Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The Breath of the Wild game design has a concept called the "Chemistry Engine". In that game engines usually have a physics engine to figure out how things interact in a motion sense. The chemistry engine figures out how materials interact in an alchemy sense. It's kinda like a rules-based engine to figure out how different things interact with different other things, so you get surprising interactions between everything in the world, like being able to light arrows on fire, because arrows are a "wood" material. The Youtube link is here: ▶ this video It seems like most rule-based stuff in games is just hand-coded, as it's relatively simple and doesn't need to be general. When I asked the author of Baba is You, if he implemented a datalog engine for it, he said 'no'. I suspect it's the same for Breath of the Wild. But still, I've often wondered if that sort of chemistry engine would be best implemented in a logic language like Prolog or Datalog, for fast experimentation. Just like how we use SQL to keep the flexibility of our queries, and we end up just shipping that. I'm sure, back in the day, lots of people lamented how slow SQL queries were. The flexibility was useful enough that we ended up pouring man-centuries into making them fast. Now, we think that's just the way you ship things, and (almost) never think, "I can hand-roll imperative code that will be faster than this query".

Yes, it's rare, but they have. Game maker's toolkit has one on how they solved their open world problem for BotW: - link And at GDC, they talked about their Chemistry engine for BotW: - ▶ this video - link Game historian has some tidbits of how they made certain design decisions for their successful games Mario Kart: - link Super Mario World: - link Super Mario Bro 3: - link GMT, Snowman, and Extra credit does analysis of how Nintendo designs their Mario levels. - link - link - link - link - link Generally, it follows the ramp up and down of the Hero's journey in storytelling. 1. Introduce a new mechanic in a safe area where it's impossible to die. 2. Increase the challenge with the mechanic by adding variations 3. Ramp up challenge even more by combining with previously learned mechanic 4. Have periods of rest inbetween the challenges.

Last year at GDC, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta broke down the creation of the game in a full length session with video of the original top-down 2D prototype: ▶ this video

Yes, they talk about it in the GDC talk[1] and that's what I was referring to: That I can see how even in such a simple prototype the fun seemed evident. [1] ▶ this video

Here's a direct link to the timestamp where they talk about this, and show off an internal 2D prototype of their "chemistry engine": ▶ this video

In their GDC talk ( ▶ this video ) one of the core concepts they present is "multiplicative gameplay", which sounds a lot like what NetHack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup aim for as well. It's a surprising amount of fun to have multiple ways to solve puzzles and try to come up with one that was or was not intended to solve it.