I asked for a NES-style top-down Zelda game, but with some Roguelike Dungeon Crawler content mixed in. Think real-time DCSS (or Brogue, or Tales of Maj'eyal) with controls and a setting that feels similar to the NES Zelda game. Anyone who has played a 2D Zelda game and DCSS immediately has an idea of what I'm suggesting here.

What I got was a Vampire Survivors style "run around in this square area while enemies spawn and swarm you" game. Which is funny, because I have seen several game engine tutorials that build exactly this type of game[0][1][2].

I asked for a variety of possible "builds", including melee and spell castors, and said that not all builds should be viable--some combinations of stats should just not work. I also asked for a variety of spell schools with different pros and cons.

What I got was a game with no way to perform melee attacks, but there were melee oriented stats I could choose to upgrade. All the spell schools felt the same, they would shoot a basic projectile, or have some sort of wide area burst attack. The ice school froze enemies in place--how original. The controls were a bit awkward and for the first 5 minutes I didn't even know what spell school I was using. Sometimes the colors would change, which I think meant I had switched to a different type of magic, but I don't know. It all felt the same.

I asked it to fix several things, and then it worked for several minutes and changed literally nothing about the game--well, actually, it did change the game from being 5 levels long to 4 levels long, even though I didn't ask for that to change.

So I prompted it a second time to fix several things, which it mostly did, but it also changed the speed of the enemies and made them way to fast. I didn't ask it to change the speed of enemies, it just decided to change that on its own and introduced new problems in the process.

I get the impression it has no idea what the essence of a Zelda game is. This is "The Legend of Zelda" here, one of the most popular game series of all time and a classic. There have been several 2D entries in the series and they all have the same essence, but the AI was not able to capture any of that. It seemed to instead latch onto a very minimal Vampire Survivors essence and do a poor job at even that.

[0]: https://www.gdquest.com/library/first_2d_game_godot4_vampire... [1]: https://www.udemy.com/course/create-a-complete-2d-arena-surv... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgvLbahJOTA

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