Hello everyone, and welcome! I'm Jjeinn, and I'm working on a series where I'm building a retro game inspired by games of the N64 and Play Station! It is under a working title of "Journey Through LoGuo" in the vein of Zelda and the like. Our protagonist, default name Locca, is going to make her way through the Empire of LoGuo, ruled by the sun emperor who as of yet does not have a name.
In her adventures through the lands, Locca will win the support of various scholars dedicated to the 6 elements, learning various spells to supplement her ever-increasing array of... gadgets? I feel that implies a higher tech than we're talking here. In the very-shoehorned reference to Journey to the Wes I have in my working title, there is a rather Chinese-inspired theme to LoGuo, which being my attempt at a N64-era "Zelda" esque game, directly created the name of the empire.
Contrary to most games I've seen of this genre, Locca is not your typical sword and shield fighter. Locca's weapon of choice is the guandao, a Chinese polarm sword, leading to a combat system that will be very active!
To me, this is basically a modern port of a hypothetical game made in a world where the video game crash didn't happen, and thus there was a US competitor to Nintendo that was attempting to match pace. So... "out of universe" but still in-universe somewhat, this is just what was the latest of a series in the 90's. To that end, there are certain things that would be known to players in this non-existent world that the game was made for, but we obviously don't have that context in real life. So, I have been going back and forth on whether to talk directly on that or not. If I do, I will mark such posts as #loguo spoilers
Other tags to follow the project are mainly going to be #loguo but I might add more.
This post will also eventually have the elemental symbols surrounding the crest of Loguo (basically mirroring the medallions around the triforce in OoT) but my pen tablet is angry currently. So hopefully soon.
And a link to my previous master post, about J'ard here:
Hey and welcome! I’m Jjeinn, and I’m making a real-time roguelike inspired by Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, Unexplored and From Soft in genera
J'ard is not dead, I've been working on the world for 8 years now, but it isn't the correct start. Thank you everyone who's followed along with my dev logs, and here we start some more!
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OK, so time to make an actual post of my own. I was once again hoping to do my next LoGuo post with an actually finished concept drawing of Locca. Given I'd recently managed to start drawing again, and I was rather happy with the Sailor Moon x Pokémon fanart that I was working on to "warm up." But finding long periods of time to work on things alone in my room has been more difficult again, so things have unfortunately been delayed. And again, waiting for that perfect moment is a good way to just never actually do anything, so here we are with something to talk about.
So, in the idea of keeping social with company, I started playing OoT in the living room again recently. Now, I think I might have mentioned before that LoGuo is kind of meant to be an... answer to OoT in sort of a meta sense. Retro adventure dungeon crawler in that era sort of idea. I also think that I've mentioned that I'm honestly not too personally fond of OoT. Like, it's a great game for sure, and has some of my key formative memories (at least in the category of gaming) but I do have some specific problems with the game. That said, I enjoyed my trip through it again here, I'd been kind of wanting to replay it anyways, and I want to talk about the dungeons. And how we can learn from them for LoGuo.
So, going into this, my favorite temples have always kind of been ordered as vaguely Forest > Water ~= Spirit > Shadow ~= Fire. That was the order I tried to play the dungeons in this playthrough as well, although the trigger for the start of the Shadow Temple incident has a different trigger than I thought and I didn't feel like learning bomb hovering, so swap the latter two. (And then I had to swap them back to the initial order I wanted for Ganon's Castle what). I know that Water not being the bottom is weird and probably kind of concerning, but I'm also definitely not touching that concept for a water temple with a ten foot pole, probably. But yeah, breakdown!
Forest Temple
I will start off with this run through the Forest Temple was probably my worst run through it I've ever had. But that is beside the point. Forest Temple is the intended first Adult dungeon, and is the introduction of keys to the game. A long-held Zelda tradition that I'm personally... Rather interested in attempting to not use. It has its tricky key in the first room that feels like outside the temple, that you almost assuredly had to come back for after searching around with nowhere to go on your first time through. I feel like that's a mean trick to play in the first key dungeon, but it does set the stage for the adult dungeons, and key stuff is kind of a point of trouble in several of them.
Honestly, that's not my problem with the keys in Forest, but after you hopefully grabbed that key, you enter that first hall into the main room of the dungeon, the Torch Room. It funnels you directly into the big "puzzle" that the dungeon revolves around. OoT is good at presenting those puzzles pretty immediately for the dungeons that do have a big puzzle, and I think a unifying thing like that is important in a dungeon. The Poe sisters steal the colored flames from the torches, and you know you have to go get the flames back as soon as you enter the dungeon proper. It provides a nice little bit of almost implied story that we unfortunately don't really get more on, but that theming is fun. Unfortunately the big puzzle of the dungeon is the common Zelda puzzle of "Kill all the enemies to open the next room" but at least it's a hunt through the whole dungeon. Without the key there's one obvious door you can actually go through, and you get another key down that route. Then you might be tempted to use your key to go through the locked door in the torch room. There's that iconic block tower climb puzzle that leads to a locked door and the twisted hallway that everyone remembers and... Oh, another locked door.
At this point, maybe because I was starting to get sick, but I felt that I had to break the progression a little bit to continue? Like, I think this is actually the intended route, but it just feels like you're not supposed to go this way. And it's the big thing I want to talk about with the Forest Temple. Back in the torch room, there is actually a third door you can go through, hidden behind a Block of Time. Technically not the first you've seen technically if you've explored Goron Village a bit, but it's the first time you can really interact with them at all. Remove the block of time, enter one of the garden areas (I love these rooms honestly) and explore around. There's the well that you (probably) can't do anything with yet. Maybe if you've gone to get the Golden Scale already you can swim to the other garden? But ignoring that possibility that I don't know the answer to, there is a wall covered with vines that leads you to the dungeon item, the bow. That wall is guarded by 3 Skulltulas, which will knock you off of it. You can kill two of them with your hookshot (but the third is out of range) so you have to dodge the third one. They rotate randomly and it's finnicky... Not like... Hard, but it just feels like a thing that... OK, this one's out of range, so look elsewhere, you technically can go this way but the dungeon wants you to go somewhere else. Try as I may, I cannot find that somewhere else however.
And that really is the thing that I pulled from the Temple this time through. I did try somewhere else for quite a while, I didn't want to sequence break the dungeons, and just... I don't know the game puts a strong enough sense of "this is not the right way" when it seems like the only real way that I have to wonder about it still, maybe I did miss something. But that's the first lesson I want to draw out. Players pick up on subtle details, and get an idea of what you're supposed to do from whatever. Are they correct? Not always, but one must be careful with the message they are sending to the player. After that you get the bow, and the dungeon just feels like it folds inside out and you can do everything suddenly. You need the bow to hunt the poe sisters, you twist and untwist the hallways, routes open up. It's very freeing, and I feel like that's also important for a dungeon item. And until you do finish the torch puzzle, everything you do does feel centralized around the torch room. Like, it literally is based on dungeon geography, but the way things interconnect you really feel it, pushing you to deal with the thing you need to deal with.
...Wow, this is going to be a colossal post if I go through all of them right now. And that one was kind of a "No duh" lesson, but I want to talk about each of them. Water next post, as fond of the Temple I am, it sure does a whole lot wrong. It's legendary for a reason after all. I am probably going to talk about some of the other dungeons besides the five temples at some point too.
OK, so here's my first post of what amount to spoilers in reality, but are also kind of things that people in the imaginary world I am half-pretending this game was originally released in would know, as it is like... The third or fourth game in the series in that world, being the jump to 3D. As this is intended to be basically the OoT for the series, the narrative does stand on its own, and explains itself. But certain things, like Link being one of the people the Triforce is attuned to, were known to people who played earlier games, kind of. Even though OoT was also the earliest in the series at the time, my game definitely is not the first in the timeline of this nonexistent series of predecessors. This cycle has happened before. I will keep spoiler stuff hidden beneath a keep reading thing though, so anyone who doesn't want to know, like it's your first experience with the series like OoT basically was for me, don't bother I guess and wait until we actually get to like, plot stuff in the dev videos, I guess.
So, in my posts about Locca, the Sun Emperor Zuigao (which I guess I have settled on that name for him) and also the post showing the first concepts of the replacement for the Medallions that OoT had, I have mentioned that Loguo has a heavy Solar/Lunar duality theme, as a sort of mirror to Daoism of real life China. We have the Sun that is Zuigao who created the world, but what of the Moon?
Well, the Moon is absolutely Locca. Where as Zuigao in his creation was only focused on... Like, majesty and greatness and just making everything grand, Locca had other ideas for creation. She brought forth life, culture, art all those good things. With her creation, the world could grow, and be its own thing beyond whatever Zuigao deemed perfect. Zuigao of course saw new ways to make his world great, and created civilization with him at the head, and many great architectural works are created, especially in his name. He makes the greatest palace, and is a great ruler, at least under his own definition.
Every once in a while, Locca sees that he has ruled in his own interest far too heavily to the detriment of the people, she cannot stand for that, and ends up toppling whatever kingdom or empire or whatever he's created at the time. However, if either of them die, their divine essence just recycles into a new them. We are at least four Locca/Zuigao deep at this point, and honestly probably more Locca have existed than Zuigao, I can't imagine she is always successful.
There are certain rules they have to dealing with their new counterpart, their balancing is important so Zuigao can't just go execute every Locca as soon as he finds her. She needs to be given the chance to assess. Hence, at least this time, her rather regal accommodations afforded to her by Emperor Zuigao, for reasons she's entirely in the dark on. You might see how that is a strategy he is running this time. Let's see how it goes for him.
I got my tablet working again. So, of course, I have started working on the graphic I wanted in my pinned post. In the local culture, the Sun/Moon logo that definitely needs some fine tuning is roughly comparable to their equivalent of the taijitu (the yin-yang symbol) and has a... related philosophy where things are associated with either the solar, or the lunar side of the universe. As the emperor is the sun, solar associations tend to be seen as better culturally. That's not to say that the moon is bad necessarily, although more things with negative connotation fall there.
The 6 symbols here besides the Sun/Moon symbol that I need a name for represent the 6 primary elements, which you will be going around collecting the support of the lead sages of each element. If you know Chinese or Japanese you'll probably see some inspiration from the characters that mean what each of these elements are, but I specifically wanted to not use real language for these, LoGuo is not China. These are the only characters that exist of "LoGuoan" right now. The circle around the sun are the 5 traditional Chinese elements (Wuxing). From the top and clockwise, we have Water, Wood, Fire, Metal and Earth. And then alone on the top we have the element of Time which, like... Part of my idea for this game is it is like it was made by an American company in some alternate timeline where the video game crash didn't happen. The studio in addition to definitely being like... East-Asiaboos, absolutely made this game in response to OoT, and oh we need Locca to be an adult too. Hence quickly appending Time to tradition, or whatever. In the final "medallion" screen, I plan on Time kind of being... The background or something like that. I'm still tinkering with this and this was like, first pass, but I really wanted to actually make a post.
Later in the week, I'm going to be making a post about our heroine Locca, and the Emperor, who I think I have a name for but that goes with explanation and this post is already hella rambly.
