Quest Master demo playthrough (Next Fest June 2023)
3When a certain extremely large game company doesn't tackle the most obvious possible "maker" idea, it's up to a few indie devs to do it.
Considering the absurd popularity of A Link to the Past randomizers, combined with the popularity of Super Mario Maker, it seems like a foregone conclusion that a Zelda maker would also be very popular. Quest Master seems to aim to do just that, with clear inspiration from a combination of A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening (and perhaps also Minish Cap, which I'm not as familiar with).
There's a lot of promise in this concept, but as I began to try creating my own level, I certainly saw a lot of room for improvement in the usability and clarity of the creation UI (starting with it currently being pretty unusable with a gamepad, since the gamepad seemed to control 2 cursors at the same time). Fortunately, it seems as if the demo has been getting a ton of updates, even after Next Fest, so hopefully that's a good indication of the devs being hard at work making improvements.
One thing I'm curious about is whether they're planning to allow for "episodes" of multiple dungeons strung together, given that otherwise it seems like there wouldn't be much point for e.g. heart containers. I also wonder whether freely moving both forwards and backwards between dungeons might be a thing (or even the concept of an overworld), since there's already clearly some metroidvania potential, and that could blow this wide open.