Eiji Aonuma discusses Chamber Dungeons in Zelda: Link’s Awakening
Nintendo has kicked off a new developer blog series for the Zelda: Link’s Awakening on Switch. For the first entry, we get to hear from franchise producer Eiji Aonuma, who discusses the new Chamber Dungeons feature.
Here’s the full blog:
Hello everyone. I’m Eiji Aonuma, producer for the Legend of Zelda series.
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is finally out, and I’d like to talk about the feature that was the deciding factor in revisiting this game: Chamber Dungeons.
With Chamber Dungeons, each room of the dungeon is a single tile called “Chambers”, and you arrange these tiles together like jigsaw pieces to form a dungeon. It’s a completely new feature, but I can imagine that for some of you, that might sound like a lot of hard work!
For example, it wouldn’t be a Legend of Zelda dungeon without treasure chests, but if you have to work out where the treasure chests should go, and what should be inside them, then it would take a long time to decide on all these details (although, of course, for the actual game development we have to work hard on all these details).
So in Chamber Dungeons, there are certain rooms that have treasure chests and certain rooms that don’t. What’s in the treasure chest will be determined by how you connect those rooms together (i.e. how you combine the tiles). So you can put the dungeons together however you want without having to worry about small details.
The contents of the treasure chest will change automatically, even though it is the same room.
On the other hand, some players might still feel overwhelmed if they’re arranging a dungeon from scratch. That’s why we’ve created specific challenges, where you have to combine the tiles in order to meet certain criteria. So even if you’re one of these people described above, you can still get the hang of arranging dungeons while also feeling like you are solving puzzles.
Also, here’s a good tip for you all; if you combine several treasure chest tiles together, it increases the chances of getting a high value rupee. So if you don’t have enough rupees on your adventure, you could earn some by arranging Chamber Dungeons (you’ll keep any rupees you find in Chamber Dungeons so long as you conquer them).
You can get useful items by conquering Chamber Dungeons, and the dungeons you arrange can be saved to a compatible amiibo figure from the Legend of Zelda series (sold separately) to share with friends too! I hope you will first get the hang of arranging dungeons with the challenges and then go on to hone your skills together with friends.
I hope you all enjoy The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, an adventure that’s packed full of things to see and do!
