I believe that there are four things which a questmaker must present well to create a good quest. These are, in no particular order, Plot, Gameplay, Graphics and Music. These four bascially create the gaming experience and have to be presented well.
Presentation, above all else, is everything. You can have a great Story but present it in a single butt-long text at the beginning of your quest, which will pretty much bore the player to sleep. You can have nice fights and clever puzzles but just place them totally random throughout your quest, which will at least confuse/fustrate your player. You can have a great set of Graphics such as DoR but still leave a weak impression in terms of graphics by the player if you just slammed every tile you found down somewhere on your screens. You can have an awesome version of Zelda's Lullaby but still have players don't like it if you decide to use it as the final battle theme.
You see, presentation really does matter and adds greatly to a quest's quality and sucsess. The better you present each aspect of your game, the more everything's polished out, the more professional the game'll feel.
Also, good advirtizing of your quest adds to it's sucess and grants you a wider audience. Make sure to have an interesting, well-arranged thread (or blog, or whatever) where you present your project in an appropriate manner. Presentation is mostly a visual medium so some nice screenshots always are a good idea to include in such a thread (or similar). Videos work even better here, since they show the whole experience, but sometimes a screenshot simply is the faster way to go.
Keep in mind, presentation is everything. A well polished-out small Classic quest without any script or any custom boss at all can beat a heartlessly crammed together DoR quest any time, regardless how huge it is. Seriously.
Now that I've hopefully made clear how important I think proper presentation is, let's move on to the four things which a quest consits of.
First, we have Plot here. A good story is something more than "Zelda got kidnapped by Ganon. Find the 8 Pieces of the Triforce and rescue her."
There're lots of ways to present a good plot, no doubting that. The easiest, and yet one of the most effecitve ones is the way which follows Freytag's theory of drama. You start of with an expostion, which introduces the prevailing mood, initial situation, conflicts, state of things, time, place, persons. (This could all be done in an introuducal tutorial part of the game, for example. In OoT that would've been the part of the game before Link left the Kokiri forest.). Than the tension rises (for instance,when Link visits the first dungeons - in OoT for example this would've been the first three dungeons) until it reaches it's first climax (in OoT that would've been the happenings at the Temple of Time). Than there has to be a twist. An unexpected twist (OoT: Ganondorf got his hands on the Triforce.). Now we create yet again tension (Link visits even more dungeons in order to solve the new problem. That would've been awakening the sages in OoT.) until we reach the second climax of the story (the final battle) which leads to a conclusion of the problems portait earlier in the game.
In order to present your story good you have to decide when to reveal which informations. You don't want to tell the player everything just in the beginning but reaveal more and more information while Link progresses through his quest. A solid background story and lot's of sidestory also greatly add to a 'good plot'. Create a living, breathing world, which could actually believed to be true. Mystery is also one of the mircale words here. Leaving things unexplained sometimes adds more to a good plot than giving away every tiny detail. The Sheikah people from OoT are that interesting because you don't exactly know much about them.
However, the utterly most important thing about presenting the story good is to show it rahter than to tell it. There's a huge diffenrece here. If the Deku tree just told Link the story of the Golden Godesses, the player would've fallen asleep (and Link even nearly did, remember him sitting on the ground after the story was finished?). Instead of just beeing told, it was shown. There was a cutscene. You've seen what happend. Of course, you still had to read text, but you got some eye-candy, too. Antother occasion where this rule applies is when, for instance, Link does something. Let's say, he picks up a book from a bookshelf. You could just have Link stand in front of the bookshelf and have a string appear which reads "Link picks up a book". But you could also show the player what happens without the need for any words. Link streches his arm out to the bookshelf and everyone will get the drift.
I may seem to go over the top here, but love for the detail is something which is never wrong. Anyways, let's move on.
Also, have a look here at what Master Maniac thinks about this. Good read!
Gameplay. What is good gameplay? Good gameplay in a Zelda game is balanced battles, clever puzzles and altering duties. The difficulty has to be balanced. Which enemey do you introduce at what point of the game? What item do you find at what point in the game? Puzzles have to be balanced in terms of diffculty, too. A hard head-breaking block-puzzle in the first dungeon is just no fun. Later on in the game, it could be seen as some sort of a challenge, though. Than, diversity is also extremly important. You don't want to do the same thing over and over again. Be it the same mosters in each room of the dungeon, the same type of puzzles or the same 'duties' (duties such as find a key to enter the dungeon, bring ItemX from NPC A to NPC B) over and over again. Keep your player entertained by giving them more to do than just one or two things which repeat over and over again.
This also applies to dungeon bosses. Custom bosses are better. Really. The build-in ones might work, but just because something works it doesn't mean it's a good choice. "Custom" actually is the new black of quest-making. We want to see something new. (Scripting comes in handy here!!)
Also, the player might, at some point of the game, want to do something else than to rush through the main-plot. That's where sidequests come in handy. Give the player more to do than just to beat Ganon. He could also hunt for HCP's or work his way though a Trading Sequence in oder to get some extra-gimmick. Talking about gimmicks, don't over do it, guys. One or two gimmicky items (or whatever) are nice and fun, too much of it might annoy the player rather than entertain her or him.
Than we have Graphics, which should actually be screendesign rather. Pretty tiles alone don't make a good screen. However, this is to huge for me to talk about it in this post. Take a look here instead.
Lastly, Music. I'm as musical as the wheel of a car, so I can not say anything about how to make good music. However, I'd like to leave a line or another about how to use it. Do never ever decide to use a certain MIDI (or Mp3 or whatever) just because you like it. Listen to it because you like it. But only use it if it suits the area/situation. The music is an important part of the experience of the game. It has to support what's going on the screen. It can't 'stand alone'.
Basically, everything that's going on on the screen has to support another aspect of the screen. Just as a bed might support the idea of a house, a house-ish-MIDI supports the idea of house.
That is, what I believe makes "The 'good' quest". Do you have to follow every thing mentioned here to make a good quest? No, as long as you present your work right, any Classic Quest without any fancy feature at all can be "a good quest". But a quest which is presented well and has fancy features might well be "a better quest".
What do you think, guys? Did I cover everything or did I miss something extremly important?
Edited by Sheik, 17 October 2010 - 04:08 PM.
