The Zelda Formula: Part Two

Previously.

We left off talking about how it’s fun, more than any other aspect of a game, that makes you feel like a hero. If you’re handed an über-powerful weapon at the start of the game and just start mowing down mobs, sure, that could be fun for a few minutes, but it very quickly loses its charm. Similarly, the game’s narrative can call you “Hero” all it wants, but if the gameplay doesn’t make you feel it, again, you’re left wanting. The Zelda franchise has mastered the art of achieving this feeling, balancing the narrative with tight, well-balanced gameplay that continuously challenges and delights.

This is done by adhering to a small handful of rules. Each of these leads into and supports each other, less like pillars supporting the structure of the game, and more like a web holding it aloft.

Today I want to focus on the first, and in my opinion, the most important aspect: exploration.

Exploration is the main goal, above all else, and should be rewarded.

If we’re talking about concrete examples of what makes a Zelda game, we must begin ab ovo. Exploration is in the Legend of Zelda’s DNA. Miyamoto’s childhood exploration through caves and waterfalls and woods served as the primary conception point for the entire series.¹ You need an exciting world filled with light and darkness, monsters and wonder, new mysteries around each corner. It’s the call to adventure that keeps you pushing forward.

At its peak, this series creates that sense of wonder, that mystery and darkness, almost primal in its allure. The fields are vast and bright. The caves are deep and crawling with danger. Faeries, treasure, and knowledge all wait behind waterfalls, around the bend. Intrepid curiosity is self-rewarding; power and wisdom await those with the strength and courage to plumb the depths and brave the trials that guard these secrets.

The first Zelda game was almost only a series of labyrinthine caves and dungeons to explore. This idea grew to include a large field to connect the dungeons, a place for the player to find respite and choose where they needed to go next.² But this overworld was not a safe place either. Even outside the dungeons creatures roamed, and before traveling in any direction the player needed to rationalize their choice and ration their resources.

It should be no surprise that even in the first Zelda, everything was already there. The dungeons, the puzzles, the secrets, the steady progression of power until you truly feel like a hero. This was, after all, grown from childhood fantasies. Subsequent games all use these same pillars of progression.

Even so, the team knew that navigating an endless series of labyrinthine dungeons would not be enough.

There needed to be more; more than simply another series of rooms to clear. To continue that drive, to really empower the player, the player needed to be challenged and rewarded at turns. They needed to make choices, sometimes difficult ones, involving real risk. And, most importantly, the world needed to continue to enchant the player, to tantalize with the possibility of something new around every corner.

Some of the strategies they used to achieve this certainly weren’t there in the beginning — but they were very quickly developed, and by the time A Link to the Past was released, were already solidified into the formula.

Combat and exploration are simultaneous

Hyrule is a land teeming with danger. In A Link to the Past, you’re a wanted man: the king’s guards jump at the sight of you and chase you down until you escape or destroy them. In Ocarina of Time, the otherwise peaceful expanse of Hyrule Field becomes claustrophobic with menace once the sun sets, as undead claw their way through the dirt to chase you down as you pass by. And in Breath of the Wild, the world has already ended and the monsters moved in.

Each game, after the introductory level or two, practically opens the entire world to you right away. But this exploration is not without cost: behind every new screen (in the older games) or around every bend in the river, curve of the mountain, there’s a camp of monsters. Always you’re balancing the reward of exploring somewhere new with the cost of encountering some unknown danger. Maybe there’s a new type of monster over there, or a more powerful version of one you know that you’re not yet ready to face. Even when you backtrack through the places you’ve been, it’s possible to get overwhelmed simply by being a bit too cocky.

You know there’s treasure behind that waterfall. Or, if you put a bomb by that crack in the wall, it will reveal a cave with something special inside. You also know that there’s monsters inside — or, instead, some puzzle to solve.

Recently while playing the 3DS’s Link Between Worlds, I found a giant boulder against a wall. I knew that if I blew up this boulder, there would be a cave behind it. But regular bombs did nothing. Several screens over was a giant bomb that would follow you around, but immediately explode when struck. So I have to go back, collect this bomb, and then navigate over the multiple screens around and through monsters trying to kill me. If they struck and missed me, they might hit the bomb. It was an actually challenging bit of fun, entirely optional with no bearing on progression or plot, and when I finally made it (using multiple different tools at my disposal), I felt great. And for my struggles, I received a Piece of Heart.

This, I think, is a great example of the challenges and rewards of exploration. None of this was part of the core game. Every single screen was filled with monsters, and each monster required a different tactic to defeat: Shield Moblins, whose shields protect them from direct attacks; flying Zirros who initially avoid and run from you, only to swoop in and drop a bomb; Snap Dragons who leap at you from afar. And I didn’t need to complete this challenge I set for myself. I could beat the game easily without it. But because I wandered over here and over there, cut my way through and snuck around mob after mob, I could connect the dots and give myself a little challenge to occupy myself between dungeons.

Which is another “pillar” of these games.

Everything is a break from everything else — and it all wears you down

Combat is a break from exploration. Puzzles are a break from combat. The overworld is a break from the dungeons, and the caves and towns are breaks from the overworld. In each area, within each “break,” there’s a new set of goals, something new to accomplish or solve or defeat. Sometimes this is a player-driven goal, sometimes it’s a secret you know is hiding around somewhere, and sometimes it’s a quest or something that pushes forward the story.

What matters is this: when you get tired of one thing, there’s something else. And in the later games they made this even easier. Quick travel, portals to leave the dungeon once you hit around the halfway mark, collectables.

Put another way: there are distractions everywhere. It’s up to the player to choose what they pursue first, and this choice gives agency. Even if it’s mostly an illusion, this agency is what makes it feel like you, the player, are the one choosing to undertake this grand quest to save Hyrule. Because you could, instead, just spend your time gathering trinkets and wandering around.

This does get pushed to an extreme in the more recent Zelda games, and I believe detrimentally so. The Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild or the Maiamais in Link Between Worlds do little but artificially pad the bulk of the game. They pull in the worst aspect of JRPGs — grinding — to give you tiny bits of mechanical progression, to beef up your character without actually giving you something meaningfully new.

Sure, it can be nice to take a break and hunt for an upgrade for your bow. But wandering Hyrule and seeing or hearing that little chirp saying there’s a thing nearby you have to collect right now! feels like the game grabbing onto your belt to slow you down.

But that’s not the way the player should be worn down. Instead, they should feel that simultaneous exhaustion / exhilaration that comes from defeating a particularly difficult foe. Or they’ve used up their arrows or potions, or maybe teased their brain figuring out some puzzle. By the time a particular encounter is over, the player should be ready and happy to move onto a new, different encounter, that will use some other resource while they recharge what was just spent. Think of a dungeon, where one room is a pure combat encounter, and then next is a puzzle, and the next is half-combat, half-puzzle, or sometimes just an empty room with a chest. A quiet spot, for a breath and a break.

Walls are mechanic- and not plot-based

When you can’t progress (spatially) in a Zelda game, it’s typically not because you need to go finish a quest first. It’s because you don’t have an ability that will let you surpass an obstacle. And usually, the ability doesn’t just unlock one new area. For example, when you get the Power Glove in A Link to the Past, you don’t just get the ability to move on to the next dungeon. Entire swaths of the overworld are now yours to explore, and you can go back to any of a dozen areas and suddenly they’re new again: new secrets, new caves to explore, new puzzles to solve.

This really makes you feel like you’re a part of the story, an agent pushing the game forward, instead of just sitting along for the ride. After all, you’re the one who braved the dungeon to find the tool that now unlocks huge chunks of the world. And now you’re the one who can choose to go back and see what new frontiers are available for you to explore.

Sometimes, it isn’t new areas unlocked, but new methods to traverse areas you’ve been to previously. Like the glider in Breath of the Wild (which, yes, is unlocked early, but still feels amazing to get), or the hookshot in A Link to the Past.

This was an interesting choice that Link Between Worlds made: from near the beginning of the game, you can “rent” every special item there is. This means you can traverse all of the overworld from the start. But, you may not be ready: tread too far up the slopes of Death Mountain, for example, and you might run into a deadly Lynel, which will definitely kill you in a single hit in the first portion of the game. And when you die, everything you’ve rented goes back to the shop for you to pony up more rupees to recover.³

Even with so many abilities at your fingertips from the start, there are places you simply can’t get to yet. And then, when you unlock the ability that gave the game its name, you suddenly have another huge section of the world you can explore — not to mention a whole other world!

The world teases you with possibility

This boths follows from, and leads to, the previous “rule.” From the beginning of the game you see areas that you can’t get to — yet. You know, though, that it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be able to go there and see what’s hiding in that cave, under those rocks, beyond that curve.

In Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom the teasing is less mechanic-based. Past the introductory area, you can literally go to any corner of Hyrule you want, as long as you can evade or fight the enemies there. Instead, you’re tantalized by the possibility of finding new secrets, new collectibles⁴, something cool, even if it’s nothing more tangible than a breathtaking vista. In these later games especially, the exploration and journey are their own reward, with all of the mechanical and audio design geared toward making it inherently rewarding.

Regardless of the reward, Zelda games have perfected the art of luring the player. The call to adventure becomes irrestistible when you enter Hyrule, the promise of rewards not just material impossible to ignore. When you explore this new world, overcome its trials and tribulations, you’re not just seeing numbers on a screen go up to indicate growing strength. You are truly growing more powerful, both with knowledge, skill, and ability, and the promise of even more on the horizon keeps you coming back for more.

Wrapping Up

That’s about all I have to say about exploration, for now. It’s difficult turn these “rules” into a list, because as I mentioned before, they’re so tightly interwoven. Zelda games are well-oiled machines and these rules are the parts. And the machine doesn’t work unless the parts do, as you can see by playing any number of fan-games, Zelda-wannabes, or even the lesser Zelda titles. It’s a fine, fine tightrope to walk, and it’s a miracle the franchise has been so consistent.

Next up is dungeon design and breaking convention. My notes for that are even rougher, and it’s taking longer than I’d like to organize. So I will be taking a short break from this series to work on that and to work on some other little side projects. There will also be a few gamedev-specific posts about that little game demo I made, the full game following it that is a sort of love letter to A Link to the Past, and some of the more difficult mechanics to implement.

The Zelda Formula: Part One

Before I started writing that little game demo way back in 2021, I knew exactly what kind of game I wanted to make. I learned a lot, threw out just about everything I’d made, and started fresh with the plan crystallized: to make a game evocative of the best Legend of Zelda titles. But I knew I had to step back and think about this. What really makes a Zelda game?

At first I thought I grasped this on an intuitive level. I mean, I’ve played through A Link to the Past at least ten times.¹ For a proper throwback I knew I needed more than something that looked like Zelda or played like Zelda. In order for my game to not just be some reskin, I needed to identify and follow the same first principles that guided the Zelda designers themselves.

The thing about first principles is, intuition isn’t enough. It’s not enough to have played a ton of these games, and it’s not enough to love them. The games, their themes, and their central mechanics all need to be grokked. To start, I needed to codify my beliefs about what a Zelda-like game should be. Once written, these rules can be referenced when in doubt, rewritten when they no longer serve, or set aside for future consideration.

So, I started writing.

What are the Rules?

A picture of a sketch outlining dungeon progression in an early Zelda game.

To put it lightly, I’m not exactly the first person to tackle this subject. In my quest to define the criteria that makes a Zelda game, I read quite a few excellent articles on specific aspects of game design used. But, it felt like everything I read only examined something specific and easily repeatable: how to replicate the level design, how you might imitate progression through dungeons, and so on. They focused on individual mechanics, which I argue are the expression of the principles that drive a game’s design.

Nothing I read, outside of interviews with Miyamoto, really tried to talk about why we are drawn to Zelda games over and over again. You can imitate the aesthetic and the mechanics, but without knowing exactly how to synthesize them, the end product becomes something like Stranger Things.² It might look like Zelda and walk like Zelda, but don’t let that fool you.

So what’s the connective tissue here? How do you marry the aesthetic, mechanical, and narrative all together into something that is tangibly Zelda-esque?

I spent a long time reading, thinking, and writing about this, and came up with just four of what I consider to be guiding principles. The first is very broad and may seem obvious, but is the single most important goal for which to aim.³ The other three follow from the first — but this doesn’t make them secondary; in fact, all four of these become pillars upon which the foundation of the game rests.

Fun makes you the hero, not the plot.

The Master Sword rules because of what you can do with it, not because it’s a storied blade of virtue.

This might sound a little reductive, or at least obvious. But, it’s important to stress this point and I think a lot of games miss this mark. A big part of the appeal of Zelda is that it makes you feel like a hero. The story gives you a nudge in that direction, but it’s not the story alone that engenders the feeling. It’s fun that does it.

A sprawling overworld, dark dungeons, a princess/world/timeline that needs saving; these alone aren’t enough. No matter how well-written your dialog is, or how moving your cutscenese are, if you aren’t having fun while you traverse and overcome the obstacles set before you by the game, then you might as well be watching a movie. Movies are great, and can be empowering in their own way, but that’s not what these games are after. It’s player agency we want. Zelda offers you power through your choices.

The goal is to empower the player through the actions they choose while playing the game. Let their choices lead to heroic challenges with heroic conclusions. You give them these seemingly insurmountable challenges and an arsenal of tools with which to tackle them, and then leave them to their own devices. When the player comes out the other side of an encounter (dungeon, fight, puzzle, etc.)⁴ for the first time, they should feel like they synthesized and used all the knowledge they had gained unto that point and that the experience enriched them.

It’s easy, in a Zelda-like game, to make this literal. Dungeon encounters often use tricks that require some special item that you only obtained at the end of the last dungeon, or somewhere in between, making it feel novel. And at the end, you get a new item and more health, literally leaving stronger than when you came. (More on this later.)

That said, your adventure grows kind of stale without some kind of narrative to push you along. The point to remember is that the two don’t live in vacuums. They are inextricably linked; propped up by each other. The story informs the game mechanics and the game mechanics express the story in a literal sense. And in the best Zelda games, “narrative” in a certain sense is superseded by the gameplay.

The “Fun Formula”

Because it’s not enough to say, “just make it fun!” I want to share a formula. This expresses the delicate balance between choice and narrative in a game, and provides a concrete way to think about each. It also makes a nice segue into our next topic.

First, to reiterate: the player’s choice makes them a hero. They must choose this adventure. The corollary to that is that you need to design an adventure that is compelling and challenging. The adventure needs to draw in the player, at the same time empowering the player through their actions. Once combined, the effect propels the player through the game world.

We can look at it this way:

(Exploration + Combat) = Player's Story
--------------------------------------------------
(Puzzles * Narrative * Quests) = Developer's Story

This is the balancing act every Zelda game pulls off, and the same one that makes imitators struggle. If these factors could actually be expressed numerically, we’d want the result to be greater than 1.

Leaning too hard on the Player’s Story can be detrimental, but won’t kill you, if your world is compelling enough (see Breath of the Wild for a Zelda example, or just about any roguelike for examples from other RPGs). Conversely, if you pull hard in the direction of the Developer’s Story, you risk losing the plot altogether. (How many times have you heard a gamer complain about fetch quests?)

So, how do we thread this needle? How do we ensure that everything remains fun and challenging and grounded in player choice without veering into Survival Game territory? How do we really capture that Zelda magic?

If “fun makes the hero” is the keystone, then what follows are the cornerstones, all of which are essential to make the final thing stand on its own.

Wrapping Up

In writing this post I’m trying to condense a notebook’s worth of notes into just a few thousand words. It’s taken much longer than I originally thought, so in the interest of actually publishing something and not holding off forever, I’ll be breaking this into parts. The next part will cover the Player’s Story, and the third part the Developer’s Story.

There’s also a tangentially-related “dungeon design tips” post in the works.

Stay tuned!

A Game in Thirty Days: Part Two

I made a game in thirty days! And now I’m writing about it. In part one of this mini-series I talked about the process of getting started: setting my goal, picking my tools, etc. Now, in part two, I’d like to talk about a few things I learned along the way.

As a quick refresher, this is the end product:

It’s a short Zelda-like action game built with GameMaker Studio 2. The game consists of a village, a dungeon, a quest, and “remembered” progression — that is, if you unlock a door or complete a puzzle, the dungeon will remember.

Lesson: Don’t just dive in

More than once, I decided what to do next and started working on it right away. The time this bit me hardest was when I originally implemented elevation changes and pits you could fall into.

Originally the game had just two elevations. Collisions worked with tile layers, one for each elevation, and had multiple tile maps for each elevation. This worked fine, but ended up being a lot more work than it needed to be: code to set depth/z-ordering based on an entity’s current elevation; code and triggers to change elevation; code to reset elevation when certain conditions were met; extra work mapping “portions” of the map; so on.

Then came time to implement pitfalls. In Zelda you can walk over a pit or hole, or knock an enemy into one, and you fall. I tried to do this using objects, collision, and triggers, and eventually got something that worked most of the time, except for if you walked funky or collided without realizing it. This ended up being frustrating if you didn’t take the happy path. I spent a lot of time tuning and tweaking these triggers. It felt like I was banging my head against GameMaker for a while.

I spent an entire day on these pits before scrapping the feature altogether.

Five days later the solution came to me, along with a way to unify both features and simplify the collision system. I spent another day doing this, as well as adding ledge jumping, while also removing large swaths of code and combining everything into a sort of “collision state machine.”

Doing this made it easier to implement all of these features, and more, with less code. The end result was more robust, required less work to build out when creating new maps, and made it easier to extend to add new features. A similar approach was used by the Pokemon games, which is where I got the idea.

Plus, it looks kind of neat.

The collision tile map. Each tile represents a different state or elevation.

The main lesson here? A little bit of planning can save days of work. If I had sat back and thought about this a little while before jumping in, I’d have had at least an extra day to work on other things.

Lesson: Get friendly with graph paper

Pen and paper will always be cheaper and easier to use than writing code or building tilemaps or whatever else. This is, luckily, something I did not have to learn the hard way.

Before placing a single tile in GameMaker, I drew every room of the dungeon on a graph pad. I placed doors, monsters, traps, chests, in little squares on paper, and ran through the dungeon in my imagination. Once I found a tileset to use, it was just a matter of putting the pieces together in GameMaker and running through to make sure it was all right.

Iterating on paper instead of in-game reduced the overall time spent on the project by a considerable amount.

That said, there were still a few changes made in-game once I was able to playtest the dungeon. A puzzle got scrapped, a room was rearranged, and a new room was added.

Still, pen and paper proved invaluable, and for the next steps in the project I’ve been doing almost all the up-front work on my trusty graph pad. If anything can be mapped visually or sketched up, then it’s probably worth doing that before you even think of writing code or building maps or anything of that nature.

Lesson: Waste your time wisely

I’m not an artist. In the beginning of this project I spent a little too much time trying to draw my own sprites and animations. The fourth time I scrapped everything and closed GraphicsGale in frustration, I decided it was time to find some art to use.

There’s almost too much good, free, and open art to use on the internet. You could spend hours looking through everything, which I did. The point is, as usual, just to pick something and stick with it. It’s not worth spending too much time on the visual appearance of your game at the early stages. As long as it’s tolerable, or at least the intent is clear in your presentation, it doesn’t matter how it looks until much, much later.

In the end I paid for some assets and drew some others. It’s probably clear which ones were “mine”: the slimes and the bosses don’t necessarily jive with the rest of the game’s aesthetic. But that’s fine.

Lesson: Play it!

You can’t know if your game is fun unless you play it. Not just the one room you’re working on, or the new feature you’re building and testing in your debug room.

Before releasing the demo, I went through the game beginning to end more than a dozen times. In the process I tweaked hitboxes, changed some behaviors, found some bugs (and left some bugs! for the attentive player to exploit if they want), and adjusted the difficulty.

^{Me, almost getting wrecked by a simple encounter.}

This might have also worked against me. I was worried the game would be too easy, but the first feedback I got was exactly the opposite. One of my first players spent nearly an hour, collecting 12 heart containers and throwing 23 bombs, and still struggled with the final boss.

(This was partially due to the fight difficulty and partially due to the control scheme being a struggle, but the point stands! I added a new control scheme and it became easier for him. )

Details aside, the bottom line is this: if you’re not having fun playing in, then others won’t, either.

Wrapping Up

If nothing else, the thing to take away from all this is, “plan ahead, and plan the right way for what you’re doing.”

Or don’t. Five hours of work can save you twenty whole minutes of planning. 😉

The Game

If you want to view, download, or leave feedback for the game, click here:

<a href="https://tallain.itch.io/gemfall-demo">Gemfall Demo by Tallain</a>

A Game in Thirty Days: Part One

Recently, I was struck by that familiar urge: to make a video game. After a few hours of reading and thinking I decided I was going to jump in and do it, but this time it would be different. I would just pick a platform, start working, and make a game in thirty days.

This is the result.

As you can see it’s got a few rough edges, and it’s obviously incomplete (no title screen, no saving, etc.), but for now it’s “done” and it’s time to reflect, take away some key lessons, and move on to the next project. For the curious, I’ll put a link to the download page on Itch.io at the bottom of this post.

I want to talk about this project: how it was formed, what I learned, and what’s next. This post is part one in a series.

The Plan

Obviously, the Zelda games were a huge inspiration for this project. A Link to the Past is my favorite game in the series and in my opinion one of the greatest games of all time. I always thought that, given the rise of nostalgia titles and revivals of older genres, no one had really given ALTTP the same treatment.

(This isn’t entirely true. There have been some. But none that have really captured the essence of the games, like the two I linked above. But that’s probably a topic for another blog post.)

So I thought I should be the change I wanted to see. It was time to dig in.

Picking My Tools

In every past attempt to make a game, I always focused too hard on vague future possibilities. Not picking Tool X because I might want to do XYZ thing in the future. Or picking Tool Y because I wanted better control over ABC thing. This focus on tools, platforms, or languages limited me and doomed my projects from the beginning: by focusing too much on some nebulous definition of quality or maintainability or extensibility, the projects became about the code and not the game.

This is not to say that these things are unimportant! Just that when you’re making a game, the game comes first. If you’re not producing something that can be played, you’re not making a game. And that’s fine if the goal is to learn about specific aspects of game development, because there are a lot. But this time, my goal was to make a game.

So my mantra became make it work; make it right; make it fast.

I closed my eyes, picked an engine, and downloaded the 30 day trial of GameMaker Studio. No further thought or planning went into this, for better or worse. The important thing was to just stick with something and make a game with it.

The first week of my thirty day trial I spent learning about GameMaker Studio and GML, its scripting language. The official resources and Shaun Spalding are excellent, and I could not have done this so quickly without help from his ARPG tutorials.

Picking My Battles

After all that, the next most important thing to focus on was scope. I didn’t want this to balloon out of control and become another thing I wouldn’t finish because I decided I wanted to do more than was possible. So I decided, one dungeon. That was it. If time allowed, maybe a little more, like a village.

If I was going to stick with the Zelda format, one dungeon meant kind of a lot. Secret rooms, special items, chests, a variety of monsters, traps, a boss battle, item drops. The idea was to write out a list of these high-level ideas. Each day I would pick an item from the list and implement it.

This was a huge help even if I wasn’t completely successful at it. There are a few features I implemented that aren’t even really visible in the end product. On top of that, there are a few features I started to implement then scrapped when I realized they were too much work, or not very fun. I probably spent a week total on these things.

A few other features I started to implement, took a break, then came back and restarted with fresh eyes. Sometimes this meant throwing away everything I’d done before, and others it was just a wall I’d hit and I needed a break. Sometimes a feature I thought would take me an hour took me a day.

I wouldn’t consider any of this lost or wasted time. That’s part of making a game: if it isn’t fun, scrap it. So it was important to frequently playtest and make sure even this narrow slice of gameplay was fun and satisfying.

The Process

During the development process I kept a devlog, just kind of raw notes at the end of each day going over everything I did and what I wanted to do the next day. This was helpful for me because I could come back without that “what now?” feeling: I already knew what was next, and Past Me told Present Me exactly what it was.

I also started sharing screenshots and gifs with some friends and family over Discord and Twitter. Feedback, even if it was just “that’s cool, keep it up,” really helped keep my motivation up.

The devlog details my setbacks and triumphs. Originally I kind of wanted to post daily or weekly updates with the devlog but decided it would take too much time to clean up and post and would detract from the energy I needed to make the game. Later, I’ll clean it up and post it. I always enjoy reading other developers talk about their process and it’s always heartening to read about others facing and overcoming their own setbacks. I want to share my own experiences with that.

This post is already longer than I thought it would be, so I’ll cut things short for next time, where I’ll go over some specific lessons I learned, a few techniques I used, and more.

The Game

View the game, download it, etc., below.

<a href="https://tallain.itch.io/gemfall-demo">Gemfall Demo by Tallain</a>