Yeah, I bought them both and I'm playing through Seasons a little at a time.  I think (depending on how the season maps are handled) I've got a pretty cool idea for a next hack when/if Return to Koholint gets completed so I fully welcome a newer more robust Seasons editor!

I simply used ZOLE.  They look like official Nintendo maps because they essentially are.  I took the basic layout of Koholint Island from Link's Awakening and then tweaked it to show what it might look like before Link showed up and after several years of disaster. 

You can see in the past, the island is generally more forested, green, and overall safer, but you can also see some areas of development like Kanalent Castle, the quarry (which becomes the rapids), and the picture shop.  The swamp is still a lake, Eagle Tower has yet to be built, Turtle Rock has no turtle features yet, and there is even a small (man-made) island in the bay that hasn't been made yet and the bay has not been closed off yet either. 

In the future on the other hand, most of the plant life has suffered, the Tal Tal Mountains have become volcanically active which has in turn dried up the springs of water that fed the river system of the island.  The swamp has completely dried up, the rapids have become little more than a trickle, and the entire island is sinking into the ocean.  The graveyard has overflowed into the Koholint Prairie, the lakes and ponds are dry, and the sinkholes have only gotten larger over time.

OMG!  TEH FOREMZ ES BAK!

Well, in the interim I finished very little work on Return to Koholint actually.  I blame it on the long Memorial Day weekend.

I did however finish the past overworld Tuesday, but I had stuff come up today that kept me from working today.  I also do not have an image update since I don't have access to my assets currently, but I'll upload the finished product tomorrow.  Now to work on the underwater portions.

Here is my basic triage plan for Return to Koholint:
1. Overworld (done aside from minor changes that might be necessary after testing)
2. Underwater
3. Underground areas which connect two places on the overworld (I plan to do this to make the overworld playable as a standalone demo/test build)
4. All remaining underground areas
5. Dungeons
6. Interaction placement (including enemies, NPCs, and things like time portals as well as any necessary scripting)

Now, technically, any of these could change places, but currently that's what I'm looking at.  Frankly, I much prefer mapping to dealing with interaction placement.  I do not mind the scripting that much, but since I program for a living, being limited to such a small toolset is a less than ideal way of doing things for me. :001_tongue:

I am just hoping I can regain and then maintain the momentum I had prior to the long weekend and really hammer some mapping out and then maybe start drudging through the interaction adding process.

I can probably design around the problem tiles (different tree style in the fairy forest tileset, the shop and building tops, and the sandy beaches are the biggest offenders), but I'll have to compromise my original visual design.

It's not just during the transistion, but it's also not the entire map.  I'll attach a pic to show you what's happening.

I've noticed these popping up from time to time.  The graphics just get kinda jumbled and will eventually sort themselves out, but I was wondering why this was happening in the hopes that I could prevent it.  Is it something inherent to ZOLE or could it be my emulator?

I think I've figured out what was going on with the map.  It seems if the screen's time flag is set incorrectly on a screen you warp to, it will not update the map in that time period...at least that seems to be what was happening with me.  For some reason a bunch of the screens have the wrong time flagged...

Wow, you map really fast. Looking pretty sweet.

To be fair, I had been working on both maps simultaneously for the first two weeks doing the present screen and then the past of the same screen.  I decided I wanted a completed work though so decided to forgo the past for a while.  This is what I had as of starting this topic a couple days ago.  Though I did finish Mabe Village, portions of the prairie, and the signpost maze (which isn't a maze yet in the past).

Any suggestions from anyone are welcome whether they be story or mapping related.

...but I cannot make any promises about whether I will use said suggestions.  If you point out something with my mapping that makes sense, yeah, I'll probably take that suggestion and roll with it.  If something you suggest expressly goes against the intent of the game (i.e. it would cause a sequence break...which I have noticed I've allowed for an inescapable trap in the present I will need to fix), it might influence me to make a change while still maintaining the sequence I intended but it may just not happen.

That being said, it is pretty set in stone in regards to the sequence and location of the first three dungeons and the necessary bits between them.  I might still dabble in some cryptic messages here and there as filler between those points, but the points are set.

Also, the ultimate goal and story are decided on.  I know where I am starting and where I am going, but the details along the way are still somewhat fluid.

No story spoilers (other than introductory information like would be found in the manual of a full game).  I can say that I'm batting around some ideas regarding Link and how to give him his sword.  I have one idea I just came up with and I think it will work really well and will give you that sense of mystery that Link's Awakening had.

What's really going on and who or what can you trust?

Uploaded a picture of Koholint Island from the past.  You can see that the swamp from Link's Awakening is a lake in this time period and dries up over time.  Also, you can see where they are building up the moat around what will become Kanalet Castle and as I mentioned the quarry where the stone was mined for Kanalet Castle.

Yeah, it's a pretty basic scripting though so making something generic or abstract really doesn't work.  I may actually put this off for some time to see what else I have to script and see if I will have the spare space to script each one individually.  If that turns out to be the case (likely I suspect since Link's Awakening didn't seem to have as many of these  type of situations so most scripts will be for anything I add specifically), I'll just script each one individually with what I currently have in terms of spawning (I spawn the Ghini a half tile above link's position...makes it look right to me), but I will likely use FF8B to check the tile as you suggested in order to get it to react on all sides.

Uploaded a new picture with some tile corrections.  As I inspected the blown up map as a whole, I noticed as I said before that the castle was not lining up properly between the front entrance and the second floor balcony.  Upon further inspection though, I noticed that I had multiple instances of half trees around the flooded sign maze.  They would have looked fine in the original since you cannot transition between the relevant screens, but since I can swim around it would be obvious...and I just like having that continuity anyhow.  Can't believe Lin complimented my mapping when I so many obvious errors. :001_tt2:

In all seriousness, I appreciate the interest and enthusiasm I am getting from you guys.  It's nice to have some people who are really interested in what I'm doing.

Tomorrow, I'm not sure if I want to work on scripting the ghini to rise from the tombstones (that's a lot of tombstones now...) or if I want to finish mapping the past or perhaps start on the present underwater to kind of break things up a bit since I haven't done any of those yet.

Dungeons are going to be interesting.  The dungeon in Ages have larger rooms than Link's Awakening so I am going to have to do something with that...perhaps simply enlarge the single rooms of dungeons to make them seem more grandiose and merge the broken up larger rooms where possible.  Suggestions for how to handle that issue are welcome.

By and large, yes, it will be much closer to what we saw in Link's Awakening, but it is at least a year prior to Link's Awakening or even the Oracle series, so some things are going to be different.  Many holes will be missing from the prairie (as you can see in the present, those have only gotten worse over the years...dang sinkholes...) and Richard will only have his villa and the pothole field will be free of plant life as it hasn't been planted yet.

One of the biggest differences would again be the rapids area.  Where the present it has dried up due to the volcanic cutting of the supply of water from Tal Tal Mountains, the past is arguably worse since the rapids do not really exist at all.  In the story, the rapids are actually the result of the quarry where Richards castle materials were obtained being flooded once they were no longer needed.  Because of this, you'll notice that not only is the water level in Tal Tal Heights where it was in the original game, it is actually higher due to the fact that water flows through the rapids much faster than the original river that flows around the quarry.

Now, I did have to make tweaks to the present overworld you see now.  Originally, there were going to be multiple places to go up and down into the Tal Tal Mountains as in the original game, but due to the limit of (essentially) 3 palette transitions, I used some lava flows to block those entrances and cut back on some of my original plans for lava actually flowing down and into the Tal Tal Heights due to area ID glitches as well as the fact that they would not have a smooth color transition.

A few areas are still up in the air in terms of what I keep and what I change about them to reflect the time difference.  I can say that certain things and places will be different, but not necessarily because of the time difference.  I won't spoil that little tidbit for you, but keep that in mind.  The past will definitely have hints in plain sight regarding the who, what, and where of Link's original appearance on Koholint and how his arrival affected the island.

All in all, I'm really excited about this and I'm glad the mapping is done for at least one time period.  I had been putting in enemies as I went along, but I finally decided I wanted something I could really show off and something that (if I have a line of chests with items for debugging purposes) I could at least wander around and let others wander around.

I was going to have my local friends do the alpha testing, but I may actually consider releasing an overworld only build for you guys to take a look at and experience once they're both mapped (and I'll have to map the underwater portions too).

I have clicked it and I have since clicked the ASM patch button a few times for good measure.  It has to have worked because I can pull up the map and inventory from the starting screen, but I am just not sure what's going on with the map.  If the map functionality cannot be changed anyhow, this may be just fine anyhow since no info is better than conflicting info I guess.