I mentioned in my post, The Inception of Lenna’s Inception, that I wanted to combine Zelda’s game mechanics with roguelike randomization for my game Lenna’s Inception. The Binding of Isaac went some way towards this, but doesn’t contain the item-based puzzles that (to me, at least) characterize Zelda.
In this post, I’ll introduce an abstraction for Zelda-like item-based puzzles, and an initial algorithm for generating puzzles procedurally.
I spent a lot of time playing Link’s Awakening over the holidays, and while I was playing it, I couldn’t help but pick apart the mechanics of the game. It was like I was Neo in the Matrix: I could see the code (although definitely not in a literal sense, Nintendo). This gave me some ideas…
It was a question that inspired me to start programming fishpye (also known as raycl): what would it look like to be able to see in all directions at once? The answer, it seems, is quite weird: