@ A long time ago, on a message board known as Zelda Fan Game Central, a user named AoDC releases a fan game called Zelda: Oracle of Life Online. This is a story about the greatest fan game to ever come out of ZFGC to date!

Game Maker. The software that brought us all together. Mark Overmars had developed Game Maker as an educational tool. But, it grew into a life of its own. ZFGC had gotten exposed to it through Daniel Barras's Ocarina of Time 2D project. We shared little bits of code and resources as we all struggled to piece together some functional games. It was a meme on ZFGC, for someone to post "yet another walking demo". But, we're not here to talk about yet another walking demo. We're here to talk about Oracle of Life.

The Beginning (2004-2005)

Let's rewind the clock to 2003-2004, when a person named Aaron Mercer joined ZFGC as AgeOfDarknessCreator. They had ambitions to make a Zelda fan game, like many others at the time! Thus, AoDC along with another user from ZFGC - HeroOfFire (Andrew Nardi) joined forces to develop their own Zelda fan game called: The Best of Zelda. Make sure to check out the screenshots in the gallery below. One would describe this game to be a parody of sorts, and also serves as a nice snapshot of the meme culture ZFGC had developed at the time.

At this time Aaron had started the project in Game Maker 6. This version was very instrumental given its ability to be extended with DLLs, 3d rendering, a new particle system, etc. The Best of Zelda serves as sort of an early stomping ground for what would later become Oracle of Life. AoDC had gotten into World of Warcraft right around the same time, which would later go on to influence Oracle of Life. I would like to point out that Aaron had a habit of drawing inspiration from other media, so this will become a recurring theme in the story as a whole.

Also, as far as The Best of Zelda goes, I do not have that much knowledge about it because its from before I had any involvement with Oracle of Life! I apologize in advance for the sparse information regarding it. From the source code that I have, it seems that Oracle of Life version 0.71 and The Best of Zelda share similarities with its core logic, which is why I speculated that Oracle of Life decended directly from it. : )

Anyways, so about ZFGC

We're going to go off on a little tangent. Because, something happened at ZFGC that significantly altered the course of its community for a year. ZFGC in the summer of 2005 decided to have an identity crisis.

ZFGC Died (2005-early 2006)

The site was rebranded to Gamers Advanced. It was an experiment at the time by the people behind ZFGC, to expand the community beyond just the Zelda fan games. Some users were recruited to write articles for the site, such as HeroOfFire, who I will refer to as Hoffy from here on.

Gamers Advanced in its short life happened to have a lot of cross over with another community called DS-Revolution, or DS-R for short. At one point, a decision was made to merge communities, thus DS-R absorbed Gamers Advanced. This move was considered rather controversial, with ZFGCers and DS-R members being awkwardly squished together in a sudden merger. I remember feeling things were rushed and maybe forced, so I can't really say much on what happened during this period since I had left the community for a bit.

DS-R focused on the Nintendo DS and ran a series of articles. The fan game aspect seemed to be deprioritized, in an effort to legitimize the community away from legally grey area fan game projects. But anyways, let's move on to talk about the next phase of ZFGC.

ZFGC-X: The Community Regroups (Early 2006-April 2006)

At the beginning of the universe, there was nothing. Then, suddenly, boom.

ZFGC-X ended up being formed by Drewdelz in February of 2006 on InvisionFree. Collectively we all felt the same, the community in my opinion could at least agree what brought us all together were these things: Zelda, love for game making, and ytmd(this is semi relevant because we were huge on posting YTMND in its heydey - shout out to MegaWorM's ytmnd clone!

I will say one thing, by the time 2005 came around, we all meme'd OOT2D to hell and accepted that there's more to the fandom than this one fan game. What OOT2D did was ignite the spark. And that I think is more than incredible that we even got that...

As I had mentioned before, AoDC had a habit of drawing inspiration from other media that he was into at the time - which by the way, this will become a recurring theme in the story as a whole since AoDC is awesum possum grade awesum like that. : D He spent this period playing World of Warcraft, and that inspired him to rework Oracle of Life into an MMO. The community would remain unaware of this as nothing had been shared until later on.

ZFGC.com: The Rebirth (April 2006-Present)

Kirby, Metal and several other admins of ZFGC congregated in a decision to finally restore ZFGC.com. This was met with much excitement as ZFGC-X at this point was bustling with activity, returning members, and new members. New projects as well! Sadly, ZFGC-X has been lost to the sands of time, so currently I cannot show you any of the old posts from then.

But, in the short time span ZFGC-X existed, Drewdelz did an amazing job of running the site, making it as close to the original feel as possible. Thus, began the rebirth of ZFGC.com , the 2nd and longest running SimpleMachineForum install to date, for ZFGC!

Oracle of Life Online (April 2006-June 2006)

After the rebirth of ZFGC.com, AoDC posts the Oracle of Life thread that still exists on zfgc today! AoDC announces an unprecendented kind of fan game. An MMO with a RPG take on the A Link to the Past style gameplay formula. With its own story that would evolve over time, with an open world that you can share with other players. The site was in an unproar at the announcement!

The Land of Zelonion is in destruction. The atmosphere is cold, the air is dark. The sun hides behind the soft sillhoutte of the clouds, and the lives of those lost due to the King's greed roam the forest roads and the city streets. What was the most powerful and well-structured land of all time has fallen into an everlasting deathwish. And the only way to repair these matters is to find the Oracle of Life. Four Heroes of Legend must rise to serve. An Archer, a Summoner, a Priest and a Swordsman must journey deep into this Zombie-infested land in search of the one who commands life, the Oracle of Life. Discover how the land came to be, discover the powers of the Oracle and witness the power of the Heroes coming together. This is Zelda: Oracle of Life.

"Yay, an online game! I can't wait. Hopefully the first public demo comes out soon. I like the HUD in the screenshots." - Hero of Vortex

"Congrats, youve done exceptionally well, hope you keep up the good work, i know how hard and tiresome online games can be to program." - Infini

As you can see, the community was absolutely mind blown by what AoDC revealed. The first beta launched privately to invite only testers on April 16th. AoDC had teamed up with Weapon, Yue, Hoffy , and set off to work towards a planned beta for April 16th, 2006. Eventually the beta was postponed due to AoDC wanting to develop the game more. Throughout the month, questions were answered and ideas were thrown around. Eventually, AoDC had the idea of creating an area named after one of the ZFGC.com members, Piers.

Im going to make a hunting area called Piers. Just for you. Enemies wont be hard, I think Piers is a good area name. -- AoDC

Not much outside of what was publicly mentioned on the forums were known. Players could only speculate, and many questions were thrown around in the thread. It was pure chaos, with mods having to moderate the thread for spam. But alas, we finally get to the moment we've all been waiting for! (drum roll please)

Trailer 1

It was at this point that the first beta was announced for June 10th, 2006. The gameplay took a hybrid approach of allowing keyboard or mouse control, with a selection of classes to choose from. Story progression would be given through quests that could be found throughout the game. There was also PvP in limited areas! Classes require its own section, so let's spend some time taking a look at them.

Class Information

Classes were openly discussed upon initial announcement. The objective was to give players several modes of gameplay, with combat being a primary focus. AoDC developed mage/summoners first because he preferred summoner type of gameplay. The way summoners worked is that you would use your magic to weaken your opponent. Then you could "haunt" an enemy, turning them into your victim under control until they die. So you basically kill em by self mutilating or you have them act as a meatshield. Something I should point out, Oracle of Life meant to be played as a full on roleplaying type of experience, but that never really materialized.

Class	Description	Weapon	Clothing	Ability
Novice	The simple peasants of Zelonion.	Dagger	Peasant Tunic	Swing Dagger
Archer	The long distance bow and arrow warriors.	Bow n' Arrows	Red Archer Tunic	Shoot Arrow
Summoner	The evil wizards that summons and controls enemies from hell.	Magic Staff	Black Robe	Summon Like Like
Swordsman	The loyal knights that use nothing but blades and sheer strength.	White Sword	Green Tunic	Swing Sword
Priest	Females that have been brought up to summon powers from fairies, and aid warriors with their magical abilities.	Fairy	Priestess Dress	Heal

Oracle of Life Finally Comes Online

In the trailer, previewed was the first initial quest in a forest maze. In Zelonion, you could also access a dueling arena, and an inn.

AoDC at this point was deadset on releasing the first public playable demo, intended to run throughout the summer. So much of the work that was going on at this point was tiling, balancing spells.. NPCs also were being added, the most notable one being Tobias - named after Fox from ZFGC.com. The demo then went onto launch on June 10th, 2006, peaking at 48 players concurrently.

I've grabbed the credits for the game, as of version 0.71, which more or less makes up the bulk of the people who may have contributed to Oracle of Life either by proxy or directly!

[Team]
Aaron Mercer (a.k.a. AoDC) - Programmer/Gameplay
Andrew Nardi (a.k.a. Hero of Fire) - Spriter/Storyline
Soojin Yun (a.k.a. Weapon) - Spell Design/Game balance

[Credits]
Music:
Nintendo
Video Game Music (http://www.vgmusic.com/):
Forest Trees:
TakaM
(Edited by Calvein)
Online Communication 3.1:
Stefan Janssen
Sound Effects:
Nintendo
Goodnight
Summoner Walking Animation:
aab
(Edited by Hero of Fire)
Archer Walking Animation:
Dascu
(Edited by Hero of Fire)
Title Screen:
TakaM
Hero of Fire
Ploray (Town):
aab
Calvein
TakaM
Helios
Hero of Fire
Zelonion (Town):
Calvein
TakaM
aab
Kren
Hero of Fire
Advertisement Banner:
Hero of Fire
Magalink
Summoner Advertisement Banner:
Alex2539
Snow Engine:
GameCave Productions (http://www.gamecave.org)
Summoner Spells:
Stars - AoDC
Deku I - Old Skool Mario
Business Deku I - TomPel
Skulltula I - Jelleye
Poe I - Talman25
Keese I - Jelleye
Gerudo I - Desgardes
Redead I - Inverder (Edited by Dascu)
Iron Knuckle I - NObody
Garo I - Fletcher
Dodongo I - Dascu
Zelonion Inn (Indoors):
Kren
The Arena (Indoors):
Kren
Guards:
pucifur27
(Colours by OldSkoolMario)
Room Send Code:
Steffan Mitrovic
(Edited by AoDC)

But then given the influx of feedback and bugs, AoDC was rapidly attepmting to push out bugfixes to his game. Problems arose because AoDC couldn't due to lack of access to the server that was hosting the game. Take a look at these patch notes, just to give you an idea of how much was changing on this day alone!

At this point, people have mostly completed all of the content that was in the game as it was only two quests. One that involved finding the fairy fountain in the forest maze, and another that involved finding rats that hid around the two different towns in the game. So, players improvised...

And likewise, AoDC being AoDC dropped another update the next day. I should note that this update also was the breaking point for the server issues.

Demo 0.73 releases on 6-11-2006 US Eastern

• Boss added to Arena.
• No more # or / in text.
• No camping (Poeple can get you though, so move up).
• Minor changes.

Also, all, version C will be released, with our new host gm112. He is ALWAYS online, and we can > do things fast, abcgum09 is not always online. Bad news, accounts will be back to the state of > four hours ago. You may have recreate.

Ill post 73C soon.

Summer of Oracle of Life (June 2006-early July 2006)

When I was given control of the server, I had setup my laptop to never go into sleep mode, and it effectively turned into a server. There was an agreement that I would be available to help whenever AoDC needed help during his hours, which worked for me since I happened to be up when he was around anyways! Which was the reason I was given the role.

Since school had just let out, many of us spent hours on Oracle of Life, despite it lacking content. I mentioned that we had improvised games like hide n seek, and also spent many hours in the PvP arena. Since I was the host, I was able to modify my account files to have a custom class that was implemented in the client, which spawned a boss enemy. It happened to be the Arrghus boss from A Link to the Past. Here's what the sprite looked like!

Everyone had a shocked reaction when the floating eye enemy spawned in the PvP arena. At first they were skeptical if it was human controlled or not. But, I exposed the truth after someone had finally defeated me in the PvP arena. This had lasted until the next update, which added encryption and some counter measures to thwart modifying packets as some players discovered a method of how to do that. Even small niche fan games can't seem to escape cheaters!

Another thing that I remember was helping people with locked accounts. There was a bug with the server where a user would get "stuck" in game and wouldn't be able to log in until the timeout was over. Though even sometimes the timeout would not remove the lock. I had to manually fix accounts. It was nice to be helpful to people in a customer support type of role, even for a fan game. I remember enjoying answering questions.

My friend Mreow hung out at my house all of the time, and he ended up joining ZFGC because of Oracle of Life. We would watch people idle in game by exploiting a bug where you could make the player run indefinitely in certain areas. There were big things in the pipeline as ZFGC had annoucned a new event for the summer of 2006. Z3 - an exciting idea that was proposed during the ZFGC-X transition. The Oracle of Life team had great momentum and decided to focus on expanding the content of the game.

Trailer 2

New Content

Since the last public beta, AoDC was testing with Hoffy, myself and my friend Mreow for some bug testing. And things got delayed a little as we found some issues, but they were worked out pretty quickly. Players were able to access Trovey Peninsula by taking the boat from East Zelonion. From there, they can access the Hunting Ground which has enemy Poe's and Keese's flying around waiting for players to attack them! Be careful, as you can get attacked by multiple foes at once!!! So, clearly, this update was a lot of content for such a short amount of time!

We'll go over these in more detail in another part since we have covered everything up to Z3. And we must cover Z3 itself, so stay tuned! I think there was something special about what AoDC and Hoffy did for the community. For a moment, we had our own thing. And the timing was absolutely perfect. These are one of the stories that exist in a corner of the internet, of moments that brought different people together.

Until next time, gm112 waz here, then he wasn't. @