Saturday, March 30, 2013

Minecraft - Big Project (PC) - Hyrule from Link to the Past

Hello everyone. No, I haven't disappeared. I've simply been busy with life and haven't had much time to play games recently. Most of my time has been spent playing Borderlands 2 on the Xbox 360 and playing some in my Survival Map on Minecraft PC. I've also still been blasting away at what I'm now considering a stupid project in Minecraft: Xbox Edition; my bedrock to surface pyramid. (I'm getting close to completion though!)

But there is one project that I have been working on when I get a chance on Minecraft for the PC that I'd like to go ahead and share with everyone. Now, when you see it, you're probably going to say "But you already did that on the Xbox" which is partially true. But, with the power of the PC's version, as well as the extra block types and items, I've been able to do it so much better. Plus, being able to use external tools such as mcedit has made a huge difference. Add to that the customizable "Super Flat" levels, and I now have the foundation for my epic project.

I'm recreating the entire world of Hyrule from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

I wasn't planning on starting this project, but I was messing around with the Super Flat options and realized I could customize the world to create pretty much whatever I wanted it to be. Once I figured that out, my mind started working and I knew what I wanted to do.

My world, once completed, will consist of both Light and Dark worlds with the Light on top and Dark underneath. I made 1 layer of Bedrock, 50 of Stone, 1 of Mycelium and 100 of air. That's my Dark world. Next came 1 of Red Wool, 1 Bedrock, 50 Stone and 1 Grass. That's the Light World. As a bonus that I hadn't thought about when creating it, Bats will spawn in the "Dark World" since it's technically a cave. Adds to the awesomeness. :)

Once I had the world created and was happy with it, I teleported to (0, 0) and created Link's house there as the center of my map. That's also the first thing I built.

Link's House in the Light World
Once I had the house created, I used mcedit to copy / paste it to the Dark World and replaced the grass with Mycelium. I also changed the red wool for purple.


Link's House in the Dark World.
What you see above is the only work I've done in the Dark World. All my time so far has been spent in the Light World.

With Link's House in place, I next moved on to the surrounding area heading towards the castle. I have a nice high-resolution photo of the overworld I found online (I'll link the source later as I don't have it with me right now) that I have been following as much as possible for the placement of the paths, trees, etc. I'm not going for a 1:1 pixel perfect version of the world, but rather a working world that makes sense and could exist.

The path and bridge leading to the castle made to scale with the game.
I've seen several other renditions of this Hyrule that, while impressive, stick too closely to the original. It looks good, but doesn't work in a practical sense. As I have mentioned before, game designers, especially in this era, took a lot of liberties with space. What you see in the overworld cannot possibly contain the dungeons, buildings, etc. that are shown when you enter them. One of the biggest "for instances" is with the castle. On the overworld map, the back of the castle is chopped off where the road in front of the Sanctuary goes. In reality, to allow for the inside of the castle, it's much deeper than that and goes back much farther.

When I've been creating the world, I have had to take some "artistic liberties" to make things fit not only the map, but also the levels themselves. At the same time, the extra "space" I have had to create has been made to look and feel as much like it actually belongs as possible. In the end, I'll leave it up to you all to be the final judges.

Anyways, enough of the mini-rant and on to the Castle. Below is the new Courtyard and Castle. You can also see part of the Eastern Palace and some of the surrounding areas. As opposed to my Xbox Edition castle, the courtyard is much closer to actual scale and size. It's also better decorated. Another thing I did more correctly was the actual front entrance to the castle. I spent some more time studying the level and determined that my Xbox castle was wrong.

The Castle grounds.
I'm not going to detail the insides of the castle too much as they are fairly close to my Xbox castle, but I will point out a few of the highlights. First, I love the cobblestone fences. They, along with the ability to put stairs upside down, added a ton of detail to the Castle that I love.

The entrance to the Castle.
I made the castle out of smooth stone with stone brick as accents. I had originally thought of doing it all out of stone bricks, but I thought it would just be too much. The dungeon turned out great too. Since this is meant to be played on Survival / Adventure, I made it so that if you fall of, it means death.

The rest of the dungeon simply follows the original level design. The next section I'm quite proud of is the Throne Room. I did the basic layout of the room first but waited to do the ceiling until I had finished Agahnim's tower so that the final levels of the tower worked out like they were supposed to. This version turned out much better and reflects how I feel the actual castle should be based on the game. Again, I love the upside down stairs and cobblestone fences for their added detail.

Speaking of the tower, most of it is fairly straight forward until you get to the top. I decided to do something much different with the top level before Agahnim's room as you can see below.

And the actual final rooms of the tower are now correctly positioned on top of the Throne Room where they should be.

I could keep going on about what I've done so far, but then I'd have nothing to blog about later. Next time, I'll move on to the Eastern Palace and surrounding areas. When it comes to actual completion, I would guess that I have about 30% of the Light World complete. I started with the castle and went east to the top of Lake Hylia and north to the Eastern Palace grounds and the dungeon itself. From there I did the river leading to Zora's Domain and the base of Death Mountain. Next I moved West towards the Sanctuary and completed the Sewers. From here, I moved north again and created Death Mountain. I just finished working on the Tower of Hera on top of Death Mountain and plan on moving East to finish off Death Mountain next. But that will all have to wait until a later blog.

I hope eventually I'll find some good (free) screen recording software so that I can take you on a video tour instead. Until then, the screenshots will have to suffice.

I look forward to hearing your comments!

EDIT: Here is the link to the high-res images from Link to the Past: http://ian-albert.com/games/legend_of_zelda_a_link_to_the_past_maps/

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