i was brainstorming alternate ways to port 999, and while the obvious way is to just make it swap between full screen text box and dialogue boxes (like 90% of normal visual novels do. including vlr) but idk, it kinda loses some of that ludo-narrative juice that just cannot be divorced from the original 2 screen format.
so i kinda fell in love with the concept of a classic pc adventure game presentation, a format where it's completely natural to have multiple windows on screen in a cool frame (and you don't have to mess with the aspect ratios of the artwork. but that might be my bias against widescreen talking lmaoo)
and so i've been putting simultaneously too much and not enough effort into making a mock-up
if it wasn't obvious, this is taking heavy inspiration from the save menu screen design.
the dialogue box would be a pop-up window so you'd get to see this design down there sometimes (my justification for putting in the effort of drawing it)
for the final puzzle, i imagine the two main screens popping out and swapping places (or giving you a prompt to swap them yourself, either with a button or maybe drag and drop?)
i haven't quite decided what to do with the upper right area... i could put the adv puzzle controls there but that might be too cluttered, so im thinking maybe there's just like a cool aesthetic detail up there?
my friends just suggested putting the inventory there, or some sort of timer/clock that shows how many hours there are left, much to think about...
That's actually very similar to how I recently played it emulated via Steam Deck (side by side "screens") - going in without knowing about [the thing], I was reminded of those earlier games / the Film Window of TSC with the presentation and prose/dialogue split initially, so I think a port could absolutely have made that work intentionally by drawing out those inspirations, it certainly works better than just dumping the dual windows. I think the Etrian Odyssey HD collection is the only DS-to-single-screen-system port that made use of keeping the separate screen boundaries...
