The associated blog post from Ben Purdy: <a href="http://www.benpurdy.com/blog/2014/3/demaking-zelda" rel="nofollow">http://www.benpurdy.com/blog/2014/3/demaking-zelda</a>
Just wish I could see my current orientation! (Seriously though—from a given screen, I have no idea what the result of A is going to do or what the arrow keys are going to do. If i'm at a square and facing left, hitting the left arrow key will move me left, but if i'm facing any other direction, hitting left will rotate me. It's important that I know which way I'm facing.)
This is a fantastic commentary on what makes a game fun. I'm always intrigued by titles that require nearly no art skills. "Thomas Was Alone" kind of surprised me in that way too because it was successful side by side with other titles on Steam while using an art style that was so simplistic almost anyone could have done it.
I don't know. I find that pretty frustrating, because I've no idea what I'm picking up and having in front of me or what I can do. It's probably only interesting if you know the original by heart...
Pretty good work. Didn't like it at first but then ended up playing it for a few minutes, even though I wasn't in the mood for playing games.
I noticed one thing though, I looked into the code (it's neat and tidy!) and the game logic (updates) was built into the render function that gets called with requestAnimationFrame. Might be a problem on devices that aren't refreshing @60 hertz because the game runs as fast as the user's monitor.
Memory is an interesting thing. I haven't played the original Zelda in many many years and immediately knew where to go when I was dropped into the game.
Reminds me of the end of REDDER[1]. Strip away the aesthetics of any modern game, and you've got something very similar to this.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/529992" rel="nofollow">http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/529992</a>
I've long thought a minimalistic style like this could be very useful in teaching game design and discussing game mechanics. You can learn a lot about a game by breaking it down like this.
This has been awesome. Thanks! I was kinda disappointed that I didn't need to get to Death Mountain after getting the 8 pieces. A 1-pixel Ganon would be cool!