Peregrination

Few titles have had such a gigantic impact on gaming as the first Legend of Zelda. Soon after it's release (and Nintendo's boost in stature) other companies rushed to get their own "Zelda Clones" out the door, such as Neutopia (Turbo Graphics 16), Arkista's Ring (NES), Crystalis (NES), and the Mana series (Game Boy, SNES). These games all included vital aspects of the Zelda series, such as:

• A large expansive world which the player was free to explore non-linearly (to varying extents, Arkista's Ring was entirely linear).
• Action oriented combat and puzzle solving (some games focused on one more than the other, and some determined battle outcomes based on a form of experience points more than action; Arkista's Ring didn't include any puzzles).
• Collecting items which could be used in combat, could modify the player (such as healing, transformation, or extra defense), or could allow access to other areas of the game world.
• Collection of coins or other objects for use as currency, generally to purchase healing or non-unique and consumable items (Arkista's Ring had no shops, and therefore no currency).
• A top down ("bird's eye") perspective.
• Non-tile restricted movement ("pixelized movement"; Arkista's Ring was limited to tile based movement).
• A plot involving a number of dungeons to explore, each with a boss and an item (Arkista's Ring was linear, so there wasn't a difference between 'dungeon' and 'overworld', though each themed set of areas ended with a boss battle).
• None Player Characters to talk to and interact with (Arkista's Ring did not include NPCs).

It's amazing how much one game can define a genre, and how many other games will just blatantly steal all sorts of ideas from the original. Wait, what's this you say about Arkista's Ring? Why, if it's so different from the others, did I even list it as a Zelda clone? Really, I shouldn't have, but so many other people do so I figured I had to. So, you've never played Arkista's Ring? I suggest giving it a try; it's one of my favorite games of all time, and one of the biggest inspirations behind George Gnome.

In Arkista's Ring (AR), you play as Christine who is on a quest to retrieve the eponymous Ring of Arkista of an evil Shogun. Christine must face hoards of monsters on 125 levels, which progress through themes (such as woodlands, crypt, snow, water, and castle), and end with a battle against the Shogun himself. So, what classifies this as a Zelda Clone in so many people's minds? Let's list what they have in common:

• First and foremost, the player character wears green and has pointy ears. Yip, this is enough to determine what "gameplay" category the title falls into. Even though Link is a Hylian, and Christine is a run of the mill elf, the ears and color are apparently all that matter.
• Gameplay takes place in a top down perspective, and is action driven. (Metroid is a side scroller with action based combat and projectiles, but I don't see people calling it a "Mario Clone").
• AR's head's up display uses hearts to display the player's health. The hearts are of a set number, and extra health containers take the form of pieces of armor, such that the display might show six hearts, a chest plate, and a helmet.
• Christine can find and use several items to help her in her quest, just like in the Legend of Zelda. (Wait, don't most games include items? Why arn't they compared to Zelda?)
• Many of the monsters in AR look like monsters from Zelda. (Now this is just getting ridiculous; since when did Zelda own the rights to Skeletons, Ogres, balls of tentacles, wizards, and... ninja? Half the monsters in this game are bloody ninja, and the original Zelda didn't include even one!)

In case you can't tell, I don't think AR is a Zelda Clone by any means, and I reject how most people categorize it as such. However, this isn't a post about AR, this is a post about trying to design a game without the stigma of "Zelda Clone". Let's take a look at the sort of gameplay someone (me, in this case) might want create:

When I made my first George Gnome game, I wanted a large world which the player could explore. Most people making multiplayer online games want this same thing. We can do this in one of several perspectives, the most popular being "bird's eye" and "side scrolling / platform". If we choose platform then we run into problems, such as our map basically becoming a large ring that the player can only choose to move east or west on, and all our puzzles can be summarized as "get over this large thing". We can make it more two dimensional by putting cities in the mountains/clouds or underground/underwater, but I don't want half my game to be clouds and the other half wet; it gets old quickly. We're basically limited to bird's eye view (unless we want to get really complicated and use something like isometric). This isn't a bad thing, though. Bird's eye view is great for action games.

So, how do we design our map? We could make one giant map which includes the entire world, and scroll the map as the player moves, but this takes up much too much memory to be a good option; also, the player has a harder time breaking the map down into sections which can be easily remembered. The best way to handle this is to break the map up into small sections which are loaded as needed, but how large should the sections be? If they're very large (ten screen widths wide, or more, let's say) then the player will loose sense of how the maps are connected geographically. In other words, the player will become conscious of the fact that's she's being warped from one area to another. We can make them smaller (2-3 screen widths, let's say) and the player will be able to form connections between the maps geographically, but the combination of scrolling and warping is odd and distracting. The player feels like she's in a box. I think that the best solution is to make each map one screen width wide, so no scrolling ever takes place, each map feels geographically connected to the others around it, and the least amount of memory is used. This is the approach I eventually decided on for George, as each map could be loaded as a separate html document into the iframe I was using for the map display (George Started off as a Javascript game in IE5, before iframes were hunted down and destroyed).

Now that we've talked about the map, let's talk about action. The player is going to need health and a way to attack. We could display the health as a number, but I believe in using small numbers for hit points. Numbers would make sense in something like Final Fantasy where health runs up around 9999, but displaying an "8" in the corner just looks stupid. So let's go with something graphical. A meter doesn't make sense, because, again, we're using small numbers in discreet steps; meters work for displaying things like "73.4%", but they don't work very well when you have 8 discreet steps with nothing in-between. So let's use tokens. We could use anything for a token: Prince of Persia used potions, but we're going to be using potions as items which restore health. We could use blue circles, yellow smiling faces, or anything really. Hearts are used most often and make the most sense, so we could certainly go with hearts here. (Side note, George uses radishes, but I think I'd use hearts in any non-G.Gnome game). On to attacking. There are three types of attacks: melee, ranged, and area of effect. Most action/adventure games don't make large use of area of effect attacks, and they're never the primary means of attacking (though the original Zelda did have some, such as the bomb and the flute), so let's talk about melee and ranged. Melee is a no-brainer: give the player a sword (or knife, spear, etc.). Ranged is often either a bow or some sort of magic missile (a wand in both Zelda and AR).

Next, we're going to need to give the player a means to access new areas of the map, or interact in new ways with already visited areas. We'll do this through the use of skills and items (Zelda didn't have "skills" as such, but some of the items, such as raft, were more of an unlocked skill than an item). Items/skills will be collected via major quests, such as by killing a boss or exploring a dungeon. Why else would a player need to explore our dungeons and kill our bosses, unless they needed the items/skills to get to new areas, and eventually the final boss?

So there you have it. We'll use a bird's eye perspective, maps which are one screen wide (and don't scroll), a giant map which the player is free to explore, action based combat using a sword, bow, magic, and items, items and skills which are found in dungeons, and boss battles. "Wait just a minute!" you say, "You've just described the Legend of Zelda! You're making a Zelda clone!"

In some ways you're correct. That does describe Zelda. However, I did not set out to copy Zelda, and we arrived at this description by exploring the best way to achieve our desired game-play. Zelda is not a unique game which has been copied over and over again; rather, the gameplay mechanics in Zelda were arrived at by a group of people looking to focus on a certain type of gameplay, and any other game built on that type of gameplay will contain similar gameplay mechanics. After all, how can you claim that Zelda owns the use of a sword, a bow, the bird's eye perspective, boss battles at the end of a dungeon, or the color green? Yet Nintendo has been able to edge out any other game from this genre, because nobody wants to be the company that just copies Zelda. In the end, it's the genre (and the player who likes that genre) that gets hurt by the lack of games (I don't know about you, but I actually hate the new Zelda games; the gameplay is completely different, and the combat just isn't there). Really, it's a shame that Zelda was the first overhead action/adventure game. Had a mediocre game (with a title like "Action Realms") been the first to use these gameplay mechanics, and then Zelda came along a year later, no one would call Arkista's Ring a Zelda Clone or an Action Realms clone. It'd just be another adventure game, and game developers would be free to design more of them.

Finally, let's take a look at another genre which has suffered the same fate. Rogue was an adventure game made in 1980 which pioneered several key gameplay mechanics, such as a text characters instead of sprites, and randomly generated content. Rogue was so successful at defining it's genre that not only is the genre named after the game (something I don't think holds true of any other genre/game), but any game with a text based display is immediately referred to as a rogue-like. (Well, in some ways the developer is just asking for it if the player is a big @ symbol).

The difference is that there's no stigma associated with being a Rogue-like; developers like the term, and will happily apply it to their creations. "Zelda Clone", however, is used to write off a game: "If a game is a Zelda Clone, the developers obviously weren't smart enough to think of their own gameplay mechanics. Plus, why play a Zelda Clone, when you can play the real thing? They're all cheap knock-offs." Imagine my frustration the first time I heard George Gnome's Secret Adventure described as "Zelda, with vegetables".

For me, it all comes down to this: With the exception of the first (and third, to an extent) games, I hate Zelda. I hate masks. I hate Tingle. I hate NPCs that smile and wring their hands like dogs begging scraps, all the while dancing like someone who needs to use the rest room and making weird moans and squeaks. I hate collecting seventeen types of attacking items for use against a total of eight non-boss enemies (Wind Waker was great, until I discovered I had seen and fought every monster in the game less than half way through. I waited until my brother had a save file near the end so I could fight Ganon. That much was fun). And though I absolutely despise the new Zelda games (and many of the old), I love the action/adventure genre. To this day I still play Zelda and AR on a regular basis. A room full of Ironknuckles (or ninja!) never looses it's challenge. I want to see more action adventure games, to hell with the "Zelda Clone" stigma.

Well, the virus is inactive for now. Huzzah? I don't really know wether or not to celebrate, or what to do next. I've used system restore to restore back to a checkpoint made automatically by the OS about two weeks ago. I was assured by Windows that this restore is "completely reversable".

Completely reversable? So at any point, I could restore to my infected state? So the infection is stored in memory, somewhere? Also, what was infected, and where did it come from? System restore can't answer any of these questions.

Let's take a look at what I did during that time which may have caused the problem: Installed several Firefox updates; installed sfxr; installed MilkyTracker; let my flat-mate use the computer. Of these four actions, I am likely to redo three of them. But is it safe to do so? Who knows.

Am I still affected by this malware (if it even was malware)? Who knows.

For the first time ever, I'm infected. Yay!
About three days ago my computer started to act in ways that make me convinced it is now infected with a computer virus. By the way, if there are any spelling or grammer errors or anything in this post, I don't care to correct them; it takes about 30sec between what I type and when it appears on the screen, and I really can't be bothered to wait that long befween each key I hit. Oh well.

[Edit: Here's my biggest problem. My CPU runs in these spike cycles where it spends about 95% of it's time at 100% CPU usage, and then dips down to 5% for just a moment before cycling again. After the comp being on for about 2min the fan goes on it's highest setting. It's like the computer is constanctly revving it's engine, or spinning it's wheels.]

Instead of listing all the problems symptoms I've noticed, I'll link you to a post which is from someone who seemed to have had the same problem I have:
http://www.gladiator-antivirus.com/forum/lofiversion/ index.php/t44357.html

Allow me to [insert] my own comments where I also observe this symptom.

"Hi there,
On 10/8 I was online and shut down around 1am without problem. When I turned my computer on again around 9pm, I noticed Zone Alarm and Spyware Doctor were no longer running in the task bar by the clock, which they should be since they load on start up [yip, zone alarm is missing in action]. Also, when clicking Internet Explorer or windows explorer it took like 10 mins for the windows to open [same, opening a window at all takes forever]. Eventually the Spyware Doctor icon appeared by the clock. It did not disable my AVG antivirus however. The ZoneAlarm client and vsmon were both running under the processes tab [same] in the task manager even though they weren't "really" running, so I ended the process on both since the vsmon was sucking a lot of memory [same, this doesn't fix anything, and trying to start Zone Alarm results in the same behavior as before]. The strangest thing was while in the task manger under the processes tab, it showed all these processes were running but it was blank under the column for "User Name" for everything except for one program showing it was being run by the system [Yip]. All the programs that would show the administrators name were blank, as if I wasn't logged on, but under the users tab it showed I was. Then after about 10 mins or so my name appeared next to the processes [same]. I am able to get around on everything I click so far but theres a huge, huge lag time opening everything."


Perhaps my biggest problem is this: I'm not a "power user". I don't download much of anything (though recently I've downloaded two programs for the audiophiles guild: sfxr and MilkyTracker) and I've never had the need to become malware savy; FireFox and ZoneAlarm have been good enough for me for years now. One thing I'd also like to point out from that thread is how my sound card seems to be disabled, too. I can play certain sound files in Windows Media, but other forms of audio don't seem to be working, and I'm getting a new beeping sound with my alert windows (as that poster described). Good thing I had recently backed up my most important BYOND projects, because I may be out of commision for a while.

Anyone have any ideas?

Airjoe recently brought to my attention that he had a copy of the project files for the 2007 Game in a Day event (GiaD).

[Random squiggly symbols denoting bewilderment and curse words]

So I hastily obtained a copy of this rare and much sought after file and began the process of judging the entries. I then offered up my results (to several persons who shall remain un-named) as an xml file so that they could offer their critique and perhaps judge as well... this didn't happen. The participants I talked with still wanted to see the results of my judging, so I offer them here. Consider this the definitive judging of the 2007 GiaD.

Game in a Day Results

I may even spell check the final product once I get some sleep.

And Iain blessed the Monday, and made it holy. For on Monday he rested from all the work which he had done in the prior four weeks without a day off.