Happy Halloween! Just wanted to write a small blog since my game is almost done. Things are slowly falling into place: I’ve reached out to a supplier about making physical copies of my game, I got my promo art back that I commissioned, and the gameplay is getting there (still need to follow up with my collaborator about the music). I’m ironing out the bugs, and putting together some more promotional stuff for the official launch on December 1st.
But anyways, if you’re looking for something spooky to do today, try playing my game. It’s got ghosts! It’s free to play online, or you can download the Gameboy Color ROM and play on an emulator (or on official hardware if you’ve got a flashcart).
Sometime in April of 2019 I discovered a newly released tool that played right into my research interests. I’ve been fascinated with retro consoles, gaming history, and the intersections with the modding community, and was looking into homebrew game development (after having backed a couple homebrew games for obsolete systems on Kickstarter, namely Tobu-Tobu Girl DX). Somehow I found out about GB Studio, a visual game engine for creating Gameboy games and was hooked. At the time, it was pretty barebones and could only really handle one type of game (top-down, JRPG-style games with minimal combat), and I tinkered around with making a few small games. One of my genius ideas at the time was to design a game that showcased my CV/resume as in-game dialogue that I would then give out to hiring committees and what-not in the future (an idea I still might revisit, but likely not).
But after getting sucked back into academia and being frustrated by the limitations of the system (and my complete lack of game development skills), I stepped away from the tool and game engines for a while. Then just a few months ago the creator tweeted a trailer for an update to the tool: upgrades for creating GBC games, especially in new genres such as platformers and point-and-click games. I was once again interested in creating a new game and dived back into the community around GB Studio.
Now, after a month of development I think I’m finally to the point where I want to document some of my journey into indie game development. As a personal history, I am a creative individual, having taken AP Studio Art in high school, and tried to pursue a degree in animation as an undergrad. But, my artistic skills have mostly languished in the decade since. It’s only in the past year that I’ve also explored similar skills tangential to game design (I recently taught myself Blender and 3D modeling, as well as took an introductory VR design course). Coding has always terrified me, I’m not really a fan of terminals and lines of code. But as GB Studio is extremely beginner friendly (described as “a quick and easy to use drag and drop retro game creator” on the website), I decided to give it a go.
Gameplay footage from my alpha build; the gem is a placeholder for the dialogue avatar
I’ve crafted a functional alpha build of the game, as hosted on my newly formed itch.io page. While the game itself is going to continue to change and evolve, I thought I would make it open and available for the public. I decided to tap into some of my interests at the time, mainly a spiritual successor to Metroid and Luigi’s Mansion. I wanted to capture that feeling of spelunking and exploring caves, that adventurous and suspenseful feeling of wanting to go deeper, but being terrified of what might happen. I’ve also tried to ground my platformer in reality (oddly enough, since it’s enemies are ghosts), eschewing standards of the genre for more basic environments and design. On one hand, I really want it to look and feel like a real cave, but also explore the exaggerated elements of that adventure.
But it’s been a great experience so far, and has distracted me from my PhD program and the overall terrible-ness of 2020. I’m excited to flesh out more mechanics (such as the flashlight-based combat system), the story, and bring on a couple freelancers to help out with aspects of the game. I might be able to do the pixel art, but I’m not going to attempt the box art illustration. And I definitely don’t want to teach myself how to make chiptunes for this game.
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I’ve been thinking a lot about the series as a whole. With the announcement of the Breath of the Wild trilogy (Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity as the prequel we didn’t know we wanted), it seems as if Nintendo is really leaning into their exploration of the series and its core. While I kind of enjoy the original Hyrule Warriors, its not really my cup of tea. I bought it mostly so that I would have a multiplayer game to enjoy with my brother, and we both got bored of it pretty quickly. Which then leads into discussions about this new series of games (including the Breath of the Wild sequel). Even now, three years later, I really enjoy Breath of the Wild and think it’s still the best in the series. But there are a large group of fans who like the game, but feel like it strayed too much from the formula.
In fact, the above article I linked to comes from Two Guys Playing Zelda, and discusses what the author (Nate Merritt) considers to be integral parts of the Zelda formula that Breath of the Wild excluded:
No sense of discovery
Lack of excitement/mystery/secrets, especially when opening chests
Lack of tools
Lack of musical involvement
Lack of dungeons and amount of shrines
Shrine puzzle difficulty
Level of boss difficulty and lack luster boss fights
Now I’m not going to debate these points, rather my objective in this blog post is to explore what at the core is expected in a Zelda game. I remember still when Metroid Prime was released on the Gamecube, all of the uproar about changing the series too much to become a FPS. However, I think in retrospect many fans have come to love that game and it’s following sequels, despite it’s evolution into the 3D space.
So, if the Zelda series is evolving to include Hyrule Warriors (from a very different genre), how else can it evolve? What other genres could be explored, and feel as natural/enjoyable to Zelda fans? I don’t really have an answer, but it’s something that I’ve been mulling over for a while. While I think that in some ways, it is fun to experiment across genres (like making a 2D Metroid game that is a top-down shooter instead of a platformer), I am curious to see what minor mechanical tweaks could be made such as borrowing from similar subgenres.
One element that I think would be beneficial would be Rogue-like randomization, or procedurally-generated dungeons. I’m not the first to suggest that, in fact there is a great proof of concept Rogue-like Zelda fan game you should check out (made using the Solarus engine). Game scholar/critic Mark Brown has made a series of YouTube videos discussing what he thinks makes a great Zelda dungeon, which basically boils down to branching paths that promote true exploration and problem solving, instead of being led down a one-way corridor.
So having a randomized dungeon would solve two issues: replayability, while also making dungeons that are unique and not overtly authored (on-way corridors). However, there are also staples of Zelda dungeons that differentiate themselves from Spelunky maps, in that there are a series of locked doors and keys. Progression is halted until the player either finds the small key, the hookshot, or other triggers to unlock the way ahead of them. So while it would be fun to play a randomized dungeon that has multiple branching paths that lead to the end, there should also be dead ends and roadblocks. And purists would also enjoy having key items return for environmental puzzles (such as using the boomerang to destroy obstacles and pull switches).
But another element that I think would be much easier to implement would be progression in difficulty in open-world Zelda games. One common critique between Breath of the Wild and A Link Between Worlds is that both of these games are open in their direction (no set dungeon completion schedule), but that also means all of the dungeons are of equal difficulty and become too easy very quickly. A simple solution would be to have the dungeons increase in difficulty based upon the amount of magical McGuffins the player has in store. While this could be as labor intensive as creating 3-4 different versions of each dungeon (such as increasing the room count), it could also just be a variable of changing the types of monsters found in each dungeon.
Hyrule University 