Thanks! It is set in our own future.
I’m working on the very endgame now and I’m having a lot of self-doubt. Fortunately, from my polls earlier and my own experience, the endgame will have very little effect on the overall impression of the game unless I do something extraordinarily bad.
Currently, my plan in the ‘main’ ending is to reuse puzzles from each of the earlier areas, but now unified with one theme. At best, that should hopefully give it a feeling of ‘everything you learned has brought you to this moment’ and should also make the endgame a lot easier while still helping the player feel smart (since they learned how to do this stuff). At worst it could feel monotonous or repetitive.
Here are some examples I’ve added so far (mentioning the original puzzle and the new one). The setting is a nuclear reactor.
Examples:
In an earlier cabin level, you repair some stairs by removing a rotten support beam, taking a log, running it through a saw mill, waxing it, and popping it back in. In the endgame, you have a coolant pipe that is leaking due to a bent support. You have to take it out, grab some sheet metal, and use a metal brake to manufacture a new support.
In an earlier wax museum level, you learn how to pan for gold and other things, and you use it to pan through a bowl of mud to get a diamond ring. In the finale, their is a faulty logic circuit in a pile of burnt rubble. You have to pick up a metal bowl and ‘pan for the circuit’ using the water.
And so on, with basically one puzzle from each area.
While writing it, I do keep worrying it will be repetitive, by while playing it I kind of like it. For the average player it will have been many hours since they had to do those things, and most people seem to like learning systems, and all the puzzles are just slightly different by necessity to fit into the newer setting.
The other big thing in this first ending is that there are two versions with two different protagonists. So far I don’t have much to distinguish them besides different grammar (2nd person vs 3rd), and I’m wondering if its important to add a lot of little differences or not. I guess time and testers will tell!
Edit: I had a fun bit of code:
if rusty-robot is rob-rec: add the rusty-robot robot-lefting to the robot-list of rusty-robot;