The Magical Kingdom of Zeal (UDK)

The Magical Kingdom of Zeal was the previous project of the games lead 3D artist William T. Nichols. Not only did this project lend him the job, but some of its assets are still in the package HatinTime\_Habboi, with a few being used over the course of development.

## Original Video Description

Big thanks to all the people who commented and thank you Kotaku for posting my work on your website. Feel free to check out my portfolio for a detailed breakdown of the project: http://www.habboi.co.uk/

This is a project that I have been working on since late last year. I never got the chance to play Chrono Trigger when I was a child but I managed to play it on an emulator last year. It's an absolutely brilliant game and I can see why some people called it "ahead of its time" when it first came out.

Anyway it came out on the Wii store a while back and I immediately bought it because I wanted to experience the journey again. That's when I reached The Kingdom of Zeal and something inside me wanted to experience the world of Zeal in 3D so I decided that my next project would be to recreate it.

Many, many months later I finally finished it. I spent a lot of time redesigning it and trying to find a style that suited my abilities and tastes. Eventually my search led to the art style from The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker by Nintendo and that's when things started to pick up. I had found my aim and I spent the next few months researching the style, asking friends and strangers for help with recreating certain effects and experimenting with shaders in order to capture the look and feel of Wind Waker. I even watched Dragon Ball: Z again as the building designs were designed by the same person and were much better references to use since the Zeal sprites are tiny.

I decided near the end that I liked some of the effects that UDK had to offer such as "godrays" and "dynamic shadows" so I enabled them in order to create a kind of HD Wind Waker. I purposely added Depth of Field to recreate the LOD blur that was in the original game. I estimate the accuracy of my recreation is 90% as it was difficult to transfer a 2D image into 3D.

Overall I'm very happy with this project. I put a lot of effort into it and learnt a great deal more about UDK. I also discovered a new dislike for cameras in UDK. What a pain they are.

I hope fans of Chrono Trigger and Wind Waker like what they see. I thank the developers for creating such great games.

Credits:

Sathoshi Aikawa for Wind Waker Theme Guitar Remix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BffzE5niuF0&t=0s

Familyjules7x for Corridors of Time Guitar Remix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV7JsFxhDMg&t=0s

James Wild and the rest of the Polycount Community for helping with the Wind Waker Effects: https://polycount.com/discussion/98578/udk-zelda-water-shader-help

Peter C Britton for UDK render techniques:

http://peterbritton.blogspot.com/2011/02/soenke-christian-seidel-concept.html

AdamandBrennan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuJhjhRqkTE&t=0s

ERH for Wind Sound Effect: https://freesound.org/people/ERH/sounds/34338/

GilvaSunner for being friendly and answering a few of my questions.

http://www.youtube.com/user/GilvaSunner

Nintendo for creating The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.

Square for creating Chrono Trigger.

This is a fan made video. All copyrighted material belongs to their respective owners.

## References

1. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMHSiYiB55s