Well, look who's back! Hello. This is your favourite weekly update blog! Last week was interesting, to say the least. Last weekend, I decided to bring The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on the Nintendo switch.

I must say that the experience was very satisfying. Although the game itself is still a bit outdated in terms of game design, it remains quite memorable. Also, with an almost identical conception of rooms (especially dungeons rooms), I was able to experiment a bit with my own room designs too. So without any further ados, let's dive right into it!

New Rooms Mechanics 

While playing Link's Awakening, I realized that most enemies in Zelda games were not as complex as I originally thought. With this realization came another question: if it's not the enemies that make the game fun, then what is it? After a few hours of play, it became very clear...

Zelda games are known for two things: their dungeons and their puzzles. In our case, the "dungeons" part is already taken care of. This leaves us with the star of this post: puzzles!

Puzzle Pieces

So last week I was cooking up a puzzle system. The idea was to have a solid puzzle system from which to build semi-complex puzzles. With it, we can also have compound puzzles.

Each puzzle can have two possible states: on or off. Some compound puzzles wait until all their sub-puzzles are cleared before turning themselves on. It's also possible to invert the puzzle too.

A compound puzzle can also have different logic gates. By default, a compound puzzle uses the AND gate. We can also have an OR gate and even an XOR gate. Paired with the inverter, we get the full logical gates range!

Puzzles can also freeze. Frozen puzzles won't be able to change their on/off state anymore. Quite handy when a puzzle is finished!

But anyway, let's take a look at some puzzle elements!

Toggle Switches

First up, here's the toggle switch. Basically, it is a switch that activates interacting with it with the "e" key. Each switch can also interact with other switches. With this, we can create complex puzzles that are quite interesting to solve.

Pressure Plates

And finally, here is the pressure plate. To activate it, just press the button down. This can be done by either pushing a heavy object onto it or just standing on it. 

Some pressure plates need constant pressure to stay "on" while others will freeze up once activated. Just look at the colour of the plate to find out.

And that's about it for the puzzle as of yet. I still have to integrate puzzles into rooms and also refactor the game flow so to include puzzles. I also want to add more type of puzzles and perhaps even change the map generation to add even more puzzles.  

In other words, a bunch of work ahead!

Minor Updates

• Changed ice floors:
  • Now ice floors have walls.
  • This is especially noticable when surrounded by either chasms or liquids.
    
• Refactored the screen brightness modifiers so that they also include tints:
  • This way I can more closely simulate the dark brown tint of sunglasses.
• Added a mechanism allowing players to break down any obstacles that would have been broken only by bombs.
  •  However, players must be strong enough and have the right kind of weapon.
• Added a ColorModifierStack class that acts as a ModifierStack but for colours. 

Next Week

I have to say that playing at Zelda allowed me to realign my priorities and also showed me how to do the parts principle well. Before I thought that what should be improved was the bosses.

However, Link's Awakening showed me that a game does not need a complex boss to be fun.

Although bosses remain a priority, it's far less important than puzzles. Thus I'm planning on working on those puzzle bits first. Then perhaps it's really gonna be boss time.

Aside from that, it's your usual suspect...

I'm really feeling great about puzzles, though. It can potentially bring a whole lot of depth to an otherwise quite dry game...

So yeah, that's about it!