Hm, okay. So that's really cool about the viewport.. I think I got it working without having to redraw anything with your parallax advice. But it means I should still leave deadspace above the map right? Like in the second picture I attached? And force move the player to new coordinates when travelling up/down.

Thank you so much for the help. I can see how the scrolling room thing can be annoying - I will reconsidering changing it :)

Well I could but it wouldn't have the same feel right? ScrollTo makes the transition seamless right?

What about my other questions though? Particularly the black bar/status thing...

I was wondering what the most efficient way to create a top-down action RPG with the Legend of Zelda like scrolling. From reading various tutorials, it looks like I could create an invisible sprite at the side of each area and then move the player/scroll the camera to the appropriate pixels.

Two questions:

1) How does one deal with the status bar over the top (e.g., black bar with map/life total/etc in picture)? All the tutorials I've found have a HUD that is just overlaid on top of the actual game. One way I thought about it is to have empty space in between every single area in the map. Is this the best way?

<img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3a/Legend_of_Zelda_NES.PNG" border="0" />

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/LuSL4UX.png1" border="0" />

2) Is it best practice to destroy all the sprites once you leave an area and then redraw them once you enter it? How can you save location of enemies/items? I thought about creating an array for each room and saving everything into the appropriate cell. Is the optimal?