The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

One of the things I wanted to include in Forgotten Gates is stealth challenges. They take the form of guard rooms, where exceptionally powerful monsters patrol around and will quickly start combat if they spot you, but are initially unaware of your presence. I recently got around to seriously implementing such guard rooms in the game, and they're proving rather challenging to design. The trouble is that each room in a Forgotten Gates dungeon has to be single-screen, and there's no telling where the entrances will be. The player might come in from north, south, east, or west, or even the up and down stairways potentially located toward the northeast and southwest corners. That means that all of these spots have to be safe zones where the player can stay initially to observe the guards before making a move, and all of these spots have to be reachable from each other. This places some tight restrictions on what layouts are possible. Here's a screenshot of my first guard room:



The guards in this room essentially just walk back and forth in straight lines with a brief pause before turning around. If all 6 guards are present (there can be as few as 1), this provides a decent challenge in which the player must choose their moments carefully to slip from one cover to the next. It gets significantly easier if only 2 or 3 guards are around. I suppose I could vary the patrol paths according to how many guards are present, but that would be a significant scope bomb in the amount of work that goes into this. e.ea

About now you're probably wondering what those flowers in the screenshot are. Those are the method I came up with to give guard rooms approximately equal challenge regardless of which entrance the player comes into the room by. They're targets which the player must reach and touch to activate, spread out around the room. Once all targets have been activated, the guards disappear and the room's treasure chest (if there is one) appears. I'm pondering adding in an XP bonus as well, probably some fraction of what the player would earn from straight-up fighting the guards. I don't want the player to feel cheated out of XP for successfully doing the stealth challenge instead of fighting, but I also want getting caught to be serious trouble, which means the guard monsters have to be strong, which means they should be worth a lot of XP...although I could always tweak the formula to lower the XP value for monsters used as guards. Or maybe...just thinking of this as I write it...I could make the stealth targets some sort of magical boosting devices that are making the guards stronger, and deactivating them just makes them less formidable when you do fight them. :|a That would be more believable than having things sitting around that just make the guards disappear, and then I could use the guard monsters as regular monsters too when appropriate (although I kinda think I wouldn't, just to keep from confusing the player about why their behavior is different when not in a guard room). Something to play around with, perhaps. If any of you have any ideas for improvements, feel free to comment. :)