It’s interesting to look back at The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and realize that it and the original Half-Life were probably the most important video games of 1998. It perhaps says a lot of myself that neither games were favorites of mine, despite certainly being games I enjoyed and thoroughly respected. Both games were incredibly influential, but I find it interesting how those inspired by Half-Life wore that inspiration out in the open. Ocarina of Time seems to have carried a far more subtle influence across the industry, but it can certainly be felt in some games regarding both the lock-on and the approach to more sophisticated A.I.

Something I’ve learned the past few years working on this channel is that I will notice things in the editing process that I never picked up on while playing the game. It’s the difference between being an active participant, your concentration and focus working aggressively as you try to compartmentalize the combat arena, and being the observer, able to take in all the action from a safe distance. I always stumble upon these observations too late in my process. Even if I had a more organic way to squeeze them into the timeline, I’m so exhausted with the project that I’ll find myself doing what I can to get it out the door.

To that end, there’s one observation I’d like to go into further detail here on the blog.

During the discussion of A.I. in combat, I had actually begun wondering about the behavior of the many smaller, less aggressive creatures. Enemies that don’t immediately drop down and engage in dueling combat in the way the Stalfos, Wolfos, and Lizalfos do. The bats, for example, hone in on the player. At times it seems a whole flock may fly right into the player at the same time. Do they have a separate A.I.? If two start honing in while the player is locked onto no opponent, does one of them back on once the player Z-targets the other? Are they unable to adjust their behavior once an attack has been committed to? Will multiple dive down even if the player is locked onto one?

There’s plenty of experimentation I could do in the future, should I be so inclined to do so. In fact, I may perform such experimentation on future games, to see if the A.I. behaves similarly in Ocarina of Time’s successors or if perhaps they changed it completely. For now, let’s hone in on one particular encounter where I noticed this A.I. at work.

This was an encounter in the Forest Temple after Link had dropped down into a room with two Blue Bubbles. In the left image we can see both monsters are charging Link, even though I am only targeting one of them. In the right image, we see that the other has turned away. I’ve actually seen similar behavior while playing and recording footage for Darksiders, where an enemy will pause mid-attack animation and turn away if War is in the middle of an execution. It’s a way to make sure the player isn’t punished for engaging in a cinematic, indulgent mechanic. Here, it would seem the Blue Bubble pursues to simulate a threat, but turns away to avoid overwhelming the player. During the skirmish itself I know I wasn’t thinking about how the enemies were behaving. I was only thinking of keeping back and using the bow to strike my opponent from a safe distance.

It’s not a perfect system, though. In the left photo above I am about to defeat the first Blue Bubble. In the right, you can see the second coming to attack Link as soon as the first Blue Bubble is defeated and the lock-on is broken. This leads me to wonder how the A.I. is working when the player isn’t locked on to anyone. It is clear that the A.I.‘s aggression isn’t wholly tied onto the lock-on. It may be more accurate to say the lack of aggression is determined based on whether the player is locked onto another target.

These are the wonderful sorts of details I love to pick up on while working on videos, and is perhaps one of the reasons I’ll continue to pursue this hobby despite the self-inflicted frustration I can experience. Being able to take a microscope to mechanics like this can not only help me learn better game design techniques, but also consider whatever drawbacks a system may have.

Unfortunately, this hobby itself has plenty of drawbacks, and I’ve considered writing about some of them here during the entire process of piecing this video together. I had a plan for a more streamlined video production approach following the release of my A Link to the Past video in January. I began to record multiple games at once while working on a script for another Godzilla film analysis. I could not escape myself, however, and crippled with self-esteem issues, I chose to scrap that project. While I felt more confident in what I could write for Ocarina of Time, I still beat my head against the wall getting that initial draft written down. In the depression that followed, I found myself escaping into a variety of games, desperate to feel any sort of satisfaction in myself.

Even now, I look upon this video and I feel as if I should be apologizing for it. I sound as if I have a cold for a good portion of it. For some reason there are portions of the video that dropped in frame rate during editing and render. I plan to upgrade my desktop computer, but I don’t know if the root of the issue is hardware related or software. If it is software, then I have to continue struggling with the choice to stick with my current outdated – and considered barbaric by many, I’m sure – Windows Movie Maker 6 or graduate to DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere Elements, both of which will likely increase the amount of time it will take to edit video. There would be benefits, certainly, but they would not save me as much time as it would cost to make the transition. Given that one of the greatest sources of guilt is the lengthy delay since my last video, I’m not comfortable changing things up like that so soon.

I can sit here and wallow in my negative feelings all day, but such wallowing has only resulted in a lack of posts on this blog and a lack of new videos. So instead, I will do my best to learn from the experience instead and move forward.

Which brings me back to Ocarina of Time itself. While there are some things that were too late to fix for this video – in part due to the rush to record the audio itself – I was able to do a lot of extra work in order to make it a better video. I had started a whole second playthrough in order to get footage that would better match the script, experimenting with the game’s freedom while also testing out some of my assumptions. My audio was not yet locked in, meaning I was able to make some corrections – such as discovering you could strike Volvagia with an arrow during one of their attack phases.

Right now, I am far less familiar with The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess than I was with Ocarina of Time, meaning I’ll need to do some research on those games if I plan to test how linear or open-ended they are. As a result, I will likely copy and create multiple save slots that will make it easier to go back and replay portions of the game, thus allowing the recording process to go more efficiently. I may approach other games in a similar fashion as well, as it is becoming clear that I may need to do multiple recordings of certain games should I wish to truly make the best video I possibly can.

I’m also beginning to think I should take a new approach to recording my audio. I currently record it all in one sitting and in one file, but it might benefit me to at least record each video section on its own. This way, should I find myself in a situation where I need to make an edit to audio during video editing, it will be easier to make that adjustment without throwing a wrench into the entire project.

I don’t know if this will decrease the amount of time between videos. I’d like to hope so. I’ve been striving to release around five videos a year for some time now rather than my typical three. Perhaps that is hoping for too much. In the meantime, however, I can at least try to improve the process so that the videos I can release are the best I can make them.

Thank you for watching, and I hope these additional thoughts were informative both on Ocarina of Time itself as well as my process into making these videos.