One of my favorite things to watch on Twitch are the Dark Souls randomizer runs. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y8R0JWQdeo
Wow! I never expected to see Barb talked about on hacker News.
There are a lot of us bald programmers..
Ocarina of Time Randomizer
41–50 of 53 posts
Re: Ocarina of Time Randomizer
#42I love playing OOT randos. Not only is it a new puzzle every time, there are a lot of quality-of-life improvements (e.g. pushing blocks is faster, cutscenes are skipped) that make it much more enjoyable for someone who already knows the game well.
What platform or emulator do you play them on? I suppose these will work on Analogue 3D when it gets released?
I use OpenEmu on my Mac, so I guess Mupen64 as the emulator core. However as someone else mentioned the ROM should run on native hardware.
Re: Ocarina of Time Randomizer
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's great! Now does the DAG make sense to humans? Does it ever put things in absurd places, eg. a necessary dungeon key in a random grotto halfway across the map (or in another time)? Without clues, how would you know where to check next? Does the game help at all? How out of sequence can the game get? Is Master Quest just the moral equivalent of a single static random roll of the Randomizer? Someone should do thi…
>Does it ever put things in absurd places, eg. a necessary dungeon key in a random grotto halfway across the map (or in another time)? Without clues, how would you know where to check next? Does the game help at all? It can be configured with options as to how items are distributed. But yeah, in general anything can be anywhere. Without clues: sometimes there are clues, those silly gossip stones in OoT can output a m…
I have somewhere a branch that allows for "sharing" items between games as well. One could do an Oracle of Seasons+Ages game where your inventory is "the same" between both games, where possible (or extend to other games for group fun).
Re: Ocarina of Time Randomizer
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't wait until my daughter is old enough to play the Wind Waker. It's so amazing that only one generation after OoT they released a Zelda that not only is arguably as good or even better than OoT, but it holds up over 20 years later. You can play Wind Waker today and not realize it's not a new game, the graphics and the gameplay are just perfect.
I was really disappointed at the time due to the "childish" graphics. But now I think it is interesting that they made such a daring design choice. Like Super Mario 2 hardly being anything like SM1. It would be fun to play Windwaker someday with my kids. I never played it.
> Like Super Mario 2 hardly being anything like SM1.
I would not call that a design choice. It's a consequence of putting Mario branding on an unrelated game.
Re: Ocarina of Time Randomizer
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think of every location in the game as accessible only after certain events or items are acquired. You can create a directed acyclic graph (how build systems figure out dependencies!). You can randomize all the locations of items, as long there is still a way to get from the starting node to the ending node.
That's great! Now does the DAG make sense to humans? Does it ever put things in absurd places, eg. a necessary dungeon key in a random grotto halfway across the map (or in another time)? Without clues, how would you know where to check next? Does the game help at all? How out of sequence can the game get? Is Master Quest just the moral equivalent of a single static random roll of the Randomizer? Someone should do thi…
From what I've seen of YouTube runs, it can make zero sense (think going into a random cave out in the wild puts you into the queen's bedroom etc.). I guess it must be most fun for people who've played the game so much it's already just a DAG to them. Or maybe they enjoy the surrealism.
Re: Ocarina of Time Randomizer
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Does it ever put things in absurd places, eg. a necessary dungeon key in a random grotto halfway across the map (or in another time)? Without clues, how would you know where to check next? Does the game help at all? It can be configured with options as to how items are distributed. But yeah, in general anything can be anywhere. Without clues: sometimes there are clues, those silly gossip stones in OoT can output a m…
I have somewhere a branch that allows for "sharing" items between games as well. One could do an Oracle of Seasons+Ages game where your inventory is "the same" between both games, where possible (or extend to other games for group fun).
my favorite are the coop randos where 2+ runners are grabbing items for eachother and having a good timetime roasting eachother
Re: Ocarina of Time Randomizer
#47There's a ROM that combines Super Metroid and A Link to the Past into a single randomized game. It's a crazy experience, especially if you don't remember every powerup/pot location by heart.
Re: Ocarina of Time Randomizer
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think of every location in the game as accessible only after certain events or items are acquired. You can create a directed acyclic graph (how build systems figure out dependencies!). You can randomize all the locations of items, as long there is still a way to get from the starting node to the ending node.
That's great! Now does the DAG make sense to humans? Does it ever put things in absurd places, eg. a necessary dungeon key in a random grotto halfway across the map (or in another time)? Without clues, how would you know where to check next? Does the game help at all? How out of sequence can the game get? Is Master Quest just the moral equivalent of a single static random roll of the Randomizer? Someone should do thi…
I don't know about OoT, but in the case of Super Metroid Map Rando (https://maprando.com/), the logic is also quite detailed – see e.g. https://github.com/vg-json-data/sm-json-data/blob/master/reg... for one room – and comes with information about the difficulty of the tricks necessary to get from one place to another with a given item loadout, health, runways from connecting rooms etc.; having that, it is possible for the user to specify a desired difficulty, and one of several game modes then effectively ensures that the "next" item is located in a particular location, access to which has only been made possible by the current loadout and doing tricks of the given difficulty, so that players sufficiently familiar with the logic (and the tricks) can quickly narrow down the set of possible locations. Other game modes will be less strict in how items are placed, which in practice can mean that the game becomes "easier" by giving you a more powerful item loadout but "harder" in that figuring out where to go becomes less straightforward; and as a result, you end up with games that feel completely different just by having a different focus on the exploration and execution aspects.
I've find that it becomes quite an interesting spectator sport too, since people will compete on completing a given random map as quickly as possible, effectively having to perform difficult platforming tricks while also having to solve a non-trivial constraint satisfaction problem to understand the map layout, and different speedrunners have evolved different probabilistic heuristics for how to do that.
Some good showcases:
- The AGDQ 2025 finale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it_xbTZHan8
- The grand finals of a recent tournament: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2485240928
Re: Ocarina of Time Randomizer
#49Here's a related software that I like : https://archipelago.gg/ This is a multi-game randomizer, where items will be scattered accross all games in the multiworld, and so players will have to find items in their own games, but for eachother. It's really fun, and I am just amazed by the fact that it works so well for a ton of games.
It's so awesome! I want to finish adding the Ultima 6 one sometime - https://arya-iwakura.github.io/Ultima6Randomizer/
Re: Ocarina of Time Randomizer
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was really disappointed at the time due to the "childish" graphics. But now I think it is interesting that they made such a daring design choice. Like Super Mario 2 hardly being anything like SM1. It would be fun to play Windwaker someday with my kids. I never played it.
> Like Super Mario 2 hardly being anything like SM1. I would not call that a design choice. It's a consequence of putting Mario branding on an unrelated game.
Ye I know the "Super Mario USA" story.
However, I still think it is a "design choice" to not just do the same thing again. The safe and boring bet.
I.e. releasing something like "the lost levels" as SM2.