Ocarina of Time Randomizer Tracker

About the Project

One of my favorite things to do in my free time is play video games. More specifically, I enjoy playing through video games I've previously played or beaten, learning about new ways to enjoy the game. This is what drew me to the randomizer for my favorite game, Ocarina of Time (OoT). But while I had a lot of fun playing the randomizer, I did not have as much fun trying to figure out what I already did in the game or if I had truly gotten every item available in a dungeon. So, I decided to make a tracker of my own, that could be used from the comfort of my own couch via my phone.

There are a lot of great trackers out there, if you find tracking from your computer easier or need to record it alongside your gameplay. One of my favorite ones for overworld tracking is Vado's OoT Randomizer Checklist, and of course track-oot.net has become a standard these days for those using browser-based item tracking. The official OoT Randomizer Wiki's list of trackers is also helpful to find a new tracker for those who specialize in different types of runs, such as an entrance randomizer. But unlike most people using trackers for their runs, I only play casually, and I use a flashcart rather than an emulator. So I need something easy to use from my phone - and unfortunately, none of the official trackers out there help.

Keeping in mind that I was probably in a minority group that would find this helpful, I decided to go out there and design something myself that would allow me to track items, check my progress in dungeons, and properly keep track of everything in the overworld and what gold skulltulas I had collected. Of course, in the process of making this tracker, I learned there are a lot more options available for the randomizer than what I'm currently using, and so while I did incorporate many of these options, I also had to make a few assumptions about the average user:

1. Users should be very familiar with the vanilla game.
   Technically, this tracker could be used for the vanilla game as well, but if the user isn't familiar with the vanilla game they're going to have problems with the randomizer that even the tracker can't solve. In full disclosure, even though I have done 100% runs of OoT many times in the past, I failed the first three randomizers I tried because they were so complex in comparison!
   
   
2. Users should be using the official Ocarina of Time Randomizer.
   I don't know of anywhere else you can generate randomizers for this game, but all the options in this tracker have been set up in accordance with their settings, and the home screen for setting up a new game presumes you have a Seed ID that relates to the one generated by that website.
   
   
3. Users should not be using any Master Quest (MQ) settings in their seed.
   While many people do play with Master Quest variants, this can change the number of items or keys in each dungeon, how the progression is tracked, and can also generate additional items throughout the game. MQ players would need a different version of the tracker to make sure everything is accounted for.

Because I was originally aiming for the goal of something I could use to keep track of things myself, I didn't actually sketch out the concept for this. Rather, I set up an Excel sheet noting everything of importance that I might need to consider when setting up a tracker, and when I decided I wanted something prettier, I opened up Figma and just translated the words to images. This document actually determines the logic behind the design, so it would be very important if this was ever brought into development.

Open Logic Tracking Document


I also set up a functional tracker via Airtable which I currently use while playing as this design is not set to be developed. In order to follow the game in a set state for this design, I played through a little less than half of a randomizer seed, keeping track of everything, and then set up the Figma file to be for that game. Below are various screens from my current tracker in the same state the design is in. You could consider this the "before" version of the design.

Item Tracker    Dungeon Tracker    Overworld Tracker    Gold Skulltula Tracker

Main Design

I knew I didn't want to use anything too complicated when it came to designing this application. Like most mobile applications, users should be spending more time in them than trying to figure out their navigation or squinting to see the content, so the simpler the design could be, the better.

With so much of the focus planned to be on item sprites and checklists, I knew I wanted a color scheme that didn't contain too much variation, and would mainly use a single color as the background. Originally, I had chosen green, because The Legend of Zelda is often associated with green. But the item screen itself in-game uses a dark blueish-purple tone, and since the original game designers though that was the best color to display their sprites on, I decided to follow suit. From there, it was easy to select a set of colors to complement it, with two lighter shades for distinguishing clickable areas, one even lighter accent color for icons, and another dark color to make input fields stand out.



I also had to pick shades of red and green to use for color indicators on progression. When they were supposed to replace the main color (#05003F), I chose #00300B and #420800. When they were supposed to replace the lighter color (#322A84), I chose #006014 and #7A0F00. While the darker colors were picked from in-game screens, the lighter colors were picked for their relation to those darker colors. You'll see more on how exactly those are used later.

      

The choice of font was much more difficult to select than the colors. Unlike colors, fonts have some permissions attached to them which makes their selection very important. To get around this, I always strive to select something from Google Fonts. Thankfully, Figma has these built in, making them easy to work with. But like many games, Ocarina of Time already had it's own "branding" - a particular style of text it uses. I wanted something to match that style, without having to sort through the legal complications of picking something like Hylia Serif. In the end, I selected Acme, which was easy to read at small sizes, and looked nice both in normal sentence case and fully uppercase text for section headers.

I also needed a font that would complement Acme, but would not be too overwhelming for users reading through walls of text on checklists or in notes they typed to themselves. For this, I selected Open Sans, which is a font that is fairly easy on the eyes, and is also a recommended pairing with Acme.

With the color scheme and fonts chosen, all that was left to worry about was the navigation, which would follow users around on each screen. From the beginning, I knew a navigation on the bottom was the way to go. With a very tap-heavy interface and the usual panicked state of a player when frantically searching for information, the last thing I wanted to do was hide everything away in an expandable side menu. Typically, bottom navigation bars are four or five items across, and consist of a label and an icon to represent the section overall.



Game refers to the game options, such as the generated seed, and choices of resetting progress or starting a new game. Ideally, other settings would be able to be accessed here as well in the future, such as turning on specific randomized settings or removing the red/green color indicators. A triforce was chosen as the icon, because it is one of the most widely-recognized symbols for The Legend of Zelda, and would remind people what game series the tracker is for.

Items refers to the item tracker, which is where a user would mark down which items they had gotten throughout the game. A bag, resembling the in-game wallet, was chosen as the icon, because no one is entirely sure where Link actually holds these items, but a magical pouch of some kind is the most likely explanation.

Dungeons refers to the game's many dungeons, which can be checked periodically for progress. A map, specifically in the scrolling style found in-game in most dungeons, was chosen as the icon, because it matches what a player would be using to keep track of the dungeons if they did not have this app to do it for them.

Other refers to all the other kinds of trackers, which is added to frequently as the randomizer continues to evolve. An ocarina was chosen as the icon here, because it is the main game mechanic in Ocarina of Time. Assuming at some point this tracker could be rolled out to other randomizers, such as the one for A Link To The Past, this symbol could easily be switched out to best represent the game it was for.

Game Options

Part of me didn't want to include a home screen on this application. In some ways, it felt like an obstacle in the user's way as they attempted to get to their trackers. But in the end, I decided there were enough options that needed to be accounted for that were better served on a separate screen, so as to not clutter the trackers, and to decrease the chance they would be tapped on by mistake. Those options ended up being a quick link to the spoiler log, as well as buttons to reset progress in your current seed, and start a new game entirely.



The buttons themselves are simple enough. Reset Progress turns everything back to the default settings on the randomizer - no items will be selected, dungeons will all show as being incomplete, etc. When you select that option, a pop-up will appear, confirming the user does intend to actually reset their progress - after all, that's an awful lot of work to put back together if tapped on accident! As for Start New Game, this will also reset the application, but will also allow the user to enter a new Seed ID and Hash.

The Seed ID is how each generated game is tracked on the randomizer website. By navigating to a generated link that includes the Seed ID, players are able to confirm their settings, patch a new ROM of the game, and can also view the spoiler log if they're stuck. The View Settings & Spoiler Log: Seed {SEED ID} is generated automatically based on the seed the user enters. It does not talk back to the randomizer itself. As a note, these seeds do expire after a time, and if a player is returning after a few months away it is entirely possible this link will no longer work.

Similarly, each seed has its own Hash, consisting of five icons from the game, which is what is used in official runs and races. If two players would like to race each other, they must first confirm their Hash is identcal, so they know they are playing the same generated seed. This Hash can be seen both on the randomizer link, and on the game itself when loaded. If you have selected to randomize tunic colors, the tunic will appear as its base color on the website, but will change to the new color on the game screen.

The "Start New Game" process has not been designed yet, but will be shortly. For those curious, I anticipate the Hash selection working much like Pokemon selection in Pokemon Go.

Item Tracker

As someone who found out about the Ocarina of Time Randomizer by watching other people play it, I found the item tracker to be a critical component of gameplay. Without it, it was hard to know what options the player had open to them, and of course, it was hard to know how many times they had been duped by fake items or trolled by finding a blue rupee when they really needed something to progress in the game with. But when I started running these randomizers myself, I discovered something unusual very quickly: the item tracker is essentially useless as a player.

Ocarina of Time has item and equipment screens in their menu, and if you're playing by yourself, you can pause the game at any time to look at them. Those pause screens aren't difficult to understand, either - in fact, since people are so familiar with the layout, things you're missing tend to jump out at you with a quick glance. For example, it's easy to see here that I still need Fire Arrows and the Kokiri Sword. Please forgive the quality, as I mentioned, I play on a flashcart, so I had to take these images from my phone rather than being able to take a screenshot.

   

Even if you step away from the game for a little while and come back, the title screen makes it very easy to see just where you left off in terms of your items, making the tracker not necessary as a player. This view is specific to version 6.0 and above of the randomizer, and is not found in the vanilla game or any of the original randomizer patches.



Despite not finding item trackers to be as helpful as I had hoped, I still loved the idea of having one I could carry around with me. I often tackle randomizers over a few days, and I like being able to look through what I have and what I need when I'm not playing it, trying to figure out my plan of attack for when I return. And at one point, there actually was an item tracking mobile app out there, but unfortunately it was removed from the app store before I had a chance to download it onto my new phone. That particular mobile application inspired the design for this item tracker, so if anyone knows the creator, let me know so I can give credit where credit is due!

That mobile app featured sprites of all the items that had a low opacity before they were collected, and tapping on them would increase the opacity to show they were collected. Progressive items (items that are replaced in the inventory when a better version is found) could be added by continuing to tap on the items. Certain items that could have an increase in inventory would show the number in the corner in green, which does seem to be a standard as I look at other trackers. When you cycled all the way through to the end, the item would go back to its default state of having low opacity, letting you circle back to the beginning.

Unfortunately, that tracker wasn't perfect. The sprites were cramped together, and were partially off the screen on all sides, as rather than being able to scroll to additional items all of them were squeezed onto a single screen. There were also several items missing, making it rather incomplete. And worst of all, there wasn't a quick way to reset your progress for everything when you wanted to start a new game - an option I included already on the main screen. But I still wanted to fix the item tracker itself, which is what led me to create this one.



In many ways, it's identical to that mobile app. There are sprites for each in-game item, you can tap through all of them to indicate if you have them or not, and progressive items are accounted for in the same manner. But what's different about it is how the items are split into sections that you can collapse and expand as needed, and how many more items were able to go onto the tracker because of this.

I discovered that four was a comfortable number across of items when working on the bottom navigation, and it's something I decided to make use of for the item tracker as well - though, it certainly helped that all the items split evenly into four! I decided to have Items & Magic - determined by what was on the item screen in the game - as one of the sections, and Equipment & Health - determined by what was on the equipment screen in the game - as another section. From there, Regular & Warp Songs become its own section, as well as Just For Fun. In the future, it would be nice to track medallions here as well, and they might end up grouped in with songs as they are both on the same selection screen in-game.

As far as the sprites go, it was quite easy to decide which ones to use. Between Ocarina of Time on the N64 and 3DS, as well as the official artwork, there are quite a few to choose from. Anyone familiar with the vanilla game would recognize these sprites, and in a worst case scenario they could compare them to the in-game item screen, so there's very small chance of confusion when it comes to selecting items. The most confusing of these is under the songs. On the in-game item screens, each regular song is represented by the same grey music note. On most trackers, people use some kind of icon to tell these songs apart, but there is no official artwork for those, and my attempt at icons was not quite on-brand with the normal N64 graphics:



This is something I do tend to address in the future, since I am still making improvements to the design when possible. Aside from those notes, the only other thing that may be confusing to users is the question mark under Just For Fun. Random items are mixed into the item pool for each seed, typically consisting of bombs, bombchus, arrows, extra deku shields and hylian shields, and recovery hearts. When those items are discovered, and you don't have the appropriate equipment for them, they get turned into blue rupees. While I originally had tried to list those all separately, upon reading about shopsanity, it seems even more random "junk" items can end up in the item pool. Without having played a shopsanity version, I didn't feel comfortable listing them out separately and missing them. So for now, they are simply grouped together under the question mark.

Another decision some may question is keeping Ruto's Letter separate from the bottle it's found in. The reason for this has more to do with logic than with design. As you can find the bottles in any order, it's possible to find Ruto's Letter inside any bottle in the sequence. While you have Ruto's Letter in your possession, you are unable to use the bottle, making it inadvisable to track should it happen to be the first one you find. Additionally, having Ruto's Letter opens up various areas of the game, that you may or may not need a bottle for - and, it's possible to generate a seed where Ruto's Letter is entirely removed from the item pool. It's really just a bonus that having it as a separate item gives us 24 items under Items & Magic, rather than 23!

Before moving onto the next screen, I wanted to briefly highlight the use of fonts. When counting a possible number of items, such as with bottles or heart pieces, I started out using Acme but quickly found it was awkward looking at such a small font size and in the standard color green that is used (#00FF38). Instead, I chose to use Aladin. While I don't find the font to be particularly readable for text, its numbers look nicer than Acme's do, and they still keep with the Zelda-esque theme of the main font.

When all is said and done, honestly, the biggest question here was not the design, but how to make an item tracker useful enough for a casual player with no one watching them to even want to take the time to fill it out. And after thinking about it for a while, the answer was obvious: items are needed for progression, so if there's another tracker within this one that would change in response to the items checked off, users would definitely want to take the time to fill it out. After all, if you're stuck, you may as well let the tracker figure out your next area for you.

Dungeons

Having a tracker for dungeons was my overall solution to the problem with the usefulness of the item tracker. Now, I have to make a confession here: as a casual player, I don't care much for dungeons. I like overworld quests. I like collecting things. I like exploring light, happy areas without too many scary monsters. My video game history has me playing games like Spyro: Year of the Dragon, Super Mario Odyssey, or Kingdom Hearts. There aren't too many dungeons in those, and there are certainly enough sidequests to keep me busy. But The Legend of Zelda relies heavily on dungeons in most of its games, and most players love them. Even I can't overlook their usefulness when playing through a randomizer. So there was no reason they shouldn't get their own spotlight.



This part of the tracker was specifically designed to let users know at a glance if they could proceed in a dungeon or not, and if they could, which one might make the most sense. This is done primarily through the use of color - green to indicate a 100% completed dungeon that does not need to be entered again, and and red to indicate a dungeon that cannot be entered or cannot be progressed in. As a note, on completed dungeons, there will also be an icon to indicate to users it has been completed. This is to follow ADA compliance for color indicator guidelines.

The triggers for the colors are fairly simple. Dungeons become green on their own, once every single key, chest, and skulltula has been collected, alongside the map and compass. Meanwhile, dungeons can become red or turn back to their default color in a number of ways. At the beginning of a game, all dungeons should show up as red, because with no items, there is no way to progress in them. However, typically users will have an Open Forest setting in their game, meaning they can enter the Deku Tree without the typically required items. In that case, a user could open up the main screen for that dungeon and check off the box labeled Can You Progress?



This will remove the red color, showing you can progress through the dungeon. But, if you didn't have an Open Forest setting, you would need the Kokiri Sword and Deku Shield in order to enter the dungeon. That is the entry requirement. Once the entry requirement for any dungeon has been met, by marking off the items on the item tracker, that box will become checked automatically. At any time, you can manually uncheck the box, showing that you can't proceed. There can be many required items throughout dungeons, and at any point, you may run into a point you can no longer progress from. Some common ones are needing the Slingshot or Bow to proceed through Dodongo's Cavern, or getting stopped in the Forest Temple because you don't have the Song of Time. For those who have gone halfway through dungeons, there is a second check, the completion requirement. When all items needed to complete a dungeon have been found, the box will also become checked automatically. You can still alter the color by yourself by checking or unchecking the box at any point up until the completion of the dungeon, however. The completion checker may be a little buggy on the Fire Temple. The Goron Tunic is stated as a requirement for 100%, but technically, it can be completed without as long as you have enough health. The same holds true for the Water Temple with the Zora Tunic. The tunics were selected instead of having a health calculation both to make it easier on the developers, and to accommodate all skill levels and play styles.

The other way users can check their progress at a glance is via the use of icons beneath the dungeon names, showing the number of small keys and gold skulltulas already collected in the dungeon, as well as if the boss key has been found. The same opacity filters as the item tracker are used here to indicate if any have been found yet or not. If the icon is not present, that means there are none of them to be found in the dungeon, as is the case for child dungeons and keys. While I had considered putting the map and compass on this screen too, I decided not to, because there is a setting in the randomizer that completely removes them from the pool, as well as another which allows the player to start with them all.

As seen above, each dungeon has its own screen as well, that can be accessed by tapping on it. This screen allows the user to specify if a dungeon boss has been defeated or if they can progress in the dungeon, while also allowing them to keep track of the map, compass, small keys, boss keys, chests opened, and gold skulltulas found. It also gives the user a place to take notes, so they can specifically mention what they are waiting for. The green and red colors will follow the user onto this screen as well. One important thing to note is the layout for each does not change, so when items don't exist in a particular dungeon, they are marked accordingly so the user knows not to worry about those.



As far as functionality goes, the hardest thing for a player to keep track of would likely be the chests. Each time a key is found, they would need to check off both a chest and a key on the tracker. While I had considered combining their functionality, for those playing with keysanity turned on, this would be very misleading as the keys are not always found in their dungeons. The same goes for when a boss is defeated - technically, this counts as a "chest opened" because you get an item, but so as not to confuse the user, the functionality is not tied together. Keys and gold skulltulas, however, are tracked separately as well as on this screen, and will be marked off in both places when marked off by the user on one.

Other Trackers

When I was first working on this tracker, I was originally just going to list out all the trackers on the bottom navigation bar. But the more I looked at the options on the randomizer, I realized that even I, as the user, cannot be the only user I worry about. With so many options, I knew I was going to need more than five sections, which would mean scrolling sideways. Since four is more comfortable anyway, and matched better to my theme (since I had gone with four across on the items), I decided to group everything that wasn't an item or a dungeon under "Other". With more improvements and options being added to the randomizer all the time, this would help cut down on future design changes and development work as well.



The design of the overworld tracker is anything but exciting, in all honesty. It's a standard checklist separated into 13 overworld areas that goes over 114 locations to get items from that aren't in dungeons. In its default state, none of these items are checked. As you check off items, the sections they fall under will turn green if every item underneath it becomes checked. When all items have been checked, the main "Overworld" item on the previous screen will also turn green.



When you have this many items to list out in one place, the functionality is more important than the design. The typical state of a user when they pull up a list of this nature is frustrated, panicked, and sometimes slightly hopeless. No matter how visual a person is, words are going to make more sense than icons, especially for esoteric locations like the top of the windmill. A picture of a windmill might indicate to look at it, or talk to someone in it...not to go the graveyard, pull back a tombstone, go through an underground maze, and exit back up at the top of the windmill where the item is. A seasoned player would probably get tripped up on the image meaning if they see it, wondering if the designer was referring to the item received from talking to the man in the windmill, or made a mistake thinking there's an item that can be gotten the second time you speak to him. But, by seeing the words "Windmill Hut Ledge", they'll know they need to get up there, and they'll likely remember how.

With so much verbiage, the way the items are separated out and the words used to describe each location are what becomes the most important part. The sections themselves were fairly easy to lay out; starting with every location in the game, and then seeing where they could be combined. Hyrule Castle & Hyrule Castle Town got combined, because the only way to the castle is to go through the town, and there isn't much to do there. Kakariko Village & Kakariko Graveyard got combined because some of their tasks are connected, requiring the player to visit both areas at the same time. Death Mountain Trail & Death Mountain Crater, Zora's Domain & Zora's Fountain, and Gerudo Valley & Gerudo Fortress got combined for similar reasons.

Another thing to note about the combined sections is that they all have the same beginning of their name, which is how the game itself indicates they are connected areas. Because of this, I wanted to draw special attention to Zora's River. It got placed outside of Zora's Domain & Fountain, because despite the name the requirements to reach it are different. You can explore Zora's River as both an adult and a child, without ever needing to enter Zora's Domain, and without even having the required items to enter it. So when searching for items, it doesn't make sense to group them together, because you may be able to reach one but not the other.

The checklist item names, on the other hand, were much more difficult. There's no official standard to go by - everyone has their own names for item locations, and guides provide a description rather than a single line of text. I tried to be as descriptive as possible, while limiting my number of words so as to keep everything on a single line. Generally speaking, I've tried to tie back everything to an in-game name for reference, stating when an item can be found near a place, or by playing a named mini-game. When that fails, I've tried to describe what to do to get the item.

Several of the items on this list are labeled, which is due to a mix of convenience and randomizer settings. Grottos and Fairy Fountains are labeled because they are some of the only named locations in the game. Songs are labeled because depending on your settings, you can only find songs shuffled with other songs, and not as part of the regular mix of items. Scrubs are labeled because there are only two that fall outside the scrubsanity shuffle. Any other individual labeled items, such as the Fairy Ocarina or Zelda's Letter, are labeled because as key items you can opt to not shuffle them at all.

I've seen some naming differences when it comes to the setting allowing gold skulltulas to drop items, and not just tokens. Some people call it skullsanity, while the creators of the tracker refer to it as tokensanity. Either way, there are reasons to hunt down gold skulltulas even without that option turned on - namely, a prize is awarded for every ten tokens collected, until you reach the 50 token prize. Since each of these prizes is mixed into the main item pool, it's a good way to pass time while deciding where next to proceed in the game.



I fought with myself over this for a while, but I decided to break down the sections of the game differently than I did in the overworld tracker. While I understand this would be considered bad design for just about any other product on the market, here, it is actually a good decision. Gold skulltula collection is different from item collection. They're found in different places, they're often collected later on in the game (at least when playing a randomizer), and it makes more sense to group the areas you can get to by a warp song rather than by where you can easily go on foot. I'll go over each of the differences below, and why I made them.

1. Combining Hyrule Field and Hyrule Castle (Town)
   Compared to items to find, there aren't nearly as many gold skulltulas in either of these areas. There are only two in all of Hyrule Field, and while I could have grouped them with Lon Lon Ranch which is in Hyrule Field, it's easier to collect those two as an adult. Because one in Ganon's Castle also must be collected as an adult, this grouping made more sense.
   
   
2. Separating Kakariko Village and Kakariko Graveyard
   When you're collecting items in these locations, you often need to run between them, with the quest to find certain items beginning in one location and ending in the other. That isn't the case with gold skulltulas. Most of the gold skulltulas are collected as a child in the village, with the ones in the graveyard being unattainable until later in the game. By that point, you'll often have a warp song that takes you directly to the graveyard, making them easy to collect on their own. Between that, and the two dungeons that reside in different parts of Kakariko, it made more sense to separate them.
   
   
3. Putting Goron City with Death Mountain Crater, instead of Death Mountain Trail.
   As far as item collection goes, Death Mountain Trail & Crater work together. Most of the items to get are where the two areas meet, creating a Kakariko Village & Graveyard dynamic. But again, gold skulltulas are a bit different. There are a surprising amount that can be found along the trail, and with Dodongo's Cavern being on the trail, that increases the number. Meanwhile, the first way you get to fully explore Death Mountain Crater in the game is by accessing it through Goron City, so between the Fire Temple being in the crater and the small number of gold skulltulas in both areas, they are a better match together.

While the verbiage here is chosen to go in line with what was used in the overworld tracker to limit confusion, I did want to draw attention to how the gold skulltulas found in dungeons are labeled by number only and fall under their overworld location. This was done because of the gold skulltula tracker on the dungeon screen. Since there is no way in that interface to select exactly which gold skulltula was found, there can't be defining descriptions on this tracker either without causing confusion. This way, when a new gold skulltula is marked off in one place, it can be updated on the other without an issue.

Similar to the key tracker, skulltulas from the dungeons should be marked off in order, and if not, they will be changed to be in order when returning to the screen. Similar to the overworld tracker, when all gold skulltulas in a category have been checked off, the section header will turn green, and when all gold skulltulas have been marked off, the main "Gold Skulltula" item on the main screen will turn green.

Turning on the keysanity option mixes all the keys in the game into the normal item pool, allowing them to be found outside the area they belong to. While keys are an item that can be tracked on the dungeon screen, I decided to separate them out into their own tracker as well so people using the keysanity option would have a place to see all the keys they have and how many they have left at the same time. Additionally, there is one area in the game that has keys, Gerudo Fortress, which is not considered to be a dungeon so is not on the dungeon screen.



This tracker is closer in view to the item tracker, which is because keys can be found anywhere and all look the same, so a text description doesn't make sense here. Also, when the average player is looking to see how many keys they have left to find, they'll be able to make use of the visual information much faster than a checklist.

As far as functionality goes, this tracker uses the same tap interface as the item tracker, though each key is separated rather than using an item counter. When a key is selected on this tracker, the number in the dungeon will update. Likewise, when the key count is changed on the dungeon screen, it will update here as well. Keys will be in order by default. If one is selected out of order, a "refresh" of the screen will show an updated view.

Turning on the scrubsanity option makes it so items from the normal item pool can be sold by Business Scrubs. As mentioned before, there are also two Business Scrubs in the game who always sell a "mysterious item", rather than their normal ware. I haven't personally played with scrubsanity turned on, so when I give it a try, I might have some adjustments to make.



This tracker design goes back to the same one we saw in both the overworld tracker and the gold skulltula tracker, allowing users to check off which scrubs they've purchased items from. At one point, I did consider a different view for this tracker, which I ended up using for the shopsanity tracker, but in the end I decided this view was better because of how many grottos and areas there are with a single Business Scrub. If you're trying to do a quick scan of the areas you should go next, it's better to know which grottos are found in the Lost Woods, versus having to look at three different grottos and hoping you remember they're all found in that area.

Though dungeons are mentioned in this tracker, this does not have any communication with the dungeon tracker itself. Scrubs are not overly common in dungeons, and unless you have scrubsanity on it doesn't make any sense to buy items from them or even try and find them, so it seemed like a better experience to exclude them from the dungeon screen logic.

Turning on the shopsanity option mixes some items from the normal item pool into the various shops in the game. It can also change the items that would normally be in shops, putting them in other shops or making them available elsewhere. I haven't personally played with shopsanity turned on, so when I give it a try, I might have some adjustments to make.



The design for shopsanity is wildly different from the other designs, and it's really because shopsanity is like a wildcard in this game. Shop items can all be mixed up amongst themselves. Regular items can be found in shops. And, all of the prices will change and be randomized each gameplay. A lot of players don't take advantage of the shops in Ocarina of Time, as they mostly sell items that can be found for free elsewhere, or sell one-time purchase items like shields and tunics (which can be lost to Like-Likes, but generally speaking, you shouldn't need to buy any of them a second time).

In order to accommodate how shopsanity can change, and how users might need a place to note down an item and its cost, I thought it would be best to provide that ability item by item. While it's unlikely someone would need to note down all eight items sold in each shop, if they want to, they can. They can also write down the cost of the item, and they can check them off just like the other trackers' lists when they have purchased them or can disregard the shop in order to turn the headers green for quick scanning. It is important to note that in vanilla gameplay, the Hyrule Castle Town and Kakariko Village shops are identical, but when shopsanity is on they are considered to be unique shops, hence why they are listed twice. All other shops that can be accessed as both a child and an adult are the same shop in both eras.

Wishlist

Like with all applications, the work is never really done. There are always improvements that can be made, logic that can be added, and new features that can be rolled out based on user feedback. Ideally, I would love to run this design past some veteran runners and see if I can get buy-in for a developer, because using this would be so much nicer than my current Airtable tracker. And if the product shipped as is, I think I would still be happy. But, as I've gone through the design process, and then through it again while writing this case study, I did realize a couple things.

As an Android user for life, I didn't really think about back buttons, and with the bottom navigation I didn't necessarily put much thought into section headers either. But spending a day on an iPhone, I found myself very lost in applications, and the header with the back button was critical as it was the only way to navigate. Right now, this app doesn't have one - though, I believe adding one would certainly be easy enough, and might even benefit some Android users. So this is the top item on my wishlist.

Another item I would love to include is some settings, which might be a good candidate on that header and back button bar as well. While there aren't a lot of settings I think this would need, I could see one day adding the ability to turn the color indicators off or change the color of the indicators to something else, if someone who is color blind would like to take advantage of that feature. Options for making the tracker work for Master Quest could also be controlled via the settings, rather than needing a separate app. Another thing I could see under settings is a beginner's mode, where the total number is displayed on counting trackers, for example to show you've gotten 3/9 treasure chests, rather than just showing you've collected three.

Overall, as I said, I am quite happy with the application as is, and I think at least the settings could wait for a second release once we have data on how many people are actually using the app. However, I would like to keep designing and prototyping out screens for this application, and to keep learning more about Figma as I go, which has proven itself to be quite a powerful tool!