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[Enzo]

Yes but people keep seperating things by keys.

Very few things in Zelda were kept locked by keys outside the dungeon you needed the item to get into. (or rather, instead of keys you get inside the dungeon being relevant for that very dungeon)

The seperating sections of the Zelda world were item based not key based.

Actually... how many sections in Zelda were opened with a litteral key?

If you're talking about the overworld, yeah. You (almost?) always require items or story progression to reach new overworld areas. But keys are a pretty big part of Zelda dungeons.

Dungeon progression in Zelda games in generally regulated by a combination of keys, items, and the dungeon gimmick. For example, take the water temple from OoT (because, like many gamers, it is burned into my memory):

First, you find an item required to access the dungeon (the iron boots, I believe), or simply progress the story to the point where you are allowed access. You spend the first section dicking around with the dungeon gimmick (changing water levels) to obtain enough keys to reach the main dungeon item (the hookshot). Using the item you can access other parts of the dungeon (unreachable platforms) where you will continue to dick around with the dungeon gimmick until you obtain the boss key.

Not every dungeon follows this format, but it's fairly typical.

[Shoku]

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.

[Neonivek]

Here is the thing

The general formula of Zelda games is you start up with a wide open but ultimately very limited area of roam.

Each tool opens up wider area of play and allows you to finish dungeons.

If this generator is JUST a Zelda Dungeon generator then fine by all means the "keys" does it well enough...

However a Zelda gameplay would be a circle inside a circle inside a circle.

[Max White]

Are you going to be making a fanwork, using the same graphics and hero and world, or a clone with your own ideas? Because realistically, art and music can be a bitch, much more then logic.

[Shoku]

Here is the thing

The general formula of Zelda games is you start up with a wide open but ultimately very limited area of roam.

Each tool opens up wider area of play and allows you to finish dungeons.

If this generator is JUST a Zelda Dungeon generator then fine by all means the "keys" does it well enough...

However a Zelda gameplay would be a circle inside a circle inside a circle.

I'm going to guess you didn't play many of those old DOS maze games where you had to roam around in some large area until you got the red key and then you could go through three of the doors that had been taunting you until you found the blue key that opened up doors into a larger area still...

"Red key" gave you access to ALL of the red doors just like the hookshot gives you access to ALL of the paths that would just be a gaping chasm except that they have a wooden post on the other side.

The puzzle logic for the overworld is basically the same thing as the dungeons. Instead of exchangeable keys it just uses exchangeable rupees and a lot of mechanisms are instead people. The tools do the same thing in and out of dungeons so I don't understand why this is a hanging point.

art

The worst case scenario for art to go with this is a choice between some ugly custom graphics by me or actual Zelda sprites. As in you could go into the options and choose one or the other. Where I'm aiming is to make it a bit more open so that could make their own. I should be able to do some fairly passable stuff though- I even know a few ways to handle having the computer do palette swap work to expand whatever art is available (like the numerous slime colors in Wind Waker.)

I think that having the more bloated sort of thing I've got in mind wouldn't hurt performance so much as just take up more memory.

Technically speaking though, the generator itself doesn't actually need any graphics at all. Those can can come later.

[Neonivek]

I'm going to guess you didn't play many of those old DOS maze games

Like Doom?

I have.

The puzzle logic is the same yes but the difference is theme and gameplay. You need to be careful when creating the system.

or rather...

For a dungeon you get a flow chart

For the overworld you got a Ven Diagram.

Of course as I said it depends on how complex you want to make it. If your just going for one large dungeon (with overworld sections) then by all means ignore what I am saying.

though this is my last attempt to explain myself, so don't worry about me clogging this up.

[Shoku]

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.

[Siquo]

There was a game that did this... Let me find it...
There we go: http://download.cnet.com/Yoda-Stories-demo/3000-7564_4-10007355.html

[Shoku]

How much of this did it do?

[Siquo]

The whole random key-gate concept? Go download it, it's just 3 mb, and very enjoyable.
I've just played it again a few times as well.

[Shoku]

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

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

[Neonivek]

Now here is extra dimensions of Zelda

1) Each Zelda needs a certain number of collectible objects that unlock the final dungeons, master sword, or final boss, or even ending... Sometimes multiple collections per game.
2) Great faries are in every game and they are either ugly or great looking
3) Dark realm or Golden Realm or Time Travel Or Shrink. Alternate realms are often in Zelda games
4) Some REALLY REALLY annoying person somewhere... no matter what... An annoying creature or person is a staple at this point... annoyingly.
5) The plot has a 80-90% chance of being about Ganon or Ganondorf even if it isn't immediately obvious. 10% of anyone else.
6) Link can either have Brown of Blond hair, ignoring how sprites often look.
7) There is a 60-80% chance Zelda is disposed, useless, or not in the game.

[Vattic]

This is a really cool idea. It reminds me of something I saw on TigSource ages ago. Random zelda-like maps (click to regen). The post about it. Apparently based on a description given by Toady in an interview on Gamasutra. They make me think of both the GB(A) Zelda games and the first.

[Shoku]

1) Well you would have a lot of non-use items gained from clearing each dungeon, such as triforce fragments or crystals with girls in them. These implicitly mean you have collected all of the dungeon tools. You also have things like the trading sequence, those little things you collected for the meter in Link's Awakening or the bugs in TP. Usually less necessary to beat the game but maybe needed for some upgrade or whatever.

2) I think the "healing fountain" is a convention that should probably go in. Reduced needs for endurance from exploring does a lot to make the difficulty low enough for more casual players. Having these be related to fairies... doesn't seem as important.

3) Yeah, I was just talking about the connected maps sort of things.

4) It almost feels like I'd just be ripping off the series if I gave the same sort of focus to Mr Obnoxious. The game could have one... or not. It certainly wouldn't break the gameplay to leave him out.

5) If I didn't use link models for the character this would be irrelevant. Nonetheless the NPCs and such should mention the end boss a good deal and it would be fine for him to run around in the world causing trouble and such.

6) Meh.

7) I think actually having another character run around during a boss fight and being involved in the weak spot showing up actually kind of sucks if it's done too early on. The character is kind of proving they are a hero able to stand on their own for the early portions like that so assistance takes away from that. Toward the end it makes more sense for you to be facing down challenges that would be physically impossible alone.

I guess I should say that a lot of what I'm trying to do here would be about as applicable for a Metroid or Castlevania game. I'm aiming for puzzles and distinct dungeons and that so Zelda is the best comparison but it doesn't need to be something people might think was an actual title in the Zelda series.

-

Nice thread. I feel kind of disheartened to see people that are no doubt better programmers than me only doing that much with it though.

e:
http://natewm.com/blog/2009/04/26/procedural-adventure-map-generation/
This shows pretty much how I mean to deal with the overworld. Larger obviously but that's the technique.

[Nivim]

 Someone created an "Open Zelda" project that you could possibly make use of, but beyond having a map editor and player, I don't really know much about it.