4 replies to this topic

[ShadowTiger]

A combination of daydreaming in Psychology class, and daydreaming about my favorite book, When The Wind Blows, has led me to an interesting conclusion.

When you're building your quest, you can twist your plotline around your finger fairly easily. It seems that, even though these are only quests, people still learn from them.

For example, if you see a major item lying on the ground in the middle of a dungeon, and you approach it, and a whole bunch of enemies spawn, ... and this happens in each dungeon, you'll soon learn that in at least that quest, you should be careful when picking up major items, or items you see just randomly lying around. People learn things like that. It's almost pavlovian. Actually, I should see no reason why it wouldn't be.

I should tell you all now, that the Pavlovian response, isn't an association of the bell with the food. It's an association that when the bell rings, food follows. The expectation is important, rather than ringing the bell WITH the food. If you ring the bell at any point whatsoever after you've gotten the food, it doesn't make any difference at all, because you've already got the food.

An example I was thinking up, at least in terms of WTWB, is that whenever you see a character wearing a specific color, you would associate that individual with some sort of either emotion or activity. Max, from WTWB, saw these specific guards, the keepers, wearing black and green. Whenever she saw anyone with that combination of clothing, even though she may have known otherwise, she kept well away from those individuals.

Thus, in more terms of Zelda Classic, you could make all sorts of connections. You can do anything from when the player kills an octorok a Death Knight will spawn, or when you pick up an item the floor drops from under you, or when you're about to beat a boss for the first time, he makes the stage change and you have to beat him again. You can do all sorts of things.


But my favorite thing to do, is deprive the player of such experiences. Has anyone here played Alien Versus Predator on the PC? If you have, you would know that the entire first level was devoid of a single Alien. You keep expecting them to pop up, but they never do.

So if you're expecting the floor to drop out from under you when you pick up this item, and it never does, ... imagine what'll be going through your head. That's so twisted, isn't it?

[Sonic Landale]

Ah, nice lecturn about the psycological aspects of a Zelda Quest.

[Tseng]

How would you go about doing this though? I'm interested in the enemies spawning out of nowhere trigger you described.

[ShadowTiger]

Heh. That's a different kind of question entirely.

All you have to do, is place pit/direct warps around the item, that warp you to an identical screen with the different enemies on it. Or in the case of the octorok, you turn on the "No secret sounds" rule, as well as the "Enemies-->Secret" rule, and cover the floor in pit warp flags when the octorok dies, with the "floor" on layer 1 to cover the appearing pit warps. Same case there.

[Radien]

Hmm, yeah. I've been using a little bit of this, too. Example:

Demonstrate to the player that when a certain thing pops up during a boss, the player should go and hit it as soon as possible, to damage the beast. This is simple, and since custom bosses are more ordered, very predictable.

However, what you CAN do is fake them out. Vary the number of things which pop up, and how long the player has to wait until one of them actually sticks around long enough to become a target.

Think Volvagia in OoT. You know it works! Every time a pool of lava starts boiling and DOESN'T produce a dragon head, popping out to shoot fire at you, the player becomes just a little bit more tense... A great technique for ZC, I'd say.