(By the way, Mike is awesome and gave me permission to use his maps in this article. If you'd like to check them out yourself, you can find the maps I used here: Mike's RPG Center.
I'm only going to cover the first dungeon in this article, but the principles apply to all of them. Fortunately, this is made easier by the fact that top-down maps of the level designs are easily and readily available. In this article, I'll apply the same methodology to the first level from the original Legend of Zelda.
If the design requires new skills from the player, does it teach and test those skills appropriately? Is there sufficient variety in the gameplay? Do enemy encounters frequently repeat themselves? Are the spaces varied in interesting ways? Does the intensity of the experience ramp up in a satisfying way? Do monsters get more difficult as the level goes on? Does the player get a chance to learn how the enemies work and then display her mastery later on? How do the spaces in the level fit together? Where is the player supposed to go, and will she know how to get there? There are a few things I'm always looking for: This kind of analysis is pretty standard fare I do it all the time on colleagues' level designs. While going through The Legend of Zelda, I played each level and then did an in-depth analysis of the level on paper. To achieve this feeling, Miyamoto and company invented a number of really clever tricks to create non-linear levels that are still useful today.
When I traveled around the country without a map, trying to find my way, stumbling on amazing things as I went, I realized how it felt to go on an adventure like this." – via Wikipedia It was quite a surprise for me to stumble upon it. "When I was a child," Miyamoto said, "I went hiking and found a lake. In an interview, creator Shigeru Miyamoto once said that with The Legend of Zelda, he wanted to evoke the feelings associated with exploration in the player: So when I went back on Link's 25th anniversary to play the first Zelda game and maybe write an article about it, I was a bit gun-shy.Īs it turns out, I was totally wrong! Instead of finding something outdated with a ton of nostalgia value, I found an excellent primer in the fundamentals of non-linear game design. The NES was the Wild West of game development, I thought, lawless and free.
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