Creative Item Usage

[Thinkman]

I've loosely designed a few quests on paper that I intended to make (but as yet haven't) and while looking over my notes recently, I noticed that I was doing something that I haven't seen much of; out-of-the-box item usage. That is to say, I take the mechanics of an item and use them in unintended ways.

For example, one could use the Stepladder to make a "Climbing Claw" item. What you do is make the Stepladder graphic completely invisible, then change the graphic of the icon to a claw of some sort (I just planned on ripping the Cat's Claws from Final Fantasy Mystic Quest). Now, to create a climbable surface, create two tiles with the same graphic, which looks like a normal wall, but with notches/roughness to indicate climbability. One of these tiles should simply be walkable, and the other should be unwalkable, requiring the stepladder to pass. Now just place a line of rough wall where you want the player to be able to climb, and put the "can only pass w/stepladder" version of the tile at the very top and bottom. This way, the player can't walk across the rough wall until they have the "Climbing Claws." And since the 'stepladder' graphic is invisible, it won't appear under Link when he passes by, thus completing the illusion. The only problem here is that since there's no way to force Link to constantly face upward, the player will be able to walk in all four directions while "climbing," which breaks the illusion a bit.

Another idea I had, and this one is really convoluted, was to make underwater levels where Link has a breath meter to measure how long he can stay submerged. What you do is, make it so that the Boots use magic and the graphics for the Boots are invisible. Now, make your underwater room covered in tiles that act as spikes, but don't actually look like spikes, and instead look however you want the underwater room to look. Now, change the color of Link's Magic Meter to blue, start him off with a full Magic Meter, and presto. While Link is in the underwater room, his "Breath Meter" (recolored Magic Meter) will drain because the Boots are active since the entire floor consists of spikes. When his Breath Meter is empty, he'll start taking damage due to a lack of oxygen (in reality, because he's walking on invisible spikes). The knockback due to the spikes could be explained away as Link thrashing uncontrollably as he suffocates. You could also make poison gas rooms or whatnot using this method, but of course, no other item will be able to use the Magic Meter. And you've also got to find a way to auto-refill Link's Breath when he leaves the water/poison.

Another idea I had was to change the Raft into a Deku Leaf or some such -- change the graphic apropriately and have the pathes of the "raft" move you across holes, instead of water.

If you don't want your quest to involve the collection of Triforce pieces, but you still want to use the Recorder (which relies on Triforce pieces to function), you could re-graphic the Triforce pieces into, say, magical lanterns which, when lit, allow you to return at any time using the Recorder, which itself could be re-graphicked into any number of things.

Speaking of which, since you can make panels that trigger some event when the Recorder is played on them, you can turn the Recorder into many different things. You can make puddles of water freeze into ice blocks which can then either be pushed around or walked on by regraphicking the Recorder into an Ice Rod, and having the Recorder panel in front of the puddle. Of course, the player will be able to face any direction while standing on the panels, which, like the Climbing Claws, sort of kills the illusion a bit, but será será. One quest idea I had involved a game world of islands floating on clouds, and you have to link magical bridges between them to span the gaps. The Recorder would be regraphicked into some mystical artefact which creates the magic bridges. And of course, you could always make something like Ren's broken sword from Pirates of Dark Water, make wall-mounted keyhole graphics and put the Recorder panel in front of it.

Most of this stuff is pretty random, silly or meaningless in the long run, but it does at least serve to set one quest apart from all the others which make conventional use of the Stepladder and Raft and Triforce Pieces and so on. So does anybody else ever think up ideas like this, or is it just me? And feel free to use any of the ideas I just threw out in your own quest, just credit me somewhere.

[Joe123]

You've come up with some quite good ideas, but I think to assume that noone's done them before is rather unfair.

1) The stepladder. (personally, I hate the stepladder, but that's beside the point) This is quite clever, however you can do better than that with the flippers. Set all of Link's swimming graphics to up-facing walking tiles, and make ladders water combos. Presto, Link now climbs up them. You can even give the flippers the graphics of your climbing claw. This has been used in Lost Isle. It means you can no longer swim in water however.

2) The boots. I've done this, if you check my FFA Demo. It's not quite the same - I had instead the float magic, which you use to cross spikes. You can also use it to create an air bubble around you and go underwater. It's very restrictive in 2.10, however, because you can't then use damage combos for a lot of things that you'd probably like them for (ie custom bosses)

3) The default graphic for the raft in the DoR tileset is a Deku Leaf.

4) If you look at Lost Isle once again, the triforce peices are not obligitory, but serve as places to leave whistle warps (or at least, so I've heard).

5) I can't say I've heard of your ideas with the whistle before, although I don't really get it, sorry.

So yeah, it's not just you :P
Nice creative thinking though :thumbsup:

[Pheonix]

Raft as Spinner = Instant win. Who cares about not being able to use raft docks normally?

[Thinkman]

@Joe123: I was going to post the flippers solution to climbing, but didn't want to make the topic post overlong, plus as you said, it removes swimming. Although, one could ostensibly make a freely controllable raft, then regraphic that to be swimming. Plus, I also hate the stepladder, which is why I wanted to think up of a way to use it.

To elaborate on the whistle usage, though -- you can make secrets trigger upon the usage of the Whistle, and can make it so that the secret only triggers when you're standing on a specific tile. So if you were to make a puddle-of-water tile and surround it with secrets that trigger if Link is standing on them and uses Whistle, you could make the secret be that the puddle of water tile changes into a pushable "ice" block. Of course then you'd have a hard time explaining why using the Ice Rod on the overworld allows you to warp, but you could always disallow warping, or use a different method of warping.

I was certain I wasn't the only one who'd thought of out-of-the-box uses for items, I was just curious as to their rarity, as I haven't played many quests (only about three from start to finish, I believe). What I'm most interested in hearing is what creative uses other people have come up with. I'm glad to hear that flippers-as-climbing has already been used, and Raft as Spinner has already been thought of (Pheonix mentioned it), because you can only play through so many quests with identical items before you tire, and from a design perspective, you can only make so many games before the creative pool becomes stagnant.

@Pheonix: Unfortunately, because Link can't move in three dimensions in Zelda Classic, the usage of the Raft as a Twilight Princess-style Spinner would be incredibly limited; you'd just end up doing the same things with it that you do with the normal Raft, with the limitation that it has to be against a surface. You also wouldn't be able to use the Raft Spinner to turn dials the way you can in Twilight, which would be it's neatest use. Hmm, although I suppose a delicate combined usage of a regraphicked Whistle and the Raft might be able to make a dial-turning spinner. Then again, scripting can do absolutely anything (did you see Zelda Classic Pong?), but how many of us have the skills necessary to script?

[Joe123]

Scriptings not too hard to learn if you're commited and keep going at it. I can't script very well at all, but I'm learning. I'm just making a script for fallen leaves that leave a trail of footprints in them when you walk across them at the moment (well, I've made it but it needs rewriting). But you could probably quite easily script a spinner a bit like that I think.

[Thinkman]

A long long time ago in the year 2000 or so, I used to be active in the Graal Online community. If you've never heard of it, it was a Link to the Past-style MMO, only with all the Nintendo stuff removed (original graphics, Rupees became "Graalats," etc). Technically it's still active, but where it was once free, it's now pay-to-play and furthermore, they've moved away from LttP and Zelda in general and towards a rather generic and cheap-feeling Ragnarok Online style of play.

The editor that the original Graal used was incredibly modular, you could easily create new items, enemies and so on and the script was a modified version of C, with specific language tailored to the game. For example, you could make an object have a script such as "if (playertouchesme) playerruppes=+5" to give the player five rupees upon touching the item. You could create your own flags and variables, both local and global, and there was essentially the full power of C (if structures, and structures, so on) at ones disposal. I became quite well-versed in the use of the editor and made a number of items, such as Arrow and Bomb variants (Splitter Arrow and Ice Bomb, if I remember correctly), Bottles (which the original Graal lacked) and even a fun little weapon I called Dark Matter. Using it shot out a blob of dark energy whose path you could influence ala the RC Boomerang, then pressing the button again warped you to the ball's location.

Now, I'm very artistically and creatively minded, not scientifically or mechanically-minded, so if I was able to learn Graal's spin on C, practically anyone can, but there's a major difference between Graal's C and Zelda Classic's scripting -- Graal's C as well as the entire game in general was beautifully doccumented, whereas ZC still doesn't even have an official tutorial, and probably never will. In fact, Graal had the FAQ/tutorial for it's scripting language built into the script editor itself (which was syntax highlighting and had error checking functionality). The only reason I was able to learn Graal C was not only because of the extensive doccumentation, but because there were literally hundreds of very complex and richly-developed scripts that people had made, and I was able to view these scripts and tinker with them to figure out how the scripting worked.

Unfortunatley, everyone locks out their games in Zelda Classic, so there's no hope of me reading through existing scripts to figure out how the scripting works, and I don't have the sheer tenacity necessary to sit at the computer for hours upon hours figuring out everything for myself. What is ZC scripting like, anyway? Is it an original language? A modification of an existing language? Because if it's C based, I might actually be able to pick it up.

[Russ]

Actually, scripting is a LOT like C and C++. Here (http://www.armageddongames.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=1159) is a link to the script showcase where you can look at scripts to see how they work. Also, the zodiac quest in the quest announcement/discussion forum is unpassworded and uses LOTS AND LOTS of scripts. You could look at that. And the best thing about ZScript is that it has predefined variables. A list of them is found in the file called zscript in the zip folder for the newer alpha builds. You can download the alpha builds here (http://www.shardstorm.com). But you should note that they can be quite buggy, but they are the only ones that can run scripts.

[Joe123]

The only reason I was able to learn Graal C was not only because of the extensive doccumentation, but because there were literally hundreds of very complex and richly-developed scripts that people had made, and I was able to view these scripts and tinker with them to figure out how the scripting worked.

This is how I'm learning Zscript. And it's a shame the documentation is so sparse, but I think it's a little unfair to say there's none and never will be.
http://www.shardstorm.com/ZCwiki/ZScript_Language_Reference
There's documentation here (although it's almost the same as that that comes with Zquest)
http://www.purezc.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=25946
http://www.geocities.com/pikachu_fan_13/zscripttutorial.txt
http://zctut.com/script1.php
And quite a few tutorials knocking around if you know where to look.

[Thinkman]

Yes, I suppose "never" is unfair, but I think it's incredibly unlikely that there will be official documentation in the forseeable future, which is understandable since the programmers are constantly working on a new beta or bugfixing extant betas, but is still lamentable since if there was official documentation by the programmers since the beginning, learning to use ZQuest would be a lot less daunting.

Anyway, thanks for the links you two. That actually does look like something I could handle. Now the question is, do I postpone designing my first game to learn scripting, or do I make my first game without script as it's currently planned, then learn script for my second game?

But back on topic -- Fission/Fusion bombs. One would have to be normal and one super, naturally, unless you were to use scripting to make it so Link can have two bomb items that act differently. As the names suggest, the Fission Bomb splits objects into two, and the Fusion Bomb fuses them together. It's quite simple, but I think it'd add something new to, for instance, pushblock puzzles (which have been done to death).

And now that there's an enemy editor, unique items can have unique enemies to go along with them. Fission Bomb could be used to split otherwise-invincible versions of enemies into smaller, killable ones. Fusion Bombs would be harder to use without scripting, but I could imagine perhaps Light Bubbles and Shadow Bubbles, or Fire Keese and Ice Keese which can only be killed if you Fuse them together. Perhaps even make a boss need to be split apart then fused specifically back together to kill it.

[Joe123]

Now that's creative thinking :)

I started making my quest, then about 4 weeks in, got caught up in scripting. It's hard to escape from really.
However, it makes the quest flow so much better. I have ladders you climb on properly, strings that play when you pick up items, duplicate screens with no seams, no more 'press down' nonsense; it really is great. I spose it depends how far you are into your quest really. I'd advise not learning till after you finish if you're quite a long way in, because you'll want to go back and redo everything with scripting.

[C-Dawg]

Unfortunatley, everyone locks out their games in Zelda Classic, so there's no hope of me reading through existing scripts to figure out how the scripting works, and I don't have the sheer tenacity necessary to sit at the computer for hours upon hours figuring out everything for myself.

Should I be offended?

http://www.armageddongames.net/forums/showthread.php?t=97366

I've been developing this quest unpassworded for about a year now, slick.

[Gleeok]

Yep, If it weren't for Zodiac I wouldn't know how to script alot of the stuff i'm working on now. As it also turns out he's a genius when it comes to what ZC can do. Example: Mud monkey. It's so complex, he broke the 1.92 engine, and the flaws of the old zc versions were shown. Anyway, Thank's again C-.

Also check out Script showcase and sift through the variety of scripts posted there. They can be very helpful.



Unfortunatley, everyone locks out their games in Zelda Classic

That's not really fair. Yes, I alway's password my quests, but I'll always post the scripts, tiles, etc. eventually from them when they're completed and I have time. If anyone requests something from me, I'll always post what I have. How hard is it to upload a .gif or copy/paste a script anyway.