This month I spent my development time building out the opening castle area of Sad Land. When playtesting the demo for Sad Land last summer, I knew the game didn’t grab the player in its opening moments, instead taking ten to twenty minutes to get to anything that compelling. I had the player, as the slime protagonist, ambling through a slowly collapsing cave tunnel, looking for a way out. The concept was for the cave to act as a small liminal space between the castle (presented in a cutscene) and the more open desert area. It would be a safe space to learn the simple mechanics of the game, teasing some of what would come later. The concept was inspired, in part, by the opening of Super Metroid, which drops the player into a nail-biting sequence where they race against the clock to escape a space station that is set to explode. It teaches the player a lot of mechanical fundamentals: it's exciting, it’s bombastic, and it works wonderfully in Super Metroid. I was hoping that rolling out something similar for Sad Land might work to pique the player’s interest.

In practice, it introduced the game as something that was light on difficulty, light on dialogue, and light on story. As Syd Field writes in his book Four Screenplays: “The first 10 pages of any screenplay are the most important. Almost everything you need to know about the movie is found in these first 10 pages.” If my working demo of Sad Land was a screenplay, Syd Field would have notes. Ideally, the intro would act as a vertical slice or as a sort of microcosm of the entire game. I tried to tighten the cave area, adding a few NPCs and some more interesting décor but nothing was getting to the root of the problem. My solution? Add an entire new area with over a dozen new NPCs to introduce the game.

Whenever I’m discussing the narrative of Sad Land with a friend, one large theme that I inevitably bring up is ‘community,’ a theme that was completely absent from the content of the earlier build of the demo. Allowing the player to explore the castle they’re leaving at the beginning of the journey solved this problem as well as another problem that I’d noticed: the opening cutscene was too long. With this new area, the player experiences the difficulty of saying goodbye to their community instead of glossing over this emotional moment in a slideshow cutscene. It solved one major problem and one minor problem in one fell swoop. That was the good news. The bad news was that this new area would take more time to build out.

As I wrote about in last month’s newsletter, I’ve committed to concentrating on one area at a time to make sure I stay focused and stay accountable to all parts of the game that need my attention. So far, this approach has been working great albeit opening my eyes to how much more work is left to do before I release anything publicly. Back in November’s newsletter I wrote that the “demo has been perpetually 6 months away from release for about 2 years, but I think at the time of writing this, the demo may truly be 6 months away from release.” When I wrote this, I was half joking, but the funny thing is I still feel like I could release the demo 6 months from now. I don’t know how true that is, but I’ll take any optimism where I can find it. It’s not always easy juggling a full-time job and game development, among many other obligations including finding time to play other people’s video games (note: I just reached the end credits of Animal Well this week and loved every second of it!).

Back before I had a concrete layout of the demo, I had spent some time building out the major hub city for Sad Land. In the plot of the game, years before the events of the game take place, the humans that once inhabited the land vanished without a trace, leaving their towns vacant. A large group of disparate and displaced creatures move in, supplying the game with a central location and a new community to explore. There was a time when this was going to be the final location in the demo but due to pacing issues and the scale of the town, it made little sense to do it this way. However, the benefit of having already furnished several pixelated houses is that much of that work could be reused for the castle, saving me a lot of time.

As an example, this is the working version of the first floor of the farmhouse I designed for the town…

…and here is the kitchen/dining room in the castle…

Walls, chairs, windows, a rug; Just a few things I could repurpose for my new area. As I’ve mentioned before, laying down pixels is easy but making sure it looks right is an iterative process.

Before I started designing my town, I needed to answer a very relevant question: “When does The Legend of Zelda take place?” This series, as well as most western fantasy with dragons and sword wielders, roughly aims to depict a time period but when exactly? If the king of Hyrule was a king of England, when would that king be ruling? The purpose of attempting to answer this question is to pin down what type of architecture you might find in a similar type of land and what technology it would make sense to include and what technology would stick out as anachronistic.

Looking at the society in the Zelda series, we see kings ruling over kingdoms, damsels in distress, and clans putting aside their differences to fight evil. Although this is all standard fantasy fare, we can look to George R.R. Martin’s The Song of Ice and Fire, a story that shares many of these fantasy staples, for some answers. Martin’s work is based on the very real War of the Roses, a series of civil wars fought during the mid-to-late 1400s across the British Isles ending with the union of two prominent houses. I’ve heard all his fiction is meticulously researched and, to my delight, Martin explores his research process on his personal website:

You can find his list of reference materials for A Song of Ice and Fire here.

I have been immersing myself in research, but it’s usually in game design philosophy or video game history, not historical texts, to add detail to the world of Sad Land. But I can take Martin for his word that his work is imbued with some realism and that the 1400s isn’t too far off historically from what we see of Hyrule.

Before getting back to Zelda’s historical timeline [which eventually goes off the rails! (That pun will make more sense in a few paragraphs)]), I just wanted to interject here that I ended up basing some aspects of my building interiors on this virtual tour I found on the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia’s YouTube channel. The video depicts a 1600s English farmhouse that was a similar size and vibe of what I was going for.

Beyond several residential homes, a house for the blacksmith, and a courtyard, I made a pub called The Black Cat, based off other pubs I saw online with the same Tudor period architecture (a style defined by the period following the War of the Roses. The House of Tudor rose to power as the result of the unification of the House of York and House of Lancaster), including this one located in Southampton, England.

For those less familiar with the series, The Legend of Zelda is set over many hundreds of years, often depicting different incarnations of Zelda, Link, and Ganon. That is to say, the Hyrule in Breath of the Wild is in many ways a different Hyrule than the one depicted in A Link to the Past, as London in 1400 is a different place than London in 1800. Taking a literalist approach to the timeline and how it lines up with real world history and technological advances isn’t possible, but looking to A Song of Ice and Fire as a starting point and the more advanced technologies throughout the Zelda series as an ending point (the more modern tech being cameras and trains), the games seem to span from the late medieval (1300-1500) to the First Industrial Revolution (1750-1830). The latter depicting a Hyrule closer to Wild Wild West (1999) than The Sword in the Stone (1963).

Apart from maybe the cheerleading outfit in Tri Force Heroes (2015), the trains prominent in the 2009 Nintendo DS release Spirit Tracks (2009) seemed like a step too far in industrializing a world built on dungeons and ancient legends. The game has our hero exploring New Hyrule, a continent previously unexplored by Hylians with its own interconnecting railway system.

I haven’t played the game yet, so I referred to the Hyrule Historia for more information. It turns out the trains are not the results of any technological innovation in-world but are ancient trains built on ancient tracks. This gets to the heart of what I love about the history of the Zelda series. In the lore of Zelda, there is a futurism to Hyrule’s distant past. The Sheikah Slate in Breath of the Wild is a functional touchscreen tablet designed to look like the Nintendo Wii U Gamepad, but, in the story of the game, the object is an ancient relic from a long-gone advanced civilization. It’s a fun way for them to create a unique world with potential for a broad spectrum of items and curiosities.

I’m reminded of George R. R. Martin’s idea of the writer as either an architect or a gardener. He’s explored this topic in many interviews, but here’s a quote from one he did with the Museum of Pop Culture:

In 2016, the producer of The Legend of Zelda series Eiji Aonuma accepted the 2016 Gold Joysticks Lifetime Achievement Award “on behalf of more than 1,000 creators, artists, engineers and composers who have worked on the series for more than 30 years.” The series isn’t the perfectly manicured vision of one auteur but an organically designed play space built out slowly by the artists on Nintendo’s payroll: a garden that started with the seed of one NES game that has grown and flourished across decades and several console generations. Although there is a rough Zelda timeline that attempts to retrofit the entire series into a historical catalogue, the truth is many people are building this world one game at a time to make something fun and memorable with whatever tools they have at their disposal. Eiji Aonuma discusses this further in the closing section of the Hyrule Historia:

If you’ve read this far, I hope you got something out of this strange diversion into the construction of fantasy worlds. These newsletters have been a lot of fun to write and research. Keep your eyes peeled for next month’s newsletter for more Sad Land updates!

Sincerely,
Neil