I’m quite disappointed with how much I worked on my projects until today. I barely touched any one of them, my classes are back, I have to figure out my schedules and plan what is the best time to work on my game projects and on my university related stuff.

Decisions on Zelda Souls

I said that I had to make decisions on art direction, name, user interface, sound/music, story and characters and some features. What I want is to create a similar feeling and experience to old NES or SNES games such as Zelda and Final Fantasy. Here we go:

Art Direction: 32×32 tiles with “chibi” characters, their heads will be about half of their size, so I can really capture identity for each character. I won’t use any color restrictions, although SNES already had a really broad color pallete.

Sound/Music: I think music is a big part of the experience those antique games created. I will go for an 8 bit or an 16 bit sound if 8 bit seems too limited for me (wich probably will be)

User Interface: Minimalist. As simple as possible, life bar and stamina bar on top left and equipments on bottom left

Experience to Create: I said that I wanted to recreate a nostalgic experience, but there’s more than that, I had the idea of using my fight against procrastination as my inspiration, my biggest goal with all these projects is to be self disciplined and achieve my goals, to get things done. As I go out of my comfort zone and fight with procrastination I thought that I should try to recreate this experience in the game.

Level Up Mechanic: You try to reach your goals and you will fail, with failure you learn, at some point you have knowledge enough to succeed, success is a sign that you have enough knowledge to accomplish what you want but it by itself won’t teach you anything. I really don’t know where it came from, it just came to my mind, that being said I thought of doing a different level up system, you gain experience by diying in the game, the lower you level when you finish the game, the best player you are! But players are just going to keep killing themselves! Sure… Sure… Let me introduce you to…

The Big Brother AI: Using Fuzzy Logic this AI will keep an eye on you through the whole game calculating the probability of you trying to cheat and level up by just killing yourself without making any effort to succeed. If it thinks you are trying to cheat it, your save game will be deleted and a beautiful message with a pixel art ancient guy will be showed!

Names: I’m starting to experiment with some names, I like “Midnight Journey”, “Journey to Midnight” and something related to the word “Moonlight”, I don’t have any part of the story yet but those names suggests something related to the night, that would be cool.

Battle System: I have a working battle system and I said I would tweak it, I changed my mind, the 80/20 rule makes sense here, I have 80% of my battle system with 20% of my time/effort, so those tweaks would be really slow and would demand a lot of effort. I don’t need a polished battle system right now. I need game design decisions, pixel art animations and tile maps so the game can turn into something.

I just have to go through story and characters now, but I promise I will continue to work on it and have a small playable demonstration by the start of May (until May 5th I hope).