Some questions and comments for the game's developer

[Attempt_NP1]

Hey there Steam's Ocean's Heart community,

I'm posting this thread in hopes that the developer will at least see and perhaps respond to its contents.

First off, let me say I think that--minus some bugs--this game was a fun, well-made, adventure game. And this is coming from a long-time Zelda fan who's thoroughly played most of the titles. When playing the game, it felt like one thing just led into another. Smooth, seamless and organic without any really overbearing grindy or farmy segments. It emulated its inspirations well. The fact that it was a solo project makes this more impressive, so thanks for making this game. I enjoyed it!

With that said, I did encounter numerous bugs during the game. While I am not surprised considering this was a one-person effort, there was one bug in particular that I would like to bring to your attention considering the "gravity" of its effect. Basically, after defeating the final boss and while the credits are rolling, if you press X (I use a PS4 controller, but I believe this is roll/dash), the game will save, without opening up a menu or prompting the player. Upon reloading the save, I still had the choice to fight the final boss or not, but if I tried to leave the dungeon, it would trigger the ending, effectively locking me in the area and preventing me from doing any other of the game's content. I had already completed a good deal of the game's content on this run, and when this bug occurred, it almost made me not want to start a new game and retry for a complete file. Long story short, I hope that if you do ever spend some time working on the game's bugs, you put this at the top of your queue because it is a potential game-ruiner.

With that out of the way, let me move on to the questions. Keep in mind that many of these relate to game completion. I actually did a deep scour of the game, but I am not sure if found everything (or at least everything unique, excluding one-time chests that contain something like bombs or crowns). It may seem like a bit of a litany, but I tried to list them in descending order, from most to least "important." Here they are:

1) I received a Key to Oakhaven from the mayor of the city, but I never found a place to use it. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I think the description accompanying the item implied it didn't really have a purpose. Is that true, or can this be used somewhere? I couldn't find a use for it.

2) There's a llama statue under a hole I uncovered in Lotus Shoal. When I interacted with it, I was healed, but that was it. Is there any other purpose to this statue?

3) There are two wishing wells, one in the SE of Oakhaven and another in an area east of Goatshead Harbor (where you meet the spirit and start a sidequest). At the former, I deposited a few hundred crowns and got a coral ore, and then maxed out my currency counter (9,999) and dumped all of my savings into the well, but nothing happened. At the latter, I dumped in 9,999 crowns as well, but nothing happened here too. Is that one piece of coral ore in Oakhaven the only reward from the wishing wells?

4) I think (hope? : p ) I found most if not all the items in the game, but I wanted to check to be sure. I have 23 hearts total (forgot how many hearts I started with, but I found 23 - n hearts in the game, with n = the initial number of hearts), my sword damage is 12, armor is 22, bow is 16, I have +3 pieces of coral ore with bombs maxed and the armorer unable to give me any more sword or bow upgrades, and 3 fairy elixir upgrades (more specifically: from inserting the bird beak into a statue in Yarrowmouth, entering a tower and then going downstream on the path to Marbletop Monastery, and opening a door in Snapmast Reef after moving two statues onto nearby switches). Based on this information, is there anything you've noticed I've missed?

5) There was a brief, recurring motif in the Fykonos Island theme that was reminiscent of Zelda's Lullaby. Was that intentional?

6) I've played FromSoftware's game Sekiro, and the cursed bell felt like a homage to that game's difficulty-increasing option. Was it?

Alright, that's it from me. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. Once again, thanks for creating this game. Take care

[Max Mraz]

Howdy!
First off, thanks for playing! I can tell you really dug into the world of Ocean's Heart, and that's really cool to hear. You and I are both in the same boat when it comes to scouring most of the Zelda titles, so I'm glad you came across this game since you're probably just the kind of person I made it for : )

I'll definitely look into that weird save bug if there are any more patches. That's very weird, since it should be impossible to save after fighting Blackbeard. I have no idea what could be causing the X button to make the game save, so yeah that's concerning. If it's any help, if you're playing on a computer you can edit the savegame file pretty easily.

Save files are stored here:
{user}\AppData\Roaming\OceansHeart\oceans_heart_saves\save1

And you would need to change these lines to a different map, for example, this ought to get you off the island where you're stuck if you want to finish up anything else:
_starting_map = "oakhaven/marblecliff"
_starting_point = ""


As far as your questions, I'll answer them to the best of my ability! I've just realized this now - and it's wild to me - but almost all of this game was created like 3-4 years ago now. So I'm a little rusty on some details haha

1) I don't think that key does anything, I think it's totally ceremonial! I agree that would be really fun if it was implied to be ceremonial, but actually had some secret use. Maybe in a future game!

2) The Llama statue is a little tribute to someone who very generously helped me to figure out some things in the game, and actually wrote the quest log system out of the goodness of their heart. I only know them by their online name, Llamazing.

3) As far as I remember, yeah the coral ore is the only wishing well reward. Heron's Well (on Goatshead) only has the "put money in" choice as one of the "wrong" options, that don't start the quest there (drinking being the correct option)

4) lmao that seems right to me. So, I actually taught myself everything about coding and game design while making this game, and one of the beginner mistakes I made was not keeping track of any upgrades or their locations. So honestly there's no way to know if there's some forgotten, well hidden upgrade, other than scouring the game code. And it's a bit of a mess, there's a ton of cut content still in the code with a lot of false positives for upgrades.

5) I had no idea, actually! But damn, now that you point it out I can't unhear it

6) The cursed bell was indeed a little homage to Sekiro - I aboslutely love that game. It's the only game I've ever actually gotten all the playstation trophies for to get the platinum one.

Hope that can help you answer your questions! I'm glad you had a good time with the game and reached out : )

[Attempt_NP1]

Max,

Thanks for taking the time to respond to my post in detail. Especially grateful that you responded so promptly. Earnestly appreciated.

Glad to see I’m not alone! I know I am not the only person to thoroughly enjoy Ocean’s Heart, and I hope that some how or other you’ve been able to hear the delighted comments of various people who valued the experience of playing through your game. I know as a player it can be easy to lose sight of the fact there are living, breathing human beings behind the games that have contributed to one’s life. So as a mere player to creator, thanks for following through with this project and making it available to those of us who want to play it!

Hopefully the bug I mentioned hasn’t affected anyone else. I think I was mashing the X button, but I actually don’t 100% remember which one of the buttons I was pressing, but it was one of the face buttons on the right side: either X, O, □ and △ (which I had mapped to dash, attack, and the two item slots). Sorry about that. Should have been clearer in my first post. And thanks for sharing the tip about editing save data. If anyone else did experience the same issue, your fix should help salvage their playthrough.

I thought you might potentially be a bit rusty, but if you didn’t know, I wasn’t sure who else would. Anyway, for the key, this wouldn’t be the only game that has a “useless” item. Did you collect all the Korok Seeds in BOTW? Haha, hopefully you weren’t like me, collecting hundreds of seeds across a vast world merely to get some useless poop in your inventory.

Roger on the llama. As his/her name indicates, that’s one truly llamazing person ; )

Was pretty sure if a max counter’s worth of crowns didn’t do it, then more of the same wouldn’t make any more difference. Cool to know the other options were implemented as “wrong” options.

Understood about the code. Thankfully, my “OCD” isn’t severe enough to go any further down that rabbit hole. I think I am satisfied with all that I found on my own, so that should be good enough : )

Haha! I really thought that was intentional. Pretty surprised to hear it wasn’t. But who knows, maybe it was your subconscious at work ; p

And nice job with Sekiro! I too platinumed that game on Steam and thought it was great. Looks like we have some similar tastes in games…which makes me think I should keep my eyes out for your next title, that is if you ever decide to release another. Is there any place I can keep an eye out for updates about your future projects? I actually don’t have social media accounts (besides Steam), so that might be a barrier, but please let me know if there are any other methods to stay in the loop with your game-developing efforts.

If I don’t hear back from you, let me just say I hope you have a great week and beyond! P.S. I gave your profile an award as a token of my appreciation. Take care

[Max Mraz]

Thanks so much! I'm glad I could put some of your mind's fixations on the game to rest lolol

As far as keeping up with upcoming projects, there's one in the oven right now but it doesn't yet have a Steam page. However, I should fairly regularly update my website when I do new projects. You can find that at https://mothatlas.co

<3

[Attempt_NP1]

Great! I'll keep my eyes out for when it's released. Thanks for sharing