Herein lies the chronicle of my experiences making a game from scratch. I have three goals: First, to provide a place to record my experiences on my way to making my first “shippable” game. Second, to share knowledge for others. Third, to provide motivation. Please comment and share if you like what I have written ~Nathan

Today I have some more game design discussion.  I will talk briefly about the Legend of Zelda as an inspiration for my next game, but moreso about the Binding of Isaac, which is an Indie game that took key parts of the Zelda formula, and made them all new.  I think this is an excellent example of a game paying tribute while building on an existing well-known play style.  Today’s post is one of the shorter ones, but I highly encourage you to watch one of Patrick Klepick’s many playthroughs on Giant Bomb called “The binding of Patrick” (embedded below), then go read the post-mortem on Binding of Isaac at Gama Sutra, here.

The Binding of Isaac

The Binding of Isaac is a Zelda game that is sort of a rogue-like as well, in that the layout of the levels changes each time you play, randomly generated. The game follows the gameplay style of the original Legend of Zelda, more specifically its dungeons.  Each level is equivalent to a Zelda dungeon, some number of single screen rooms, connected via doors.  There is a boss room, a secret room, items and enemies.  The goal of each level is to find and defeat the boss.  Once defeated, the player has the option of continuing to the next dungeon, or scouring the existing level for more items, hearts, or secrets. The game takes more from Zelda than just the mechanics.  Here is the inventory Screen for Isaac:

And here is the inventory screen for the Legend of Zelda (NES):

Of course, this is more homage than theft.  The binding of Isaac creates a warped world, dark and gruesome.  But it definitely contains the feeling of exploration that was first felt in the original Zelda game, and so appropriately uses many of its tropes.  This matters to me because I have often looked to the Legend of Zelda for my inspiration, in fact modeling much of my first game on Zelda’s map and scope.  Whereas Isaac pulls liberally from Zelda’s dungeons, I hoped to inspire the open exploration of Zelda’s overworld in my game.  Whereas Isaac adds to the Zelda formula by creating random maps that change every time, I hope to add to the formula by creating enemies that move only when the player moves, creating a more turn-based, slower style of gameplay.

Another fascinating aspect of Isaac, at least for me, is that this is the first game that I can look at and really make connections between what happens on the screen and what I can do in Game Maker.  Many of the actions in this game, from player movement to enemy movement, inventory, and switching screens, draw direct comparisons for me to code that I’ve looked at or written; moreso than any of the other games I’ve looked at.  The game was written in ActionScript 2, an older version of Flash.  Edmund McMillen wrote an excellent post-mortem on the game at GamaSutra, wherein he talks a bit about his inspiration:

I wanted to combine the roguelike formula with some kind of real-time experience, like Spelunky, but I also wanted to experiment more with the traditional role-playing game aspect of roguelike games Crawl and Diablo. Fortunately, using the basic Legend of Zelda dungeon structure as the game’s skeleton made it easy to rework almost all the elements of a traditional roguelike formula (procedurally generated dungeons, permadeath, and so on) into a real-time dungeon crawler format.

I am really into this game, and will look at it for inspiration and instruction on my own project.  But for now I will look at it as an excellent example of taking a well-known game style and adding new mechanics to it to create something unique.  I encourage anyone who likes the Legend of Zelda to try this game out.