Taking a break from writing a blog post about The Tower of Zeldaga to write a shorter blog post about The Tower of Zeldaga, specifically about puzzle designs that had to be abandoned or dropped, and about the hardest puzzles in the game.

Rejected Ideas

Boomerang Room

What is now the room with the mummies originally was a room with boomerang-throwing enemies that I was calling "Kobolds". The only recording I have of this room is from when the boomerang return logic was... incorrect.

This was patterned after an early Druaga floor where you have to block magic; in this case, blocking boomerangs 3 times would spawn the room reward.

I wasn't thrilled with how basic and derivative of a puzzle it was, especially for being outside the initial "tutorial" rooms, but the actual dealbreaker was the enemy names. Another room's puzzle requires identifying several rooms by the enemies that they contain, and I was very worried that no one would recognize those enemies as kobolds.

Eventually I replaced them with mummies, which are much more recognizable, and replaced blocking their weapons with burning the mummy using a candle, which is more of a nod to future Zelda games that had mummy burning mechanics.

Guestbooks

My original intent for Zeldaga was to try and evoke the feeling of solving obtuse puzzles together with others that Tower of Druaga is so well-known for. I decided that a webpage guestbook / shoutchat was the closest equivalent to arcade cabinet notebooks and wanted to add a sidebar guestbook to each room that players could leave hints or pointers in. Unfortunately, while planning it out, I realized:

1. Unless I did a bunch of work that let people create "sessions" shared between them and their friends, then the guestbooks would quickly get filled up with solutions and then be available to everyone.
2. More importantly: If I was hosting text content from people online, I'd need to moderate it.

Eventually I pivoted to having fake guestbooks that filled up with content as playtime increased to simulate the feeling of other folks solving the game with you in real time. You'd still be able to type in answers yourself, but they'd only be stored and displayed locally alongside the pre-generated comments.

When I sat down to draft some initial guestbook messages, I realized that the idea wanted consistent characters with consistent personalities, posting messages across several rooms. Later rooms would have fewer people posting to indicate how few folks made it that far, and there would be some implied time period and setting in which others were playing the game.

I hated this.

I really did not like the idea of adding a fictional setting within which Tower of Zeldaga existed. I want Zeldaga to be a thing that exists on its own, in the present, but adding a setting via the guestbooks made the entire thing feel too much like an "alternate timeline where Zelda was more like Druaga".

I dropped the guestbook, and with it dropped my second favorite puzzle idea: the Red Statue.

The Red Statue

The Red Statue room as it exists in the game today is the leftovers of an original idea I had:

A room would have a red statue in it, and the puzzle for that room was very simple: push the red statue.

However, the room would also have a sealed door that could not be unlocked. In order to open the door, the player would have to actively participate in the guestbook collaboration by posting a message that had the words "push", "red", and "statue" in it. Posting such a message would cause the door to open to another room with a reward waiting.

This was one of the earliest puzzle ideas I came up with and I was not happy to have to drop it. I still really wish I could have come up with something that addresses the collaborative aspects of Druaga within the game itself, but it just wasn't meant to be. I have, however, been pleased to see a few forum threads with folks swapping hints and solutions with each other. That rules! I really hoped people would do that!

Zoom Puzzle

One of the medium-difficulty puzzles I had planned was to have a room with a very tiny mini-maze in the center. The player was expected to use their browser zoom controls to zoom in on the game, which would zoom everything except Link, shrinking him down until the mini-maze was full-sized and he could navigate through it. I really liked how this idea dovetailed with the Minish Cap but still relied on the player thinking of things outside the limits of the NES-game framing.

Unfortunately, this got dropped for technical reasons: you cannot intercept browser zoom events, nor reliably detect the current zoom level across most browsers. I could have faked something by intercepting common browser zoom keyboard and mouse shortcuts, but this would break things for folks using browser zoom for accessibility purposes, so it had to go.

I did think about animating this puzzle as a fake "not actually in the game" puzzle for a video trailer, but never got around to making the trailer anyway.

The Hardest Puzzles

There's a harsh difficulty jump for a few of the puzzles in Zeldaga because they rely on the player attempting actions outside the normal controller, some of which are only possible in a web browser. Were I making a full-sized game instead of a demo, I probably would have spent a lot more time adjusting the difficulty and ramp-up of these types of puzzles, but for the length of game I wanted to make I didn't really have enough rooms to get to the puzzles I wanted to in a gradual way.

The Button Room

The hardest part of designing the button was making sure it actually looked like a button: my biggest fear was that people wouldn't understand that it was a button that was meant to be pushed (or, in this case, clicked with your mouse / tapped with your finger). Ultimately I modeled it off the push buttons in Star Tropics, and in playtesting and in things people have posted, it seems to have been pretty well understood as a button.

The Moat Room

The moat was a really fun puzzle to implement. This room is the only room that allows you to drag and drop Link around, and you can only pass the lava to reach the island in the middle by picking up and carrying Link over with your mouse/finger. I spent a fair amount of time testing and tweaking the collision logic in this room so that you couldn't swing Link so fast at a wall that he'd clip through it.

Fun fact: The squeak sound when you pick Link up is the sound of my friend James' pet dog Bolt's squeak toy.

Normal fact: This is the only puzzle that I updated post-release. The moat was originally one tile wide, but I noticed lots of folks kept on assuming that there was a ladder item somewhere else in the game that they needed to find, and leaving the room pre-emptively. I ended up doubling the width of the moat to make it clearer that it wasn't passable and there was no ladder item like in Zelda.

The Other Room

THIS ROOM FUCKIN RULES I LOVE THIS ROOM I'M A FUCKIN GENIUS

This is the most technically complicated room in the entire game, and took me a long time to implement. I had the idea early on but waited until every other room was done to leave this one as a treat for myself.

See, when I first had the idea of having rooms with puzzles that relied on the game being run in a browser, I went through a list in my head of things that you can only do in a web browser (short of simulating a web browser in a native game). Clicking, browser zoom, drag and drop, saving a bookmark, visiting a completely different website, etc.

What I settled on was: opening multiple tabs.

If you open Tower of Zeldaga in 3 browser tabs simultaneously, the third tab will display an error message:

The implication being: this game can be played in two tabs simultaneously.

When the Tower of Zeldaga starts, it creates a SharedWorker, which is a subprocess that runs in the browser that is shared between multiple tabs under the same origin (roughly, domain name). Zeldaga manages most of the player state, such as what items you have unlocked or what rooms you have solved, through this shared worker, which allows you to run the game in multiple tabs that automatically are kept in sync. When you solve a room and get an item in one tab, it is immediately available in the other tab. Only a few pieces of data, such as your current HP, are local to the tab and not shared among multiple tabs.

The purpose of all of this is to make every room besides the Other Room make sense if you're running the game in two tabs.

For the Other Room, when two running instances of Tower of Zeldaga in the same browser are both in that room, they can see each other. If you run the tabs side-by-side, you can see yourself moving around in the other tab.

And there's only one thing you can do in this room: attack with your sword.

Some folks who figured this room out thought it was inspired by the Shadow Link fights in various Zelda games, and while that's a useful hint, it really wasn't. The only direct creative inspiration I had while building it was, amusingly, the Sopranos finale. The hard cut to black with no fanfare from the perspective of the person getting killed is so powerful, and I wanted to lean in to a different depiction of dying than the rest of the game had as much as I could with this room.

Interestingly, several folks read the source code for this room when attempting to solve it and, not knowing about Shared Workers, got the idea of damage boosting themselves through the door into this room while simultaneously reducing their health to 0 using the candle. I'm really not sure why, but given that more than one person claimed to have tried that I assume there's a good reason for it, and I appreciate their playtime regardless.

Thank you for playing Tower of Zeldaga

And thank you for reading this post! As a reward for reading this far, here's a bonus tip:

You may have noticed in the screenshots above that Link has some items that aren't available in the game normally. If you add ?everything to the end of the URL, you'll start the game in a debug mode that I used for testing things out, including every item in the game, as well as the Master Sword and a mattock that has 100 charges per room.