Zelda 1 Demake Postmortem

3 mins read time

Hi there! Welcome to blog post 1 of 3 about my work in the University of Michigan’s game development course, EECS 494! In our first project we were paired up to remake our choice of the first dungeon of the original The Legend of Zelda or some of the original Metroid. As per the title of this post, me and my partner went for remaking Zelda, so he’s a bit about that process.

As I mentioned, given that this was a group project, what was I responsible for here? Well, we started off with being given most of the sprites necessary and the layout of the dungeon fully completed, but outside of that pretty much everything was built from scratch. My partner and I went about the work by splitting down the middle, each taking roughly half of the tasks we had to get through for the completed product. To get specific, here’s what I handled:

And the largest chunk of work was getting every enemy working, including:

For it being such a small project while both me and my partner with still both learning Unity, a lot of it all was just duct-taped together since we didn’t know better nor did we need to, but it was still a fun challenge along the way trying to pick up on how to get every piece working properly.

Also having to collaborate on a larger project like this one was interesting as well. Most of my past projects have just been on my own so I knew how everything operated and what was blocking what from working, but working with a partner to split tasks, learning how to effectively communicate ideas, and learning the Unity Collaborate’s watered-down version of source control were all a good part of the learning process of becoming a better developer which was also enjoyable.

However, the assignment didn’t just end there! We also had to put together our own custom level and mechanic in the game. After some thinking we settled on an ice theme, combining the new mechanics of ice tiles that make you slide with no control and an ice wand that lets you freeze enemies. Playing around with the base game to try and add some levels with a unique twist was a lot of fun here! The combination getting locked into sliding and having enemies to freeze that you need to figure out how to move around and slide off of was a really fun experience since it meant we got to break from the chains that was the original level and its exact layout. Anyways, to put it into writing, that meant I also worked on:

If a ice sounds nice to you, go ahead and hit the number 4 on your keyboard to get taken to that secret level and go have fun and let me know what you think in the comments down below.

Wrapping up

Although this is where I would normally link a GitHub repo or something, since this is school work that will be assigned again next semester, sharing it here would technically open the door for plagarism. Sorry!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you had a fun time playing! -Robert