Zelda, Physics, and Multiplicative Gameplay

Introduction

Hello everyone! Thanks to all the people who subscribed to my newsletter! Whether you’re a new or returning reader I’ve got some exciting stuff to talk about this week! First, I’ll start with just some thoughts about this newsletter. 

I was thinking to myself after I wrote the last entry, and I realized that I want this to be more than just a platform for myself, but also my friends! With that being said I think I’m going to try to bring a game dev friend in every week to write a blurb about a game of their choosing, whether it be the one I’m covering or something they’ve been playing! I think that way readers can get another person’s opinion or perspective in addition to my own.

Since’s it’s relevant right now, this week’s article will be about:

The Legend of Zelda and multiplicative gameplay! 

For those who don’t know, the latest entry in the Zelda franchise: Echoes of Wisdom was just released yesterday. I’ve had some time to progress in the game and explore the world of Hyrule which has been a blast. The new mechanic of copying objects and enemies allows for a unique gameplay experience where you are encouraged to solve problems with ingenuity. I’ve also been playing the game on hard mode which means I can’t find hearts in the over-world and take twice as much damage. It’s led to me coming up with some interesting strategies like creating a blockade of spiky sea urchins to shield myself while I plop down a bed for a powernap. There’s just so much tension and humor in having to strategically go to sleep in the middle of a boss fight.

I’ve also noticed that although this is a top-down Zelda game, they’ve added a lot of verticality to the environments. In older games there were always mountains and other forms of elevated terrain, but falling down would usually result in you having to trek all the way back up. Verticality was more of a challenge for the player but now it feels like a component that is integral to the exploration aspect.

What is multiplicative gameplay and what does it have to do with Zelda?

If you’ve played Tears of the Kingdom or Echoes of Wisdom, you know that both games are all about putting the power of creation in the hands of the player. In Tears of the Kingdom, you have the ability to combine any objects you find in the world. With the game’s variety of puzzles, you’re encouraged to mix and match properties that react with one another in order to solve them in unique ways. For example, you can fuse a rocket with your shield to propel you upward or attach an Ice Chuchu jelly to your arrow to make a frozen path across a river. In Echoes of Wisdom, you see this same idea reiterated in the form of the echoes you can create of anything you’ve learned. 

See a chest that’s too high up? Create blocks of water that you can use to swim up. On a freezing mountain without any resistance potions? Put down a fire Zol! 

(Zols are just your basic slime creature, and they are very cute if I may say so!

All of these solutions that I just listed can be attributed to the design philosophy that the games’ Technical Directors used. In their words, multiplicative gameplay is not to create something that is fun, but to create something where fun things happen. In order to follow through on this principle, the team at Nintendo focused on making the entire world based on a physics system utilizing rigidbodies. A rigidbody is a property you can apply to anything in a game that gives it various physical properties including but not limited to mass, velocity, gravity, and impulse. Rigidbodies can also be active or kinematic. I don’t want to make things too complicated, but if you’re interested in learning more, I recommend watching Nintendo’s GDC Talk: Tunes of the Kingdom, as well as this clip that I believe showcases what multiplicative gameplay looks like in practice.

TLDR; By giving the player objects and an environment to play with, the game’s experience will create itself. I also recommend that you play both of the games that I covered for yourself if you haven’t already!

What I’ve been up to

All of what I just rambled about was intentional! If you saw the last newsletter, you might have seen that I posted a sneak peek for a game that I’m working on, and that same game is based around rigidbody physics! It’s meant to be a short puzzle platformer that will make you rage, but I’m still trying to find the sweet spot where the game is frustratingly difficult but not so hard that there’s no fun in it. I don’t have much to show about the game itself this week, but I’ll drop another sneak peek of it down below! This week I figured out how to make objects break and split off into new meshes like so!

Though I have to say, making everything work correctly can be pretty tricky. Just when you think your newest property will work in theory, everything starts clipping and freaking out. Game development is a lot of trial, error, and LOTS of debugging. I hope that you all enjoyed this week’s newsletter, as I was super excited to write it! I’ve got some even cooler stuff cooking that incorporates the concept of multiplicative gameplay for my thesis, so I recommend sticking around 👀

If you recognize where the image below is from, it’ll give you a little teaser as to what games I’m taking inspiration from :P

See you soon!