We spoke with Julian Creutz of Quest Master about its future and how it became synonymous with "the Zelda Maker"

Julian: Yeah it was pretty nuts! It was always my intention to do exactly that, I've always wanted Quest Master to really be in the footsteps of being the "Zelda Maker" that Nintendo hasn't done themselves. We saw that our competitors just weren't capable of doing so and people still were craving something better. I was always on the verge [of releasing early] because I've been making the game for so long, I started development back in January 2021. I still remember the day I saw the Reddit post of Super Dungeon Maker, and I was like dang we have a competitor? And it didn't look bad, but it luckily kind of played out kind of nicely in our favor. It just wasn't able to really be what people wanted out of a "Zelda Maker" right? So yeah I've always been on the verge of should we release the game early to get more competition in, or should we just wait and see what people don't like about the competition? It was a very good decision to delay the game more because then we had the others as learning lessons for us to see what people like and what they don't.

There's still things I would have preferred to change about the development cycle of Quest Master. One thing that really stood out to me over the past six months of Early Access is that people really don't see the game as a "Zelda Maker" fully until there is an overworld maker. I really underestimated the amount of people wanting that specific feature, that is the one thing I would change if I were to start this from scratch again. I still do think that people largely underestimate the amount of work that you have to put into an overworld because it's essentially like a dungeon but on such a larger scale that you have to think about. So it's something that we are still obviously targeting, and it's also confirmed in the road map. However, it's unfortunately coming after 1.0 because we just weren't able to put all of that before 1.0. We have the campaign coming, we have another secret update this month, and then we have all the other stuff like small content updates coming until 1.0. Of course also Castle Town expansions and all that stuff. It was just not feasible to do the overworlds before 1.0 because there are many things I still haven't figured out, unfortunately. It's so much more complex than just the dungeon maker itself, and I want it to be on the same level of ease as the dungeon maker which will be a challenge to achieve from a game design perspective.

There's just things that don't work out well when you want the maker game to be more like a game as opposed to an editor. This is one of the things that all competitors I think do wrong, so this is also why I think Quest Master is so approachable for many people especially children, which is just really, really heartwarming to see. I have many parents telling me that they play Quest Master with their kids which is exactly what I intended. I really wanted to have that connection which is awesome to see.

SM: Yeah it's really heartwarming when you go online and see exactly what you set out to do mirrored in what you see online. So, as an indie dev overall; how has it felt with all the fan feedback and being able to be in this position where you're able to make your big break that a lot of indie devs hope for? Where you basically have the world at your fingertips to create this amazing game that is like a dream come true for both you and the fans alike?

Julian: It's very much a double-edged sword I would argue. I really appreciate and love the fact that I'm able to do so. I work on this game and love it just the same as I did on day one. However, becoming a person of public interest has certain drawbacks that I would have preferred not to experience. People tend to get very attached to your game, and they tend to be very emotional when things don't go the way that they want it to go. A good example is if an update is delayed because we have this very strict update schedule. Well, I used to, where every Friday we released a new content update. If it wasn't released on Friday'd get heaps and heaps of people on both Steam and Discord asking me where the update is, which is understandable of course, but it's always a pain having to explain yourself right? Having to share intimate details about sometimes perhaps your personal life to explain stuff like this, and it's especially more difficult as such an arguably small team. Especially with me as the only programmer it puts a very large burden on your mental health, that's for sure. I try to still separate this kind of stuff so it doesn't affect me as much, but it's impossible not to have it affect you right? So this is why I made a decision in one of the last updates to remove that limitation to always have it on Friday every week, which hopefully should ease the people that always complain about it. I will still try to make an update every Friday, but perhaps it doesn't come out on Friday, maybe it's Sunday, maybe it's Saturday, maybe it doesn't happen at all. Maybe there's two updates a week! It's just more flexible, this change is not meant to lower the scope of the game or make the game have fewer updates at all. It’s just a time management thing and to remove that burden from not only me but also the team.

SM: That’s a decision I can respect. Mental health is very important. Don't set expectations too much if you're an aspiring developer is the advice here, I think.

Julian: Yeah, don't tell people when things are gonna drop because in many cases it doesn't always go to plan and people take things very much to heart. It's better to be more vague about it as opposed to being too specific, that's what I've learned. Obviously, I'm very grateful, and it's very exciting to see people getting so attached to the game and I love that. I love being close to the community, I think that's also one thing that I try to do which is not very common either. People being able to speak to me as the lead developer of the game so closely and me being so active in the discord again is like a double-edged sword because I tend to spoil too much stuff. I tend to be where maybe the lead developer should not be. I get many people in my DMs that tend to overstep boundaries. It's a bit weird, but it's something that I tend to deal with at least for Quest Master. I'm not sure if I’m going to continue doing it for perhaps my next game, but we'll see how that goes.

SM: That totally makes sense. Overall the next question is how would you have indie developers position themselves in order to be able to find that big break or be able to give themselves many opportunities to have that lucky break come up?

Julian: I think it's always a question of luck predominantly. Honestly, I'm very lucky to be in this position. I think I also picked out a niche which is always one thing I can recommend, finding a niche for a game that perhaps a large audience of people might be attracted to, in my case it was a "Zelda Maker." Also having a market that's not over saturated, I think that's a very big problem; people tend to focus on having games like platformers or shooters which are very much over saturated genres. It's kind of common to see games of that nature not doing very well. I think a game actually doesn’t need much to be a wide scale success. I think we've seen this many times; games that have even just a good art style or just a cool idea tend to do much, much better than games that have very deep mechanics but just aren't marketable right? You could have the best game, but if it's not marketable it won't find success. Unfortunately, this is just the reality of today's world. So, what I can recommend is finding a niche, finding something where perhaps you would also like a game to be made. There's always this concept of your dream game coming true. Which I do kind of find ridiculous because, yeah, Quest Master is my dream game, but truthfully I don't play it anymore because I kind of tend to work on it all day for almost four years now. So, you can kind of imagine how much time I have to actually play the game. I still delegate some time to play the game once in a while, just to dive into the new dungeons that have been made. I wish I would have more time because this really was the game that I was dreaming to make. But, it's kind of always the case with game development that you tend to not be able to actually play your own game, which is also kind of ironic. But, that's one of the core things I would recommend to my fellow people.

End Goals and Inspirations

SM: That is very sound advice! What would you say your ultimate end goal for this project is?

Julian: Hmm, let me think about this for a second. (pauses) My end goal for this game is to be self-driven. This is also one of the things that I want the modding to take the lead with. I believe, with modding, the game can really be self-sustainable because in the ideal world it will produce enough new content every day that gets people excited and perhaps even more excited than actual game content. It's very likely that perhaps some of those mods might exceed things that I do with the game, so my vision for this game is to be obviously the Zelda maker. I want this game to be recognized as the "Zelda Maker" which I think you could argue is already kind of is as I've heard from many people which is great. One other goal is also for this game to be on a Nintendo console which is most likely going to be the Switch and I will try to do my best to get it onto the Switch 2 as well. I have theories, my suspicion is that the switch 2 will launch into the holidays around Christmas, so that could be approximately where the Quest Master Switch port might be done as well.

SM: What advice would you give to those who are trying to get started in game dev but feel overwhelmed by all of these options? You have so many game engines, you have all the pieces available on the internet to be a solo indie dev, but it’s a lot to take in.

Julian: Yeah I mean this space is very difficult to maneuver in my opinion because there are so many options and I think it's a jungle, and it's hard to see through the forest or over the trees nowadays, honestly. I used to be a big proponent for making custom game engines and I still am especially now that I'm doing the modding again. I did choose Unity for Quest Master after the fact, but Quest Master actually started out as a custom game engine in 2021. Approximately half a year into it, I made the move to Unity because of porting reasons for Switch. I think it's a question about efficiency and how much you want to learn. I would argue that I would not be in the position where I am today if I didn't start out making my own game engines because it really solidifies your understanding of how games internally work. I also think it strengthens programming fundamentals because you tend to work with a lot lower level stuff like data structures and general architecture as opposed to when making a game. I think many people tend to under use common programming principles and concepts like this and tend to just rely on spaghetti code and not structuring their code well enough. I think this is something that you can learn a lot from because when it comes to developing or programming business applications that are very different programmatically from games, and you can learn a lot from those kinds of areas which is why I recommend trying out custom game engines if you want to make this your career or your main focus. I think if you want to just dabble in it choosing a game engine that eases your way into the development cycle is probably the best idea like Unity or having a more simple thing like Python with Pygame or maybe GameMaker or even maybe trying Scratch. I'm a very big proponent about programming a custom game engine because it just offers the most flexibility and the most amount of stuff you can learn from it, and you get to iterate a lot more on your knowledge. The only drawback is with a custom game engine it's not very easy to port it anywhere because you have to port it yourself which is the big benefit of market ready game engines like Unity or Unreal Engine, there's many, many more out there. If I wasn't making Quest Master as a commercial product that I have to live off of I definitely would use a custom game engine that’s for sure.

SM: That’s fascinating to hear you say that. I had recently seen someone talk about the fact that people should make their own Game Boy emulator, inherently due to the fact you can code pieces of it at a time to learn how stuff works.

Julian: I saw that a while ago myself, yeah.

SM: So here’s my next question. When you say self-driven, what do you mean? Self-driven in terms of purely modding potential or do you mean replayability for people to be able to basically perpetually play the game forever for as long as they want to, like Mario Maker for example?

Julian: So before I answer that, do you know Zelda Classic? 

SM: That sounds vaguely familiar?

Julian: I would call this the OG "Zelda Maker." It started out as a Legend of Zelda recreation in the 90s, and it grew into this custom quest creation tool that you can create custom Zelda games with but on a much more moddable nature than Quest Master. Like you can even do custom scripts and stuff they have their own custom programming language called Z-Script it's crazy. This also grew into this own community where people make these insanely long, complex, amazing quests that span dozens and dozens of hours. This community has been ongoing for almost 30 years. So it's nuts to think about that. Quest Master could potentially fill that role but hopefully on a much more large commercial scale. Hopefully also on a much more approachable scale because the problem with Zelda Classic is it's not very approachable it's very difficult to get into. This is where Quest Master steps in because it's so easy to make your own dungeon and together with modding it bridges the gap. This self-driven aspect is very important to me because, as sad as it sounds, I don't want to work on the game until I die right? I want to be done someday. (laughs) Hopefully this day is in the next few years, I mean we'll see how it goes. But yeah eventually with the modding this game can just be self-driven in the sense that there will always be new content, always new things to experience. This is my core idea for how the game hopefully sells itself. Of course, the modding stuff will be fully disabled on things like the Nintendo Switch, which is a shame, but arguably the PC community might be the bigger one with the modding.

SM: Yeah it’s a shame given the hardware. So here’s a cheeky question: What's your favorite Legend of Zelda game of all time?

Julian: Oh that's… that's a big one. Choosing a favorite Zelda game is tough because I usually prefer to split it up into 2d and 3d because it's just so hard to decide. I think because both of these perspectives play out so differently in the games they designed I would argue 2d wise my favorite one is a Link Between Worlds if we count the 2.5d stuff? It just has a special place in my heart because of the nostalgia and also like how well it remakes a Link to the Past which is also one of my favorites. It just does everything right in my opinion. It has the perfect difficulty balance, it has nice replayability reasons, it's very non-linear and it's gorgeous. It's so expansive and the dungeons are great. It's such a great game, there's obviously flaws, but I think this would be my favorite 2d Zelda game. Minish Cap is also very high on my list like just for the visuals alone, but also the coherence of the world. I think Capcom makes great Zelda games. I wish they would have made more like the Minish Cap and the Oracle (The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, Seasons) games there's such hidden gems among the Zelda games. I wish they would get more recognition and this is my wish that Minish Cap gets more recognition because of Quest Master because obviously Quest Master is visually most inspired by Minish Cap, because we figured the large pixel art and the colorful vibe is just the best appeal for both marketing wise but also being able to play it on a large modern monitor. We started out with an Oracle kind of graphic style, but it just didn't work out well because the pixels were too big on a modern screen. The Minish Cap kind of dimensions work much better because the pixels the resolution is much higher for the game with the pixel Minish Cap pixel art style. It looks a lot crisper and just brings out the colors better and like just the vibe is nicer because it doesn't look so blocky and ancient and also like that also translates to the soundtrack.

3D-wise I know it's a controversial pick, but I would say my favorite is Skyward Sword because I'm one of those people that really adored the motion controls. It just made me feel like Link which is such a cool thing to experience, and the story is great the world is amazing. The only thing i kind of dislike a bit is the linearity, but even that's not a big issue because I think Zelda tends to do best when it is linear. I think the recent direction it kind of took with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is very much wrong-headed. I think it's a very bad idea for Zelda to be so non-linear, but that's for everyone to decide on their own. Overall, Skyward Sword is for sure my favorite and close after that would be Twilight Princess as well it's a really amazing one.

SM: I actually love that that was as deep of an answer as it was. It actually did bring up a question for me, what would you say you'd like your main campaign to be? I know when I looked at your projects on Itch they were both sort of roguelike typed. Are you looking for a linear type adventure, non-linear, or more procedurally generated with set locations? I'm very curious.

Julian:  That's a good question! I used to be really much into procedural generation especially with Mystica which was meant to be this fully procedurally generated Zelda game. I found it to work decently well, but it will never be able to come close to having a hand-designed dungeon especially for a Zelda game. So the idea for the campaign for Quest Master is that it's an engaging and immersive lore-wise adventure that takes you through dungeons. Unfortunately, not in the overworld because that's not part of the scope, and it's mostly linear, but there are non-linear branches at points and things you can go back to break up the monotony. It's very much more story focused than your typical Zelda game because the world and lore of Quest Master is actually quite deep, actually much more deep than you would imagine for such a game. The campaign will basically also just be a showcase of what you can do with Quest Master. There's barely anything in the campaign that you can't do in the dungeon maker. There will be a few things for story purposes just because it's not possible to have everything that the dungeon maker uses to be in the campaign because there's just certain things that just fit only in the campaign. However, you'll be able to basically make the entire campaign in the dungeon maker yourself which is exactly what I want to achieve. There's this very much hated fact in Mario Maker where there's this super useful and polished course part in one of the campaign levels, I think it's a stone block, and it's not available in the maker. People hated this fact and I really don't want to repeat that mistake, so my big thing is if there will be custom stuff in the campaign it will be either unlockable through the campaign or it will just be available from the get-go. There will not be anything of crazy nature, I would imagine maybe the final boss of the campaign that's probably not going to be part of the dungeon maker because it just doesn't fit right, but we'll see we'll see how it goes, but there will not be anything that’s on the level of the stone block in Quest Master that you can't use in the dungeon maker. Arguably maybe even if there was something that's locked you could probably mod it in if I'm honest I don't see why you wouldn't be able to do so. But that's my philosophy for the campaign for Quest Master. It will also flesh out the soundtrack a lot more which is going to be very exciting.

SM: I look forward to hearing it! We've talked a lot about the modding part of this. In terms of modding capabilities I think a lot of people are curious as to how deep the scope of modding do you want possible?

Julian: It's a complex topic, because just as with how approachable the dungeon maker is I want the modding to be just as approachable. This is why I chose not to go with a program language like Lua or Python, but rather just go with a text-based format like YAML. I think Quest Master is arguably one of the most approachable games to mod. This is my philosophy; everything that the dungeon maker has; all tiles, objects, items, enemies, rings, everything will be moddable. What won't be moddable is things like Castle Town and the campaign that's stuff that the game just ships with that's unrelated to the modding. All the rest, the themes, music, art, enemies, objects, everything will be moddable and that's really exciting. In the one of the next updates you'll be able to make custom translations for the game which is one thing I’m really excited about because people always ask me for translations they want to help with. Which is something I can't do because Apogee will do the official translations. However, for the time being, you'll be able to make your own translations on the workshop with a mod like for German or Spanish or whatever. You can even have some funny translations like Pirate Speak or stuff like that. That'll be very exciting I think for the accessibility of the game because I've heard that sometimes it's easy to dismiss a game if it's not available in your language. My hope is it lowers the language barrier which would be great and hopefully that attracts more people to the game.

SM: I sure hope so, from what I’ve played a good many people should get a chance to play your game. It was a pleasure speaking with you today.

Julian: I appreciate you having me on!

Quest Master updates March 21st with a new Secret Update, and later this year 1.0 also releases. You can check out the Steam page here for the Early Access release of the game.

Apogee Entertainment, Steam, Quest Master (X)