Working on this as a distraction for the last couple of days. Just for fun.

Here’s something I’ve been working on lately. I haven’t time to do much on it in the last couple of days, but what you see here is the state of things after a week of messing around in Unity. I’ve never gotten anywhere in the past with Unity, although it’s a lot of fun. This one is coming out pretty neat though, so when I get a chance I’ll be adding things to kill and some multiplayer.

Blocky 3D remakes of classic games, who cares any more, right. When this thing started out the only comparable game I remember was Locomalito’s bitching neato 8bit Killer, but thanks to that one Infiniminer clone everyone’s pretty much over the first-person look of giant pixel cubes. Still, I start dumb gimmick games like this purely for my own enjoyment, and even though I’ve done barely anything on the game since the demo release I don’t consider stuff abandoned until I’ve mentally let go of it completely.

I’ve seen a couple of other spins on the idea since, but I still think it’d be cool to finish a really faithful FPS adaptation of Legend of Zelda 1. By faithful I mean pretty much a tile-for-tile remake with any necessary changes (for balance since it’s an FPS, etc) coming directly from the game itself. Like harder versions of the enemies taken from later areas or the second quest (eg Stalfos with projectile attacks), or bombs acting more like thrown grenades inspired by their behaviour in BS Zelda. The whole overworld should be there along with every key and puzzle and bombable wall.

So why stop working on it, especially when the demo got a whole bunch of cool attention? Well, it was developed in Construct, based on the engine from Standard Waiver. In fact originally I was just planning on putting together a more fully-featured demo to give out to people, adding enemies and weapons (later, y look and jumping). I like using Zelda graphics as placeholders. Here they’d replace the original rough Ludum Dare game walls and the previously-boring map tiles used to build a level (it’s a 2.5D fake 3D thing, if you’ve ever looked at the map in Rise of the Triad you’re looking at the “real” 2D level; this is just like that). Here, look:

It turned out to be gnarly in practice, and worth making a game out of. Trouble is, Construct has/had a nasty Z buffer issue with transparency on cube faces. Like this:

There was one update that fixed it, but introduced a way worse issue that broke the whole thing. So the plan was to either wait for an update, or do some other projects then come back and start over in an alternative engine.

You can check out the original thread on Tigforums, or just find a download mirror here.