Bay 12 Games Forum

I get some error and can't run the game.

So did it just do the colored keys thing like Doom?

How much of this did it do?

Yeah, Doom is probably the best known of them but there were smaller ventures like some thing I think was part of the microsoft encyclopedia program.

Well no, the overworld doesn't "just" open up larger circles. Your new tool only actually lets you get at one large new area through a chokepoint of a path. Later tools open it up much more by giving shorter routes back to town (which the player has further incentive to take due to there usually being heart pieces about,) which really just requires me making the flow chart from dungeon to dungeon intersect on a town after 60% of the dungeons. This goes along with the pacing as well what with a first time player not really knowing where or what the next dungeon is going to be.

In LttP you didn't actually have barriers on the light overworld except that one bridge with the hammer pegs and I think one hookshot/glove spot. Technically flippers too but you just walked up there and bought them about as soon as you had cash (I think that's where the glove spot was actually.) It was really tools letting you into nooks and crannies the whole way through, aside from pesky npcs that wouldn't let you through a place and nagging voices in your head.

Link's Awakening had a much more Venn Diagram-y feel to it. Beach town woods and dungeon followed by another dungeon and then suddenly a huge field to run through with structures to ogle at and then one dungeon later you could start going into the mountains. After that it was nooks and crannies again (well I guess you could count animal town and the two dungeons near it as another large area.) Each of those though was gated through one particular path the tool opened up. Either you could walk through now that a stone wasn't impassable or you could jump over a particular pit for a portion of the new area.


So if you're asking how to fill them that's actually why I've bothered to describe this in maze terms. A maze without all these tools and NPCs is just a bunch of winding paths. What the keys and tools do is make dead ends into parts of the main path.

As for the problem of being able to "get through" that I've focussed on changing compact rooms into large areas where very few of the sides are constrained- well that's just fewer places to worry about being unsolvable. It takes more work to make it look nice than anything else.


Seeing as you've mentioned a flow chart there's a fairly simple way to procedurally fill the map with organic shapes. Lay down approximate positions for all the dungeons pretty much randomly, throw down some civilization near the first couple of dungeons (in these games the main castle in the world is more often a dungeon, albeit an unnumbered one, than a population center,) and then expand each region until you fill the map. Just "choose an available edge from the list of available ones and stick a tile there."

Now in both games I've brought up the areas were actually strikingly square without a lot of deviation. On the SNES where they could have two area palettes at once (or just larger ones all including generic grassland) they masked it somewhat but you could see a whole lot of high hills that lined up just so with rivers and somehow trees would line up too. The Oracle games were still working with very square building blocks so they couldn't put nice slanted edges on things but they did seem to go to an effort to have little portions jut into the space that would otherwise be a square area.

Working out the areas at a higher resolution still shouldn't pose any problems with the assets of a computer rather than a hand held. If I'm even less picky about angles the areas could be defined as Voronoi diagrams. Just need to bias the points toward the outer edges and choose the largest ones to be, say, the 1st, 3rd, and 5th numbered dungeons. And of course you combine about 25% of the zones touching each other so they've got the same theme, just so the dungeons don't seem to dominate the landscape too much.


This has made me realize I haven't put any real thought into height though.
No, not mountains height. I mean multiple floors on a dungeon or the overworld caves* that you have such a poor sense of direction in yet they spit you out at the exact distance you traveled. It might be a piece of cake to make the caves periodically act as connections for the overworld but sticking dungeon generation on a 3d grid might give me some headaches.

*Technically also alternate worlds like "the golden realm" in LttP or whatever dark mirror world from metroidvania type titles.

e: Random thought: I'd like a tool to be a camera based on that old (Japanese?) superstition that being photographed steals your soul. It could exorcise possessed objects in the most obvious sense and harm either undead class enemies or perhaps remove some invulnerability shield from some enemy. Puzzle design might take a lot of thought though. Probably be mostly mirrors.
Or you could do gimmicky stuff where the ghosts were some kind of currency or where you had to put one into a receptor to open doors instead of using small keys.

I think I can clear this up.
If you talk to an NPC (after doing some task for him most likely) and he lowers a bridge that lets you into some area that NPC was the key and the bridge was a locked door. If the same NPC unlocks some other path later they are a different key at that point.

If you really want I could call all of the keys triggers and all of the locked paths events- it doesn't matter what I call them, they have the same functional role of your needing to get access to the key and then go over the the lock to get somewhere else. Very few dungeons have NPCs in them and very few overworld areas have literal keys in them so these are areally just two sides of the same coin.

Now NPCs obviously do a lot of things that keys do not do but for the bare bones "did we put this all together in a way that the player can even get through it" metric they are identical.


So with that said good design in these games usually tries to break that rule, or rather make it look like they've broken that rule. For example you can have some sequence where and NPC is scurrying around to lower the bridge from the other side of a canyon. Like that the key is actually wherever the player has to step for the NPC to "notice" him and start their little sequence. I think there are several cases in these games where some napping character smells some food thing and wakes up for it and opens a path somehow in exchange for it. If the NPC is literally napping in the road then are the lock and the NPC that gave you the story item is the key.

Logically you need that item like you need a key but any time the item/key only has a single use the game might as well check that you went to where you get it instead of seeing if you are holding 1 or 0 of it. In fact these games don't usually have what you would think of as an inventory for those kinds of items- instead the screen just looks at the trigger and tells you if you've been there yet or not.

For opening up paths there isn't all that glaring a difference between these ways of checking for the key but for generating blocks in the path you care much more about if they can get the item for the door than if they are holding it.

As for the tools they're just multiple use keys. You want to be able to get to them before having to go through any of the locks they open. These are generally the most interesting because they have the most involved role in puzzles- both intuitive but not-automatic. Keys in puzzles don't take any thought so much as a guess and NPCs either have some strange role they've got to explain or do something the player couldn't have expected without seeing it.


Really keys were just the clearest name for these things the way the generator is going to handle them. It's going to spit out something midway between a zelda game and an ordered list of items and dungeons. If you were dead set on it you could make it into just an old style maze with keys (red key, blue key, green key, small keys, boss1 key, pressure plate- well that one's not exactly a key but still.) but that would be cutting out information. The goal is to have something that really just needs a Zelda type library of rooms and puzzles and such. A process for plugging those in would be really simple, but more importantly it gives you a step where you can interfere.

"A 2x3 room segment that requires tool_A to solve goes at coords x,y"
It would be like the world and history seeds in DF map generation- the world seed sets down the landscape, the puzzle seed says if the first dungeon has 'the boomerang and switches over gaps' or 'the glove and stones/blocks to lift' as well as which particular puzzles go where.
*the puzzle seed would obviously include bosses as their vulnerabilities are important but I don't know if I'd want to have another seed just for the towns and NPCs- I don't think people would be too concerned about town layouts and who is giving sagely advice but being pretty distinct it might be worth it.

I don't blame you for not reading but in the first part I called the items multi use keys. It's still important to make sure they are in front of all the locks puzzles that you can't get through without them. It wouldn't do to have the bow behind a small key door and have the only small key available require you to shoot one of those eyes on the wall with an arrow.

A fish-taur is called a mermaid. A cuttlefish-taur is more like an octopus-taur.

I'd already thought of these though, for the most part. I just expanded the idea somewhat after looking at this.

e: You know thinking about it since they cover their head in tentacles to be streamlined for fast movement they're also sailing blind. Actual cuttlefish have the eyes off to the side of there.
Well, giant lumbering manbeasts that run into things when they are in a hurry kind of has its own poetry to it.

Actually I didn't think the games ever had those kinds of treasure rooms that you could end up stuck out of. There was always some other key out in the dungeon to find and the safeguard to that was just making it harder to get into the room so you'd probably use the key in more obvious rooms.

Even so this was very rare as you'd usually just bomb your way into those rooms.

E: though with seeds and replayability I guess there could be incomplete solutions and that so that you had to do a lot of things right to get a "good ending." I'd probably prefer to have some time themed dungeon where all the keys and doors reset when you left it or did some other trigger action.