19 replies to this topic

[Evan20000]

I personally dread working on overworlds, but love designing dungeons and bosses. I know some friends who work almost the exact opposite. I'm just curious where on this sort of spectrum most of PureZC falls.

[Aevin]

My love of storytelling is my main reason for making quests. I value story so thoroughly that I tend to classify most other aspects of game-building as part of it. All of them are just tools for the cause of storytelling for me. Graphics and music help set the mood, and can even highlight and enhance aspects of the narrative. Dungeon layout, even traps and enemy behavior can contribute to the story in some ways. And stuff like game structure and McGuffins can vary wildly depending on the needs of the story.

[Titanium Justice]

My favorite part by far is making the overworld. What I'm not quite as good at is making dungeons, as well as integrating a comprehensible story. I did go to great lengths to pull these off in my previous attempt at a quest, though despite there being only 5-6 planned dungeons, they got out of hand with their sizes, and the story was very convoluted. My current quest project will feature barely any cutscenes or story elements. For the most part it will be assumed to be your typical collect the triforce and save the princess affair, but will subvert expectations last minute. I do feel confident that I could make a quest with a decent story and cutscenes now, but I would rather save my good ideas for writing fiction.  

[TheLegend_njf]

I selected other for "All of the Above".

 

I used to just like overworlds and story, and pretty much everything else was built around that. I was more interested in making immersive looking dungeons than fun dungeons. What resulted were quests that were pretty, but lacked real gameplay.

 

But embracing everything a quest has to offer, I just feel much more fulfilled as a quest designer. Today I love deciding everything from overworlds, to items, to enemies (and drive Moosh crazy asking for his help), to dungeon form and gameplay, to the general quest philosophies and framework. Even how the quest's economy system has taken extra though of care by introducing a where system where items are just way too expensive to buy reasonably, but you're also never expected to grind a single rupee.  

 

I couldn't possibly select a handful of aspects I like about quest designing when I generally like the entire experience as a whole, but that's just me. 

[Anthus]

I picked "other", since I enjoy a variety of questmaking aspects, and also find some to be really annoying/ not fun.

 

For your list, I'd have to say Overworld, and Dungeons are tied with me. I love making overworlds, and I mostly use Classic these days, but I love just sitting down and making random screens, and overworld areas, even if they never get used for anything. I like pairing a good MIDI/ bgm with a nice palette, and going wild. The same applies for dungeons, but here is where I often lose my momentum in projects. I enjoy the idea of designing a dungeon, but more often than not, I realize I can't do what I set out to do, so I go for something simpler/ otherwise compromise. I like building areas that reward exploration, and don't punish the player too harshly for dying/ trying something new.

 

This one isn't on the list, but I enjoy making tiles too. I'm not really great at it by any means, but spriting can be fun. It can also end up being a ton of work for something you thought was gonna be simple. 

 

Ultimately, when I open up ZC, I am either trying a new idea I thought of, or making an area I was inspired to make. Whether or not these will ever amount to a cohesive project remains to be seen.

[CDi-Fails]

I like building the dungeons, but not designing.

[Eddy]

That's pretty difficult to say, since I'm kinda torn between dungeons and overworlds. I'm leaning more towards dungeons though because I always found them much easier to work with and you can really use a ton of cool ideas which fits a nice theme. I've always like dungeons more than overworlds in official Zeldas too, so I guess because of that I ended up designing dungeons better than overworlds and liking them more

[Shane]

Hard to say honestly. With the quest I'm currently making, I'm starting to enjoy making just about every aspect of quest making including building houses and caves. I'd say overworld designing has been a far longer favorite aspect of mine but I do enjoy creating dungeons too as it's so satisfying seeing a complex map come together nicely. I also like storytelling but for me it's just not as fun as designing stuff.

 

I decided to go with "other" because I couldn't really choose just one, so I would go with "screen/layout designing". I just like building maps in general nowadays.

[Lüt]

I hate to be that guy again, but - it depends.

 

In classic, I found everything to be similarly easy to work with - there wasn't any particular aspect I had an easy or hard time working with compared to any other, so I didn't have any particular favorite or least-favorite part of making the quest. At first, the notion of an entire overworld was overwhelming, and I felt more comfortable doing a small dungeon. Then when I ran out of space on the overworld so quickly that I had to make an entire underworld and little nether-thingy to finish everything I wanted, it became more overwhelming keeping up with the dungeons. Part of the reason is that they offer a lot more design possibilities as far as tricks and traps go, especially when you begin to take advantage of multi-floor configurations. Because of that, their progress fell significantly behind my overworld material, which just kind of flowed out once I got the hang of it.

 

On the other hand, I recently opened DoR-Hybrid for the first time - totally different game. Overworlds require just as much precision and attention to detail as any dungeon might require due to having a literal height change for every new tier of rock wall you add, so coming up with a "natural flow" requires far more planning than an abstract tileset like classic. Alternatively, doing dungeons, even freeform, is easier because many of the dungeon sets don't take top-down perspective into account the way classic does, so you can just flood walls in whatever direction you want and not have to worry about the angles of the vertical bricks.

 

I think a lot of it comes down to which tileset you're using and how complex or well laid-out it is. Aliases always help, but even then, classic-styled dungeons can be surprisingly hard to work with if you intend to keep perspectives correct, especially when doing multi-tier setups. They're always the most rewarding in the end though, so I suppose I'll answer with "dungeons" despite the tedium of making them in the first place.

 

As for bosses/enemies/items... I've seen a few lines of code in my lifetime.

 

Story... the princess is in another dungeon?

 

(Yeah, I'm pretty much just a layout designer.)

[Mitsukara]

Some barbarian guy Evan: "What is best in life Zelda Classic?"

Me: "To shield-push your enemies, to see the Somaria block driven before you, and to steer the aviations of the Beetle."
 

I learned about ZC in The Year 2000, around the first release to include ZQuest. And I was excited for a lot of years, but I never really finished anything... I lost interest in the 1.92 era. In the time I was away, 2.5 was released. It was learning about the potential of scripting that brought me back, because my favorite thing is playing with items. The more items the player has, the more they can do in the entire game, and my favorite part of any official Zelda game is always playing with the items (...on my original file in LTTP GBA, when I got to the second ending, I learned that I'd used the shovel over 900 times, more than anything besides the Sword... because it was a semi-new item for that version of the game). The item editor is cool too (though it's uses are more for particular niches). This capability, more than anything else, is what's driven me to seriously finish a project, after so many years.

I do like things about the rest of the design process- though I sometimes get writers block when it comes to designing an overworld, or confuse myself trying to design a dungeon. The potential of scripting, and the enemy editor, certainly make bosses fun (though I feel like mine are pretty clunky). I do have some interest in storytelling too, but I tend to want to steer such things towards my own ventures more than my fangame attempts (and some of the stuff I'd like to write about wouldn't really fit in Zelda very well at all, anyway). I do each of those things... but it's the broad range of capabilities that you can give to the player that really keeps me going. The more different kinds of gadgets and abilities the player has at their disposal, the happier I am with what I'm making.

My runner up thing might be making custom graphics, but, I'm not sure. I tend to want to keep my combo tables simple and easy to use (....though I have severely botched this with my current project), but actually drawing tiles can be fun, and not too tough. This is probably because drawing, with both pixel art and line art, is one of my other main hobbies/creative efforts, though.

Edited by Mitsukara, 15 November 2016 - 10:36 AM.

[Ben]

I like-a make-a dungeons.

 

They're fun.

 

Dungeon carving mode helps a lot. These days I do a little bit of dungeon planning; I get an overall layout of what I want to do, but actual individual screens I make up on the spot.

 

 

Overworlds aren't my favorite to do, but admittedly since 2.50 are much easier with things like combo aliases. I made an alias for Classic tileset that is just a blob of mountain tiles correctly oriented and I can use it like a big brush and set down screens really fast, and for things like Pure tileset I can use aliases to plop down trees, houses, and ground clutter. Then I can use relational mode to set down water or dirt paths.

[Nightmeres]

i enjoy making the story the most honestly cause i adore writing and stories 

[Evan20000]

I gotta say, these poll results have been fascinating.

And for those of you who absolutely don't like working on one area, there's plenty of hope for finding a partner to collaborate with if these results are anything to go by!

[KingPridenia]

Although I'm not really good at sticking to a project, I really like making custom enemies, even if it's just with the base editor. I also tend to better balance vanilla enemies as well. Honestly, as overlooked as they are compared to scripted enemies, I still find a lot of value in the normal editor. I also have gotten more into making dungeons that aren't a series of 12x7 rooms now that I'm not being lazy and am actually attempting to make dungeons look more freeform. Other times, I like making and rebalancing existing items. What I'm working on at the moment, the Wand is basically meant to be the sword beam replacement, so there are four Wands throughout the game. So more or less, each Wand is basically a ranged version of its similarly leveled sword (i.e Level 3 Wand = Level 3 Sword's damage) with the swords being strictly melee only.

[Avaro]

So I voted dungeons. My least favourite aspect is actually making screens, as weird as that sounds. I like making subscreens, items, enemies, scripts, stories, music, ideas, puzzles and gameplay functionality but when it comes to making the screens progress gets slowed down. I'm still really excited about making dungeons though. It's really worth it, really fulfilling. lol

Edited by Avataro, 18 November 2016 - 09:56 AM.