Today was game day (D&D). Always a good source of inspiration.

In other news, moving day is looming. Will have to carve out some time to pre-write a few posts.

Goal ideas for the basin puzzle.

SKELETON KEY

1. Place heavy object on material pedestal
2. Change target object to metal
3. Place target object on improvement pedestal
4. Improve second target object (bone) and change to metal, producing skeleton key
5. Unlock everything

WHAT A WORLD

1. Place heavy object on size pedestal
2. Change target object to large size
3. Place target object on transmutate pedestal
4. Transform second target object to cinder block
5. Place cinder block on snowglobe pedestal
6. Transform third target object to snowglobe
7. Give snowglobe to someone as a gift

EASY WAY OUT

1. Place heavy object on improvement pedestal
2. Sit in basin
3. Win game

Working through the mechanics of the basin system. Some ideas for effects:

• Make object larger (and heavier; useful for activating a 2nd plate)
• Make object ‘better’
• Transform object into a common, everyday object (e.g. a hat or a cinderblock)
• Transform object into a snowglobe containing a tiny alternate dimension populated by living copies of the object
• Cycle the color of the object
• Cycle the material of the object (original, metal, wood, etc)
• Make object sentient

Open questions:

• Should the number of objects transformed at one time be limited in some way? (Leaning yes)
• What triggers the change? (Leaning toward requiring a manual activation of the basin to avoid weird edge cases)
• What’s the end goal, once the player has found a way to activate all the pedestals simultaneously? (Leaning toward I have no idea)

Sketched out a puzzle involving several weighted pedestals and a mysterious water basin. The general idea is that each pedestal will fill the basin with a different liquid when activated, and the properties of the liquids are needed to acquire/create/modify certain objects (e.g. turning them to lead, changing their size, etc) to allow for the activation of multiple pedestals simultaneously.

If it works out, it will make for some interesting possibilities in Act III (when the forest becomes available once again).

Changes & Updates:

• Testing, cleanup and bug fixing for recent changes/additions. Had some accumulated cruft from new rulebook capabilities and the new conversations.
• Got the twins’ intro conversation working.
• Rough draft on output timing for twins conversation. Came out much too fast at first, so I did some research on avg reading speeds and added an ‘auto’ rate to calculate the timers based on the # of words in each sentence. Will require some tuning but gives much better results already, and requires way less work to set up the conversations (I can still override it with specific times when needed).
• Refined handling of conversation topic shortcuts.
• Wired up special topics for the sword.
• Improved on() filter for rules.
• Worked on some concepts for the intro segment for first-time players and resuming players.
• Made wireframe for resume screen. Don’t like it so I need to try some other things.
• Wrote up optional late-game sidequests for Fighter, Wizard, Homemaker, Liar, and Unicorn Hunter. No spoilers yet, but I think they’ll be a lot of fun.

Changes & Updates:

• Wrote up optional late-game sidequests for Fighter, Wizard, Homemaker, Liar, and Unicorn Hunter. No spoilers yet, but I think they’ll be a lot of fun.

Slow day. Messed around with D3.js a bit, considering using it to dynamically graph the world layout (mostly for my own benefit, not as an in-game thing).

Went and saw Deadpool. I have little knowledge and little interest in Deadpool, but the movie was pretty good if you like dick jokes.

First wireframe for resume screen. I don’t care for it much.