7 replies to this topic

[KingPridenia]

I have decided to try something different with the production of Adam's Quest Redux. Since what I'm basically doing is copying it from the original and building it from the ground up (I have an LP of the original that I go through to copy the rooms down), I have decided to focus just on making a few of the dungeons at a time before working on the overworld. Speaking of the overworld, I am planning to try making the overworld less flat and try to make it come to life a bit more. After receiving a rude wakeup call via feedback, I have decided that after I accepted the criticism and use that as a challenge to design a little better than I am currently.

Anyway, the plans are as follows with tentative improvements to each:

Level 3 - The original had a flaw with key placement and you could "steal" a key from level 3 for use in level 4. The key was used to open a hint room. However, that lock will be removed and with all keys in this quest being either Boss Keys or Level Specific Keys, that wouldn't matter as much. Another issue I'd like to address is how depressingly boring the level is. It's just another enemy gauntlet after all. Perhaps adding a Boss Key shortcut near the start?

Overworld to Level 4 - Oh dear God. THIS was the epic failure of the original Adam's Quest. It was basically a 10-12 screen long raft ride to the mountain, which was basically just one gigantic flat rock. The outside parameter was literally just me copying and pasting the exact same screen over and over again with the EXACT same 4 Blue Goriya + Zora formation. How boring! After that, you'd bomb a fairly obvious spot, climb up the "mountain" for hours, then just have a boring trek down to level 4. This time around, I plan to have a bit of a junction cave and separate the icy mountain overworld section from the rest of the overworld (at least until the Flippers come into play). Hopefully that will make the mountain much more interesting.

Post Level 4 Dungeon - Plain linearity? Check. Too many bosses? Check. Full of boring near empty rooms? Check. Basically, this is one of those mandatory mini-dungeons where you have to get the item in order to get more than a few rooms into level 5. However, a better idea I've come up with is to make the item required to get into level 5, rather than have you go in and be like "Oh crap, I don't have [insert item here]."

Level 5 - My friend found a very fatal flaw with level 5; ti's possible to steal 2 keys out of this due to bad design. Again, using level-specific keys, it's not as major of a deal, but bad design is bad design. I also am wondering if one can get perma-stuck in the original. Regardless, level 5 would remove a bulk of the bosses. In the original, there was a Manhandla, three Digdoggers, a BS Patra (that you could get cheap shot by if you go the wrong way no less), a pair of Aquamenti, a Gleeok and Moldroms on top of the boss which was a Manhandla 2 with a pair of its lesser breathen for backup. Trust me, the later dungeons had even MORE boss spam. Luckily, that's where 2.50 comes into play; I have more enemies to pick from and can tweak others to be more fair for level 5.

From this point on, I'd like to make some polls and get feedback from YOU. Since I don't seem to be able to make polls within quest projects, I'll just have to rely on posts and the quality of one's arguments for/against the items in the questions. If the opinions are 50/50 or I get no feedback at all on certain questions, my own personal judgment will be used.

Question 1 - Should I make an effort to make the overworld less flat and boring looking?

Question 2 - When should I add the Slash ability into the quest, if ever? Please note that you will not start with it; DO NOT SUGGEST that I start the player with it. Give me a rough level span (i.e: around level 4 to level 5).

Question 3 - How many bosses would you consider to be "too many" for a dungeon? I am asking this mostly because the original's biggest flaw was spamming the hell out of them.

Question 4 - Should I keep Trap damage nerfed from 1 heart base damage to 1/2 heart base damage?

Question 5 - In the original, you had to clear out an item cave filled with Blue Wizzrobes for the Magical Sword. Should I keep it the way it is, or make a small mini-dungeon to fight through to get the Magical Sword instead?

Question 6 - Should I keep the classic Rupee exploit in the quest? See spoiler for details.

Spoiler

The Rupee exploit is where you can spend draining Rupees. For instance, if you have an item for 500 and another for 800 Rupees but only have 850 Rupees, you could buy the 800 Rupee item and return to the shop and buy the 500 Rupee item although you would normally only have 50 Rupees left. This only works if the counter is at or above 500 when the item is purchased.

Thank you for your feedback and time,
RedmageAdam

[DragonDePlatino]

1. I highly suggest you go with a more dynamic overworld design, like a lot of DoR quests have. Don't let the tileset restrict you, and use your imagination to stretch what you can do with a small number of tiles. You don't have the same space restrictions as an NES cartridge, so why design levels that look like they were meant for one?

 

2. Start with the slash. I'm not joking. Stabbing is clunky and obnoxious. The only reason it ever existed in the first place was because a slashing animation takes up more space on an NES cartridge than a stabbing animation, so that's what the designers went with. Notice how from Link to the Past onwards, Link would default to the slash? Later games didn't have the ROM size restriction, so they didn't give the player clunky stabbing.

 

3. If having "too many bosses" is becoming a concern, consider using some scripted bosses. You could probably find a few nice pre-scripted ones if you search around for a bit. Most people are tired of seeing the same-old Z1 bosses anyways.

 

4. Hmm...I would keep the trap damage to 1 heart. When something like that deals more damage, it gives more importance to the tunic upgrades.

 

5. Go with what whatever takes more effort to design. You can apply that to just about anything in life, really.

 

6. Hmm...that's some very strange behavior. Personally, I would remove an exploit like that.

Edited by DragonDePlatino, 10 February 2015 - 09:47 PM.

[KingPridenia]

^In response:

 

Point 2- I already said I have no plans on starting the player with slash, although I MIGHT consider giving it at the start, but just making the Wooden Sword only not be able to slash. I just feel slash makes the game too easy, especially with cheap tactics such as facing down while a Darknut is marching towards you and all you gotta do is slash downward and he'll never touch you. The biggest thing is that after all of my revamping and rebalancing, the quest is already easy compared to the original. Having beams on the first two swords makes it even easier yet. Perhaps I'm being a little ridiculous, but I usually tend to keep beams off the Wooden and sometimes White Swords. I feel things are a bit too easy when you can just stand halfway across a room and snipe an enemy with sword beams.

 

Point 3 - I should have been a bit more clear. By boss spamming, I meant a typical room with them in level 8 would be like 4 Manhandlas + 3 Dodongos and you usually fought at least one boss type enemy every 3-6 rooms, depending. It was bad enough that my friend that LP'ed the original was complaining about the overuse of Manhandlas by level 4, to the point every time he saw them afterwards, he would say "Adam's Manhandla fetish continues!", and rightly so. Having a room filled up with so much crap you can barely see Link isn't really a good idea, and I'm aiming to just have tricky formations of normal enemies so it's not Digdoggers every 4 rooms.

 

Point 5 - Seems like a mixed opinion to me. I mean on one hand, all you gotta do is kill some Blue Wizzrobes in a cave for it, and people may not want to have to do a dungeon for every single upgrade. As you were saying on point 1 with making the overworld more dynamic, I'm thinking progression should be more that way too. I'm not 100% sure how I should do that.

 

Point 6 - That behavior only occurs if you check the "Draining Rupees can be spent" rule.

[Moosh]

Question 1 - Should I make an effort to make the overworld less flat and boring looking?

Well when you word it like that, how can I say no? Remake the whole overworld from the ground up if you have to. Just don't leave it the way it is if it's "flat and boring." Nobody likes flat and boring.

 

Question 2 - When should I add the Slash ability into the quest, if ever? Please note that you will not start with it; DO NOT SUGGEST that I start the player with it. Give me a rough level span (i.e: around level 4 to level 5).

If you're dead set against starting the player with slash, I'd say don't put it in at all. I prefer to have slash, but I think it's an even worse offense to make the quest inconsistent. If you're starting the quest with a thrusting weapon like a spear and get slash along with a later game weapon where it makes sense that's fine, but don't arbitrarily limit the player if you give them a sword.

 

Question 3 - How many bosses would you consider to be "too many" for a dungeon? I am asking this mostly because the original's biggest flaw was spamming the hell out of them.

Spamming any enemy devalues the enemy and NES bosses are especially susceptible to this. Most of them move in perdictable patterns that players tire of quickly after seeing them in so many quests and usually as the player progresses through the quest they become more and more pathetic because they don't line up well with the rest of ZC's difficulty curve. If you try to rebalance them in the enemy editor you walk a fine line between boring, unfair, and too easy. If you give it too much HP, it becomes boring. If you give it too much damage, it becomes unfair. Anything else and you run the risk of it still being too easy because none of these bosses save for Manhandla are any good at hitting Link. Then on the other end of the spectrum there's the infamous Fire Gleeok and Patra 3 that do nothing besides hitting Link. Those are just stupid and unfair no matter what edits you make to them. ZC doesn't give you a whole lot of choices with bosses for a full sized quest, so you'll probably either have to break out the enemy editor and get creative or use some custom bosses. Custom bosses aren't anything too ambitious as far as scripts go because you can just add them in when the rest of the quest is finished as they have no impact on anything outside of their own boss room. So tl;dr, don't use NES bosses in dungeons anywhere except the boss room because it downgrade's the boss's value to just a normal enemy, avoid having too many (I'd say more than two or three) of  boss in a room because this leads to chaotic and unfair situations, and for late game bosses use the enemy editor or scripts. This has been Moosh's boss rant of the day.

 

Question 4 - Should I keep Trap damage nerfed from 1 heart base damage to 1/2 heart base damage?

No, 1/2 hearts of damage is too powerful. You need to use a script to make traps deal negative damage and heal Link.

I feel like traps are already weak enough as is in ZC. 1 heart of damage is fine. If you'd like, I could even write you a simple script that changes their damage for later dungeons or lets them pierce Link's tunic.

 

Question 5 - In the original, you had to clear out an item cave filled with Blue Wizzrobes for the Magical Sword. Should I keep it the way it is, or make a small mini-dungeon to fight through to get the Magical Sword instead?

Why not both? Make a cave mini-dungeon with the Magical Sword in it. It's faithful to the original, but way more interesting.

 

Question 6 - Should I keep the classic Rupee exploit in the quest?

I'd say unless you're going to make the rupee drops way more generous, keep it. The only shops where this sort of exploit is really helpful are the really expensive ones and in those cases players will likely have to grind or carefully manage one time rupee drops anyways. Any exploit that saves on money grinding is fine by me.

[Shane]

1. I would say as long as the perspective makes sense, go for it.

 

2. Remakes generally have bonus content. Maybe make a mini-dungeon with slash as the reward?

 

3. Bosses should always remain at the end of the dungeon. I dislike quests that place bosses in every dungeon room. It makes the actual boss battle less special and less climatic. I don't mind existing Zelda 1 bosses though, I'm not fussy.

 

4. It depends on how much you use them. Do you like to spam them? If so, I suggest hitting them with the nerf hammer.

 

5. Sounds like your chance to add in bonus content. Make it a mini-dungeon.

 

6. If you want to.

[KingPridenia]

@Moosh: That actually sounds more practical having set damage traps. Either way, I do plan on making traps do a full heart again, but if you're able to make a basic script that can make it 1 heart of damage regardless of ring, I would actually like that. Kind of a shame that in vanilla ZC the only ring piercing damage are damage combos, and only if you have the rule for it and/or the screen flag. Can't you actually make damage combos ignore rings on a screen by screen basis instead of as a universal quest rule? I do think more things should do set damage, much like how a lot of ALttP enemies always do 1/2 or 1 heart of damage regardless of which armor you have (or in the case of Viterous' lightning attack or Ganon's final phase fire bats, 2 hearts). On a similar note, would a script to make Flame 2's impossible to block by any means be feasible as well, since it's kind of silly to see a dinky Wooden Shield block fire? That way, Flame 2's can actually be dangerous and threatening for a change.

 

@Shane: I was thinking either a mini-dungeon or a smallish cave with slash as the prize. And yeah, I tend to agree with you. I could probably make the Magical Sword obtainable by clearing out a mini-dungeon where in the original it was just a boring cave with statue shooters and Blue Wizzrobes. As for traps, I didn't have them in the original very much at all, mostly only in the White Sword dungeon and level 3. After that, they became almost extinct.

 

With regard to the "Rupee exploit", based on test runs, I'm sitting on about 300 Rupees right now with all available items and secrets unlocked, including a 20 Rupee door repair. Rupees are a bit more generous than they were in a default 1.92 or 2.10 quest for sure, but not to the point you could camp the overworld for 10 minutes and hit 999 from being flat broke. I am trying to fine tune how many Rupees to award within dungeons and I may tweak the Rupee secrets, because the ones I have right now are a bit generous. In general, my goal is to encourage you to fight every monster within dungeons and if you do, you should have to do a limited amount of out of the way grinding. I will also have to allow a bit of leeway as well depending on how skilled the player is, since a skilled player will need fewer potions, saving them Rupees less skilled players will be spending buying replacements.

[DragonDePlatino]

Concerning Darknuts and slashing:

 

If you make darknuts shielded in the front, left and right, slashing will be less effective against them.

 

Please, please, please do not force us to start the quest with stabbing. Stabbing is a clunky restriction that makes combat a pain.

Edited by DragonDePlatino, 11 February 2015 - 05:13 PM.

[Moosh]

Here's the script for piercing traps. Just put it on a screen with traps and it'll make them pierce. It only upgrades the traps when you enter the screen, though, so don't use traps in rooms that give you the ring.

ffc script PiercingTraps{
	void run(){
		itemdata ring1 = Game->LoadItemData(I_RING1);
		itemdata ring2 = Game->LoadItemData(I_RING2);
		itemdata ring3 = Game->LoadItemData(I_RING3);
		Waitframes(5);
		for(int i=1; i<=Screen->NumNPCs(); i++){
			npc n = Screen->LoadNPC(i);
			if(n->ID==NPC_TRAP||n->ID==NPC_TRAPHORIZC||n->ID==NPC_TRAPHORIZLOS||n->ID==NPC_TRAPVERTC||n->ID==NPC_TRAPVERTLOS){
				if(Link->Item[I_RING3])
					n->Damage = n->Damage*ring3->Power;
				else if(Link->Item[I_RING2])
					n->Damage = n->Damage*ring2->Power;
				else if(Link->Item[I_RING1])
					n->Damage = n->Damage*ring1->Power;
			}
		}
	}
}