What I'm Working On - Boss Keys (Patreon)

Hi everyone! First things first: I'm 1 off of 500 Patrons. Holy Shibuya, you guys. I don't even know what to say. Any cool ideas for stuff I / we could do to celebrate? Please drop them in the comments.

Anyway.

A video I've wanted to make for a long time is an episode about the dungeon design in The Legend of Zelda series.

I love these things. They're these self-contained mazes, filled with puzzles and enemies. They're non-linear, forcing you to think about how you'll navigate their twisting corridors. And the very best ones are like massive great puzzles in of themselves, where you have to manipulate, and carefully navigate the dungeon to find the treasure.

They also have great architecture and their own, unique atmosphere. Sometimes they have clever gameplay mechanics that get explored throughout the dungeon. And they're topped off with a great puzzle-like boss fight that tests you on the item you just found.

So I want to talk about how Zelda's dungeons work. How they're constructed so they give you freedom to explore, but also guide you through the maze. How mind-bending puzzle dungeons like the Water Temple tick. And how Nintendo's design philosophy has changed over the years.

But to do it properly, I need to revisit a whole bunch of Zelda games and that would require literally hundreds of hours of research, just for one video. That's crazy, even by my standards.

So I thought perhaps a more interesting way to tackle it would be to document my journey through all the games and put the findings up on the YouTube channel as I go.

(They just need a name to differentiate them from GMT. I'm thinking Boss Keys - what do you reckon? Like the logo?)

Each game (I'm not sure exactly which games I'll tackle - will likely skip some of the handheld ones) will get a video with my thoughts and findings on every dungeon.

If you're are interested they can follow along, but if you'd like something a bit more bite size you can wait for me to finish and put together the actual episode of the show some time later this year.

So I had played and took notes on the whole of Ocarina of Time - but then decided I should start with the 2D games and have now finished and taken notes on Link to the Past. That will be the first video, sometime later this month.

I won't be charging for these videos (as always - it's a max of 2 episodes of Game Maker's Toolkit a month/ A normal episode, probably on Downwell, will also arrive in June) but your generous support of course makes this sort of bonus stuff possible.

Lemme know what you think!