January 4th, 2019

One of my long-standing dream games is to build a 3D Legend of Zelda-style game. There are a lot of things that go into building a game in this genre -- mechanics for movement and interacting with the world, printing text to the screen for informative messages or conversations with other characters, as well as building the actual world using art that doesn't look like total garbage. Whereas certain other games can be primarily devoted to a particular mechanic or a really nice art style, a 3D action-adventure-RPG game really requires the synthesis of all of these things. 

 

It's a game that I've been excited to work on for a long time -- but also  one of the games I've procrastinated working on because it's such a daunting task. When I decided I was going to do One Game a Week, thogh, it gave me a chance to strategically plan out some of the systems I was building. I wrote a fairly functional dialog system for Game #2, Curious Castle. I spent a lot of time working with animations and world-building with some assets while making Game #3, The Marker Game.

 

But now, finally, my excitement has overcome my patient planning. I've decided it's time to jump in and see how far I can get in a week -- my fourth OGAW game is going to be my own very tightly scoped 3D Zelda-like!

 

I've decided to call this one The Legend of Trykon. 

 

I've got a few things I'm going to focus on while I create this game -- namely, I want to really figure out a good system for world building. 

 

I will be using this art pack from BitGem -- it's an amazing set for creating a Zelda-like theme. This set is super evocative of Link to the Past. 

 

I've also heard good things about this level-editing tool called TileEd, so I am going to try and force myself to learn that. 

 

 

The first thing I tried to tackle was the character -- I thought that if I could focus on getting the character working in the first day, that would be a good starting point. 

 

The first day ended up being a frustrating waste of time.....I couldn't get generic animations to play nicely with humanoid models. I'm sure this is a solved problem and I'm just not finding a good resource to show me how to do this better, but I just couldn't seem to get it working. 

 

The next couple of days, I spent time setting up and familiarizing myself with TileEd. I have to say -- if I gain no other tangible benefit for the rest of the project, the stuff I learned with TileEd will be insanely helpful for future projects. It's the EXACT kind of tool I wish I'd always had for this kind of work. 

 

 

On the fourth day, I took a step back to make use of some of the other assets in my stockpile and I created an awesome intro screen.