What's the game about?
The Book of Mudora helps to hold together the world of Hyrule - it's a magical artifact that's been around since the beginning of time, magically recording the history of the land. Once it's broken apart, it breaks apart the cohesiveness of Hyrule as well, leading to small civil wars or arguments between various races. Link's job is to bring together the book, stop the people who broke it up in the first place, and return peace to the land.
How long did it take to make?
I've lost count of how many years I've been working on Book of Mudora. In the current iteration (Solarus engine) I believe it's been since about 2010. Before that, a Game Maker version existed, and before that it was only on paper and in my head.
​
That original version in Game Maker allowed me to flesh out my initial ideas and get them into a working game, but I soon found that there was too much I wouldn't be able to do with that engine (at least at the time). So, I happened across Solarus when it was in early development. It was being created by a fellow game maker as a way to port one of his Zelda games to a more capable engine - exactly what I was looking to do! The engine has gone through a lot of changes (all for the better) since I've started using it, and I've had to re-write some parts of the game a couple of times, but it's all been worth it. Solarus was built from the ground-up to create Zelda-like games, and it definitely delivers. What little I can't do with Solarus currently will be written into a future version, because the developer really cares about what his users need. Also, with scripts being written in Lua, I can usually create my own capabilities where the engine may be lacking. Finally, being based on SDL2 allows the engine and game to be ported to multiple platforms, which was important to me.
Where did the idea come from?
I don't event recall where the idea originally came from. Probably the same way a lot of random ideas come about in my life - my brother and I sitting around, talking about nerdy things, and asking "You know what would be cool?"
​
Then as the game developed, other ideas slowly came to me, or evolved from other game elements, and I included those in the game. Between that evolution and my love of mapping areas, the game quickly grew to be massive. Probably too massive!
The game is big and/or difficult - why?
The lack of hand-holding (as I prefer to call it) is very much by design. I wanted a game that hearkened back to the early series and forced the player to explore.
Derived from full interview available at http://wiki.zfgc.com/Book_of_Mudora