13 replies to this topic

[Darkmatt]

Here's a thing about a quest.

Progress goes here. Expect usually daily WEEKLY updates and breaks inbetween.

 

New screens, when mentioned, are visible here.

Errata: This started like a week ago.

12/24: What I've done so far is tear up the combo pages to allow more room, curse at Pure Basic, get a DMap working so I can take that snapshot, do a draft of a couple screens, finish 2 of them, and continue to have no idea where to go with this overworld. Fun stuff!

I have not even started and I'm already facing designer woes.

Edited by Darkmatt, 02 January 2015 - 07:51 PM.

[Darkmatt]

12/25: I now have a solid idea as to where Level 1 should be, now that I have a couple more screen drafts laid down. The problem here now is what to do with the overworld for now. The past 2 quests I've done I have unceremoniously dropped the first level wherever I thought would be where players would drift to. That has had varying degrees of success at best. I might just make the starting area and a couple areas next to it "newbie friendly land", where you cannot drift off so far that you get lost, kidnapped, beaten up, left for dead, etcetera. That would, however, require some extravagant ways to enforce that and I'm not quite sure how to bring the child locks on the overworld about right now.

 

Watching MeleeWizard's let's play has reminded me of something I've used to good effect but haven't consciously acknowledged: using tiered enemies to deter players from going where they shouldn't be early on. That could work for getting the player away from the later game areas, but that won't form a complete fence so that the player can find Level 1 with minimum wandering.

Edited by Darkmatt, 25 December 2014 - 09:26 PM.

[Deedee]

The thing is, you want players to be rewarded for going into those hard places. For example, what if you had items that appear only at certain time periods, in areas you can only access completely with an item that causes the former item to disappear.

 

For example, you find a cave that has 50 rupees at the end of it. However, if you bomb a certain northern wall in said cave, you access another room in the cave that has some stair leading to an area that normally can only be accessed with a hookshot. However, you cannot explore far in this area without the hookshot. So, you can only access, say, 4 screens of this hookshot-area. Then, you find a cave within those 4 screens, and get/buy an item. For example, for traversing that far without a hookshot, you get an item that upgrades the hookshot to level 2 when you get the hookshot.

In that case, if you are given/sold the item by a "shopkeeper", they would say something like "LAST IN STOCK. BUY NOW" or "YOU ARE OUR 100TH CUSTOMER. TAKE THIS". If you have the item that disables this "Last in stock item", they would say something like "WE ARE OUT OF STOCK. SORRY" or "YOU MISSED OUR BIG GIVEAWAY BY 1 PERSON. BUY SOMETHIN' WILL YA?". The thing is, you want some of these "Last in stock" places to be kinda obvious when the player misses them, but completely hidden with no markers or anything before the player find them. This way, the player thinks "Wait a second, maybe I can get to this on a second playthrough!".

 

 

 

Also, If you really don't like the Pure tileset, I do know quite a bit of the DoR tileset, so I can help with that if you are willing to switch. I also have some scripting knowledge, if you need it. EX. I can make a script that makes the game easier/harder with a choice, by making enemies do more/less damage, making it so hearts dont appear, and possibly making enemies faster (The faster thing might require a little extra setup).

[Darkmatt]

The thing is, you want players to be rewarded for going into those hard places. For example, what if you had items that appear only at certain time periods, in areas you can only access completely with an item that causes the former item to disappear.

No. I will never do BS Zelda shenanigans, and even if I do, I won't have the mechanic be that blunt. What I need to do is what I've been wanting to do: allow smart people to just bypass all the locks and go where they want.

 

Also you have it backwards. I don't like the DoR tileset. I've been using Pure because I like it better.

 

12/28: Porting graphics is easier on the mind, but more tedious to do. I've been doing that because Pure water hits up on the problem I have with the common tilesets: takes too much screen size just to even be functional. We're gonna be porting Revenge 2 water and see how that works. Why I don't just use BS/Revenge 2 tileset is because I have a use for a lot of Pure graphics, but not a whole lot for BS/Revenge 2. More screen drafts done. I'll probably not update if it's just minor stuff like me working on screens and me getting my graphics in a row.

Edited by Darkmatt, 28 December 2014 - 06:17 PM.

[Deedee]

Dang it, I forgot to put a certain point at the end of my post. You don't have to make it that blunt. For example, you can temporarily "lend" the item out to somebody for a cash fee or something to go get the item, and the shopkeepers could say "WE JUST GOT MORE STOCK. BUY NOW".

You don't like DoR? It's just Pure with more variety and Ocarina of Time graphics mixed in. If you don't like it because it's "too messy" or "too overused", Pure is overused too, and the messiness of DoR is made up by the beauty.

[Darkmatt]

It's Pure with larger assets that demand even more screen space and strains what you can even put on any single screen.

[Deedee]

Yea, I get the fact that everything feels cramped. However, isn't that the feel of every screen in FitS2?

Also, to add onto my item suggestion, instead of not giving the item to you if you are late, why not make it so that by the time you would get to that area normally, the item would be useless and/or the dungeons that you can access at the same time or after you can unlock the item are a ton more difficult due to not having the item. For example, the white sword is on death mountain, and you can only access death mountain normally with the hookshot, which is in level 5. However, there is a secret path you can take to get to the white sword after level 2, so that levels 2, 3, and 5 are not nigh-impossible.

[Darkmatt]

No? The screens in FitS2 might be cluttered but they're cluttered by assets that don't take up a large amount of space by themselves.

 

Also, I won't be taking your suggestion into consideration no matter how much you flesh it out. Thing about me: I tend to hardly, if ever, actually take an idea someone else has given me, unless the stars themselves are right. The only "ask the audience" I'll ever do is testing my ideas to see if they were good, or having the idea in my head but not knowing the means to put it down. (i.e. scripts, but I swear by the end of this quest I will learn how to do basic scripting.)

 

12/30: I've laid down tracks into different areas now. One thing to note is that these screens are subject to change, even the ones that look fine and presentable. I still have to lay down the general way and flow of my overworld before I can really tweak it. You can't paint a house if the walls aren't finished, after all.

 

This area will probably serve no immediate purpose early game other than to help point the player in the right direction. There may or may not be a castle in this area. It may or may not be of any importance, but looking at my notes on "How Player Gets Magic", it'll probably at least serve as a place to introduce a quest mechanic. Which I'll need to iron out and figure out how it'll come about, whether I want to be lazy and just use editor tricks or if I want to use scripting to give it a better feel.

Edited by Darkmatt, 31 December 2014 - 02:38 AM.

[Darkmatt]

1/7: DarkMatt's third quest, now with weekly updates instead of daily, because I like to grossly overestimate things.

 

Not much has been done in the corporeal dimension, but I have made a rough draft of Level 1, as a .png file of archaic drawings that makes sense to no one but me. Combine that with the overworld progress I've had, and I now have a charter for beginning of the game to the first triforce piece. None of it is really physical, but it's still an important milestone.

 

Here's a little trick when it comes to designing something: when you have an idea, first lay it down in the most primitive form you can imagine. This will take the fastest time, be the least effective way to bring it to life, and give you a starting point. That way, you now have a good piece of reference when, in the future, you're making that idea again but in the medium it deserves. By starting with the simplest crudest way to make a zelda classic quest, and then working your way up, you make a draft and then revise the idea as you go along. Furthermore, since the easiest way is the simplest, you can tweak the finer details of the idea with minimal effort. Those easy revisions will mean a lot more when you've reach the final step of the idea: bringing it to reality unabridged.

[Darkmatt]

1/18: So spoilers there's gonna be a castle.

 

The plan right now is to make the drafts for the overworld leading into this castle, and that's what I've been doing over the last week or 2. After that, I'll either work on a large side area that'll be available to explore after going to said castle, or go straight to Level 1.

 

I do have a general idea of what the Castle will serve, but the question is how it'll serve it. Right now I have an idea of what it'll offer, but I'm still hanging on the question of how interactive I want the quest to be.

 

I suppose interactive is the wrong word to use, but I dunno how I would describe writing captivating dialogue. In fact, spoilers, I originally had an idea to give a story to the quest. But I run into a couple caveats: one, I would have to put in a lot of work to make it entertaining and immersive, and I'm already doing that just on this quest alone. If I had dudes to help me with that, that would be that, but this is a one man band, and I want to be done sometime before we're all old. Second, I would have to think extra hard to make the story not hinge the gameplay in the slightest, because I still stand by my philosophy that a game is either a game or a story, not a hodgepodge of both that will grind eachother down. Though, I already talked about how the freedom to explore degrades the ability to tell a compelling storyline, so while I'm confident I can bring an interesting story to the table, due to philosophical and time constraints, it probably won't be any more than the random crap I put down for strings normally.

Edited by Darkmatt, 18 January 2015 - 04:21 PM.

[Deedee]

How about a story that is not making you goto a certain place, but instead guiding you their subtley?

For example, a boy must find a cure for a non-deadly disease, that causes one to go insane. That would let you explore around and find things, as it is justified by the "Look for the cure" storyline, and it also allows you to post random crap for NPC's, as they are "insane". Then make it so that ganon has the cure, but you have to collect the triforce to defeat him. However, there is no rush, as Ganon has retired, and is not actively eveil, and, again, the disease is non-deadly.

This is a great way to implement a story for a non-linear game. Or you can do something along the lines of the first zelda and make it "Save the Princess". YOu can always implement a good story without discouraging non-linearity.

[Darkmatt]

Except I said it was originally an idea. I'm not doing it.

 

Stop trying to give me suggestions.

Edited by Darkmatt, 19 January 2015 - 01:59 PM.

[Darkmatt]

1/23: Maybe someday I will get the chance to breathe during the midweek. Until then though, I felt the urge to take a screen draft and finish most of the detail on it already. For some reason I really like how this turned out and I like the idea I had put down for what lies beyond that curious gate.

 

Hopefully over the weekend I'll find the urge to finish this area of the overworld and then another and see about getting the quest off its feet and actually put in a little bit of gameplay. Until then, I've been thinking about ways to allow greater control over Blue Ring/Red Ring damage reduction.

 

I had a script figured out and prepared for Shadow of the First. I think it was BigJoe who helped me figure out how to do it, but basically, how I did it back then was a global script kept a "damage multiplier" variable that was modified when you picked up a ring. This was applied to all enemies' damage and weapon damage, and there you would have a nice working damage reduction without a lot of complications.

 

Well, there was one, and I chose not to work around it: it involved the Mirror Shield. Normally when you reflect a projectile back at an enemy, it'll just do that enemy's weapon damage to the monster unfortunate enough to catch the projectile. This meant that the more scripted defense you had, the LESS damage ANY reflected shot will do. This can be a rather, unpleasant experience to the player when he tries walling Wizzrobe shots and realizing they do nothing. Thankfully, Mirror Wizzrobes went unused in SotF, but it does mean the script's not perfect. Unless there's a way to remove the damage reduction off neutral projectiles, if projectiles could even be in a neutral condition, you pretty much get precise control over damage reduction at the expense of breaking a functionality of the Mirror Shield. Tradeoffs are never a pleasant thing to have in scripting; the goal is to add in a feature with no strings attached.

 

So right now, I am going to try a rather brute force option and just multiply every variable in item damage/enemy health/ enemy damage/and damage divisor by 8. First off, I would have to give the player a ring at the start to bring the bloated damage back down. After that, I can take advantage of the greater damage divisor and simply tick the divisor up 2 to go from 1/8th damage to 1/10th, which given the starting numbers, would equate to a 20% damage reduction when you receive the Blue Ring. Unless some hardcoded elements in this game ignore the damage divisor, I should have at the end an evenly increased damage table that can then be divided by the first divisor to return you to what you started with. After that, all I need to do to make this work is give the player a "Green" Ring in the init data, and go on an arduous process of multiplying every relevant variable by 8. Unless Zelda Classic really emulates an NES and it overflows easily, I have solved a past dilemma using nothing but maths.

 

Now I wish I was actually good at LEARNING maths instead of just understanding how to maths.

 

Oh and not to mention you finally have a use for that Gold Ring.

Edited by Darkmatt, 23 January 2015 - 01:13 PM.

[Darkmatt]

2/15: So you know what has been happening to me? WORK. SCHOOL. COOLING DOWN INBETWEEN. You know, things not related to making this quest. Don't worry though, nothing was related to making anything this past couple of weeks. Hopefully that'll be changing soon.

 

Anyway, I've gotten plenty of time this weekend to poke and prod this quest some more. Here's a screen that I'm not 100% happy with. The problem here is that what I have to add clutter to the screen is, well, grass. That's it. I can't use water due to the geography I want, and can't think of anything I can put on the screen that'll actually contribute to the screen instead of just be another addition.

 

Either way, the Gardens has the bulk of its screens drafted and I can now begin the task that is detailing every screen from the start, to everywhere you can immediately go, to Level 1. Steering the player into the right areas should be the easy part. Opening up roadblocks to be crossed later and a way for the player to go off the rails and have it mean something is going to be the hard part.