ZeldaDX

The first The Legend of Zelda game did not age well due to its heavy reliance on the game's manual and confusing world design. Nevertheless, the game was a major success back in the 1980s and it sparked one of the largest video game franchises of all time. It may be one of the first (more or less) open world games in history. Around 2018, I became interested in developing my own small games from scratch. As I did not want to bother with my own game design and conceptualization, I wanted to recreate the original Zelda game in Java to learn the essentials. While the project had great progress overall, I wanted the game to grow larger. I realized that the NES style was not visually appealing at all and the code contained was very convoluted. Especially the assets manager was pretty much non-existent and all objects used the same animation frames at the same time...

In 2020, I rebooted the project and a lot of progress was done in a short amount of time. First, I decided to go with Link's Awakening's appealing graphical style. Then, I began to experiment with the underlying core of the engine and got the basics done. Some day, I discovered a discontinued project by Iris Hurt who recreated Link's Awakenings engine in GameMaker. It turned out that they originally worked on a The Legend of Zelda remake by themself as well. They mapped the entire maps of Hyrule and Level 1. Their work is great and should not be lost in time, so I converted their maps to my project. Now, one could be asking why I did not continue their GameMaker project. However, my plan was to create my own engine in order to practice and learn more about game development in general, so that was not an option.

ZeldaDX is not only a remake of the very first Zelda game. I also planned a lot of extra content and aspects to spice things up. For example, the rings from the Oracle games make a return in this remake. More dungeons and the integration of the Second Quest are among the considered features. As of now, there are no playable builds and the project is kept closed-source for the time being. I occasionally return to this project when I'm really bored.