now, we have available the green one, the brown one, as well as a few more which we probably will not use for a little while. That's all, next!
Anyways, now that we have our new CSet selected, let's turn our cliff brown. There's actually a lot of ways to do this, the least efficient being replacing each combo manually. How about we use a new feature called Replace?
Here's how: right-click anywhere on the cliff to bring up the Draw menu, and select Replace from the bottom of it. And ZQuest does the rest.
So what does replace do? All it does is take the combo you right clicked on and replace ALL instances of that combo on the screen with the combo you currently have selected. Pretty simple, eh? There's a bit more to it though.Replace is C-Set sensitive. What I mean is that:
- It replaces the combo right-clicked on with the current combo, but also the current CSet.
- It will not replace a combo identical to the one you right-clicked on if they don't have the same CSet.
That's about it for drawing on the screen! It was simple, wasn't it? Next, we'll go into more depth on creating things like caves. Also, don't delete this screen; we will use in Section 3.