Do you think a Zelda Maker would work, both for creators and the players? People already seem to struggle with reactive left-to-right Mario stages, not sure how the majority would expect users to play their attempts at an exploration + puzzle quests. Maybe it'd actually be a load of fun.
I think a lot of the fun with Mario Maker is how objects interact with each other, and one of the complaints leveled against Mario Maker 2 is that a lot of the new stuff, especially the Super Mario 3D World style, doesn’t feel like it integrates very well as a new set of tools. I’ve heard all the new stuff feels very isolated and limited in frustrating ways.
And I feel like that’s a lot of what Zelda hinges on. You have dungeons themed around using one specific item and all the puzzles are tailor-built around that. There’s not a lot of general-purpose kind of stuff, but that’s not to say it would be impossible. If you took a slightly more Breath of the Wild approach, which was more about objects and states interacting with each other across a wide range of situations, then it might work out.
Like I imagine setting tiles for thorns and having to figure out a way to generate fire to burn the thorns away so you could progress. Having to find the titan’s glove to move heavy objects (and by that I mean more than just big boulders). The hookshot to grab and pull things at different distances.
I guess the problem is even considering that, you’d have a pretty limited pool of resources to build dungeons around. Things would get old quickly.
Maybe you could introduce some elements of randomization; Binding of Isaac is close enough to a Zelda game in some ways that maybe you could place chests that give the player random buffs. As a dungeon creator you could limit which items could spawn from chests out of a pool of different items, maybe? Focus on letting players half-design custom floors of a roguelike Zelda. Maybe that’s too haphazard.Â
I dunno. I can’t envision this with top-down pixel art graphics, because I feel like you really do need to go fully Breath of the Wild here with 3D dungeons with object physics, just so you’d widen the scope of the kinds of interactions you could design for, but that makes the map editor a lot harder to program and work with.
Maybe it’s just not possible to do a Zelda Maker and have it be as easy and as robust as Mario Maker is. Zelda is just too puzzle-focused, whereas Mario can be a lot of different things. Same reason why a Metroid Maker would be tough, too.
What I suppose you could do, I guess, is break out of the Mario Maker mold entirely and invent a brand new multi-purpose item, or multi-purpose items that were designed to be modular and changed around. Like being able to change the elemental affinity of... everything. So you could freeze enemies or objects for different effects, use fire to melt them, build puzzles around wind or rocks. Almost like a rock-paper-scissors system but as a modifier for every tool and object across the entire editor. That might work. And you could even build a little story around that, like Mario Maker 2′s story mode.
