OG Zelda Clone
A clone of the 3D Fan Remake of the original Legend of Zelda
The Project
OG Zelda Clone was the final project that I worked on in my Intermediate Game Development Class during the Fall of the 2017. As per the project our group of four had to take a part of a game and clone it without looking at the games code to the best of our ability. The team consisted of myself, Jonah Gaynor, Nick Bannon, and Jack Terzi. With the additional stipulation that everyone had to write at least one script and sculpt one 3D asset. After some deliberation my group settled on cloning the 30 year fan tribute the first Legend of Zelda in which they remade the game with 3D assets.
Breaking Up the Work
So like I said we all had to code and model but we did otherwise focus on different parts. I primarily focused on modeling the environment objects and some of the monsters as well as tackling the UI. Jack Terzi and Nick Bannon were our primary coders and laid a lot of the groundwork that we all used. Jonah Gaynor handled most of the models for the monsters and pickups as well as the majority of the painting of the models.
​
As for ensuring we split the duties we made sure that everyone coded and modeled at least one of the monsters. I ended up modeling the Q-Bert and creating the basic player movement script. I also touched scripts to control several of the animations and the UI.
Working in 3D with Pixels
This was not the first time I worked on a 3D project but it did provide a unique challenge in that the game required us to wrap our heads around 3D Pixel Art. As an art medium Pixel Art can be seen as easy and quicker to make but much harder to communicate details as everything gets abstracted. Taking that and putting it in 3D makes it even harder to ensure that the representation is both clear with the limited variations.
​
My part was primarily concerned with the making of a lot of the 3D assets especially the many of the ones for the terrain. Interestingly enough we decided to deviate intentionally from some of the models of the 3D Tribute in order to convey clarity. Look at the mountains that define the edges of a zone, we
opted to sculpt the detail into the mountains unlike in the Tribute which used blocks and painted on the details.
​
The most annoying part about the 3D Pixel style was managing the hidden faces. Our assets were made in Maya and the easiest way to maintain the cubic feel of pixel art was to either place cubes or extrude faces both of which had the potential to create a lot of hidden faces (although the latter would usually produce fewer). We realized that as our game grew in size that the assets were putting a serious draw on the computer and it didn't take much longer to find out why. As a result we had to take a lot of time to clean up our models so that our game could run.
