Hmm, these really help with visualizing the possibilities that are available in this setting. I think I like the logic components a lot, since the theme of this section is machinery and calibration and drawing power. Having the ability to create logical components and circuitry type things could be interesting without breaking the game in other places.
2 Likes
Interesting… I just had an idea. So, say the ship’s light portal is connected to some engine room (let’s say it has a furnace one), or some other large important furnace. But, there’s a part where you have to get through the fire to get to another side. (Or maybe this happens in the endgame, where you could be trying to fix the engine.) Then the portal is broken! So you have to find another light source that is short-lived.
Actually, it makes more sense in the endgame, where you might be fixing the engine.
EDIT: Or, you have to destroy something by opening the light barrier (protecting you from the portal’s heat) on the tool and throw something into the furnace.
2 Likes
Another thing: since there is a portal that can pick a lock by moving a short distance through a solid, maybe there’s another power that can’t go through solids, but instead can go further. Like, to the bottom of an acid fountain, for example.
2 Likes
I like the endgame idea actually, and I might use that!
Some of these ideas would be cool but could get me in trouble. Like, let’s say that I let players reach through liquids. There’s a puzzle in the garden dimension about fishing up a rusty canister from the bottom of the lake; there’s a puzzle in the animal dimension about unclogging a swamp; there’s a pond in the haunted house dimension that your doppleganger lives in; there’s an unholy pit feeder the size of a city underneath the lake in the horror dimension; so I’d have to check to see how the liquid interactions of the tool affect those.
If I had made the tool first then I could have designed puzzles around it in each dimension, but 1) I had trouble coming up with tool powers, and 2) testers seemed to find it frustrating to have to go to other dimensions when trying to finish one.
So I definitely could add powers that could work in other areas like fire, freezing things, teleporting away objects, etc. but the more powerful it is the more game it rewrites. What I’d like to do is things that appear very powerful but are sandboxed in a way that it doesn’t affect the rest of the game. For instance: time travel to the future. Super powerful, but since it’s in the future it doesn’t affect the past at all. So I can mess around with it all I want and not have to change the other puzzles. Or allowing the player to shrink down to the molecular realm: again very powerful and cool, but it’s so small the player can’t affect anything in the larger world. A third option is informational effects, like an animal-translater that lets you talk to all the animals in the game. It’d be annoying to program in, but it could work.
But things that would be a nightmare to program would be like ‘push a button in one room and then push a button in another and now there is a permanent portal connecting them’. Because now players can bypass important scenes that trigger when leaving areas, or take items out of restricted areas. Another nightmare example would be ‘flamethrower’. I’d have to make rules for the forest area and cabin burning down, damaging npcs, etc. Or ‘decrease the mass of an object’. What happens if they do this to part of the ship? Does it break? To a tree trunk?
That’s why ‘flashlight’ and ‘lockpick’ have been working well so far. They both feel cool (to me at least) because you see this area you can’t access and you’re like ‘huh, what’s over there or in here’ and suddenly you get in. And it doesn’t require the nightmare code because you just simply don’t put locked rooms or darkness in the rest of the game.
Fortunately, the combat dimension and horror dimension require you to drop all items before entering so the tool won’t matter there, and most of the murder mystery dimension is flashbacks so I don’t need to program that.
I like your idea of having the main functionality of the tool breaking and needing to find a replacement, that sounds cool!
2 Likes
All of those appear to have long distances to reach the other size: I imagined instead of a miniscule hole that reaches about 10 cm in distance through a solid, maybe something just large enough to put your hand through that reaches maximum of 1 meter. So… make the portal by putting the tool in the water and the tool wouldn’t reach far enough to affect any of those (response when putting your hand in: “You reach in and feel water. Unfortunately, the portal seems to be too small to fit more than a hand in.”).
Though I might just be finding excuses!
Another idea: this means making this dimension unreachable until the murder mystery dimension is complete (ie. When the chip is returned, maybe an off-limits door is opened: “it was malfunctioning” - which leads to the power area - ) but one power could be one of
- telepathically communicating with others
- {reaching into the mind of/looking at the thoughts of} other humans
I say only after the murder mystery dimension is done, to avoid confusion, but maybe not if it’s telepathy? I also mention “humans” in the reading minds one since allowing animals might surpass the wolf conversation in the zoo area - since that is a scene. And, of course, I don’t need to mention anything about humans in the telepathy choice since as far as we know animals can’t speak a human language fluently and the robots probably don’t have a brain - though they might.
[Relation for the telepathy/mind-reading power - a “portal into the mind”!]
2 Likes
Progress has been slow on the new dimension. I’m doing single-room, time based stuff with limited options to mimic limited parser, but even doing the first puzzle was very complex and required a lot of objects.
My main job has started up again and so I have way less time and energy than before. Fortunately, IFComp is also coming, so that’ll be a good time to take a break from writing and do more playing!
I’m still working on power ideas, although the suggestions above have significantly helped.
6 Likes
Concur and agree on the break from writing in judging IFComp works 
(I also have a small backlog from 2018-22 IFComps, so I can also do a little “warm-up” in late september…)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
4 Likes
Thanks for the encouragement! I think we’ll get a good crop of games this year!
(Some general ramblings directed at everyone)
I started work on the second ‘tool upgrade’ scene. I was worried because it was an informational one, and I wasn’t sure how to make that into a puzzle.
Then I realized…does it have to be puzzle?
Right now this game is just pure puzzle. I don’t think there’s any non-puzzle exposition; all storytelling is environmental.
So, what if I used this informational upgrade to tell a non-puzzle story? The game has all of these ‘rifts’ connecting areas to each other, and many of my testers have expressed interest in understanding the ‘big picture’. So I’m thinking of using this ‘information upgrade’ to explain the nature of the rifts, what the different colors mean, etc. It won’t reveal all the big secrets of the game, but it will be a big reward since this can only be accessed if the player has already visited parts of 3 different dimensions.
8 Likes
As predicted, progress has been pretty slow since real job came back.
That scene I mentioned last time was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do this entire time. Probably colored by increased stress from work, etc. but I felt like none of my ideas were working. I had no clue what to put it, or how to program it. I could only think of one idea, but I didn’t know how to program it and thought that players would almost certainly hate it. It was a scheduled scene where specific things happen every turn, and as I don’t do those often it was a real pain to code. I worried for the first time that people would just hate the whole game, since I’m close to being done and there’s not much more opportunity to ‘fix’ things if they’re bad.
After spending hours on it, I finally got it done, and…it’s not really that bad? And it ended up generating a lot more lore for my game, which I’m going back to incorporate in other areas. I’ve ended up adding a whole catalog of rifts in my game, besides the red and green from before. There are now blue ones as well as black ones that are essentially gaps in space where there’s nothing, while the blue ones teleport people in space instead of time, so I might use them to give people a tour of all the dimensions from a new perspective.
I had to remind myself too that people will almost certainly dislike many parts of the game, but I didn’t make this game to win competitions or be popular; it’s just designed to help with the lack of recent big games that are ‘completable’ (more like Anchorhead than Mulldoon legacy).
Overall, I think this section will probably have the worst gameplay but some of the more interesting content. It’s extremely linear in one sense, because you have to upgrade your device with one power at a time and in order, but non-linear because you can collect the items for upgrade from all around the world.
8 Likes
Sorry for posting again in one day, but I could use some advice before I get too deep into this.
This whole dimension is about:
- Getting a cool tool and upgrading it,
- Learning more about the world as a whole, and
- Interacting with all the other dimensions.
This world has 8 puzzles, one after another, with each one corresponding to an upgrade. Here is the general outline of the puzzles so far:
1-Upgrade the tool to emit light. You have to ‘calibrate’ it by having the machine emit some radiation followed by you identifying where it lies on the electromagnetic spectrum using a little dial (so you can tell it’s infrared because it’s hot, radio because there’s a retractable antenna, etc.)
2-Upgrade the tool to give you information on rifts (when they were created, what type they are, etc.). This is mostly a ‘slideshow’ of different kinds of rifts, but it pauses at different points to calibrate the measurements by you indicating physical distance and temporal distance. It uses a dial again.
So both are kind of ‘quizzes’. I have been working on the third upgrade, which lets you tell what items have been ‘temporally displaced’. These are items that you have to carry from one dimension to another to solve them. Some testers have been kind of annoyed at having to go ‘out’ of a dimension to grab something, so this setting lets you identify exactly what items need to go ‘somewhere else’ and where they need to go.
I want to use this time to drop some more lore/info about the world, and I need a way for players to identify which ‘dimension’ is which. It’s not like they have names in game…
So my original thought was to use another ‘training’ quiz where I had a bunch of symbols (like a haunted house, a train, etc.) and showed images of each dimension, and the players had to correctly identify which image belonged to which dimension.
But that’s exactly like the first two puzzles!
So, what if this one was different? I was thinking of just displaying all nine dimensions and having the player name each of them whatever name they want, so that for the rest of the game it uses the player-given name. So if they see a picture of a zoo and call it STUPID DIMENSION, then using the tool will say ‘such and such item belongs to the STUPID DIMENSION’.
This would require naming 9 things in a row using special command prompts, with a yes/no confirmation on each since there’s no UNDO when the command prompt is changed in this way. So 18 text entries. Would that get boring? I could also not change command prompts, and have the player use commands like NAME DIMENSION ________. Or I could drop the whole naming thing and do a quiz like earlier.
I’m leaning towards the naming thing, because my gut tells me it will be pretty cool at this stage (at least halfway through the game) when the player will have already seen a lot of random stuff, and maybe also this will hint at the cool areas they haven’t seen yet. So basically I’m looking for opinions of the form ‘This would bother me’, if they exist.
Edit:
Example:
The pedestal now displays a holographic image of a zoo consisting of many biomes. Goats climb on foothills, mice cower in the desert, deer roam the forest, and a dormant volcano smolders in the background. Shimmering walls separate each area, and fragments of some kind of machinery or object are scattered everywhere.
What will you name the seventh location? >
6 Likes
Yeah, as you were describing the setup, my brain was already going “oh, let the player name the dimensions!” so I think that’s a good approach. Personally I’d lean more towards the NAME DIMENSION SOMETHING approach, since that gives the player a little more flexibility. Like, I’d probably immediately have an idea for the haunted house dimension, but maybe I wouldn’t have one for the Vegas-in-Space one, so if I had to remember my idea while brainstorming through half a dozen other dimensions, that could get annoying. NAME DIMENSION SOMETHING is maybe a lot of letters to type, but you could probably figure out a shortcut (like maybe the player just types NAME, then you get a menu with all the dimensions, so you just type the appropriate letter, then you get the prompt?)
3 Likes
Hmm, that’s a fair point, and it would help with the saving/undoing problem. It’s a bit more work but this will probably be an important moment in the playthrough so I’d rather get it right!
Edit: Your idea helps me sneak in a tenth ‘REDACTED’ (in-game), unnameable dimension into this which wouldn’t have fit well otherwise.
3 Likes
I envision it more like the coffee cup in Cragne Manor:
Suddenly, the air around you changes. You notice a pattern in the noise around you, a sort of dark whispering—of dark secrets and ancient magic. It seems the reason for the displacement may be uncovered in another place: and it feels more sinister.
3 Likes
It couldn’t hurt to have two different modes! One for identifying where items should go, and nano therefore identifying if something’s missing.
I have a question for people who have beta tested or read along, and it’s kind of a weird question. I’m working on the lore reveals now. All along I’ve had a picture of exactly what the overarching story is that connects all of this together, and (aside from a move from Viking to welsh) it’s pretty much stayed the same. But I masked the story with the dimensions so that many theories could be possible.
Now, maybe no one made any theories, and that’s just fine. But if you did or have, what theories have you had about the overall story? What hypotheses have you had about the nature of the dimensions and rifts, their relation to each other, or the reasons behind everything happening, or what the finale will be?
My main focus on answers to this would be to make sure to clarify what exactly the answers are to most things over the course of the last two dimensions. I’ve already answered several in this current dimension, but because of my limited perspective I’m not even sure of what questions people might have or misconceptions.
2 Likes
I know what the finale is, so I’m not very helpful, but I have a theory behind how all these dimensions link (in a more complex way than just everything being randomly scattered).
*** SPOILERS FOR ALL THE AREAS BELOW ***
Now, I’m not exactly sure about the murder mystery dimension, since at the end the people say “Good game!” and there I got confused.
For the haunted house dimension, I believe that the reason for the portal has to do with Gareth’s missing action figure troubling him in his dreams and the dreams causing a rift (though thinking back on that, it would only make sense if time had passed since the toy was stolen). Except for the mirror version of yourself, which makes me feel like it’s your own dream, I stick with Gareth’s thing (as long as it’s changed so that the monkey arrives after the portal opens).
The robot dimension has me guessing something to do with a fairground Emerys went to as a child. I might be forgetting something that happened in the fairground that changes that.
The horror one might be Emerys’s nightmares, or related to the school that it takes place in. Maybe the child, I don’t know.
The garden is likely the heart of the ship, over time, grew a life of its own (the cabin), and this rift was always there. It just needed finding. (I still stick to that idea!)
The zoo I have no idea how it is a relatable rift.
Finally:
What’s this robot monkey all about?
2 Likes
Thanks Max! That’s helpful.
In addition to adding some clarification to some of the above, I’ll also add some monkey lore; there are some good spots in this current dimension to throw some in.
Question for people in general: is a timed Hamiltonian path puzzle annoying? As part of a current area (to get people used to portals) I’m thinking of having a puzzle with six rooms where you have to flip a switch in each room one right after another; if you end up in the same room twice you won’t have enough time to flip all the switches before the first one turns off again. So you have to find a path that doesn’t loop back on itself.
It’s essentially a maze, which I don’t usually like to play and don’t generally include in my games. I expect the player would slowly draw it out, think of a solution, and then execute it. In the meantime, each room would be very different and be essentially a brief world tour of everything in the game via portals. So hopefully it should be something players want to experience. I could imagine myself enjoying this puzzle in someone else’s game.
The first alternative would be a silly puzzle where you have to calibrate a portal to function for your size, and while you’re working on it you shrink down or get big. This would be a lot of fun, but would have groundshaking implications for in-game lore that would be really hard to get around (if you have miniaturization tech, why isn’t it being used everywhere?)
The other alternative is a bog-standard calibration puzzle where you adjust a portal’s size and angle to fit you well. Or maybe something with opening up a portal and reaching your hand through and grabbing your own back or something, but that would be a loot cooler and clearer in a visual game; I’ve noticed relative positioning is difficult to describe well in a text game.
Edit: I’ve already started implementing the hamiltonian idea, but I can rip it out if it sparks severe protest.
1 Like
If it’s a Hamiltonian path, you need some sort of advance warning of what you’re getting in to and a map, otherwise you’ve got no way of planning your moves. If you don’t have a map and you need to map it by exploring, then you will end up with lots of dead ends and need a way to reset. Your timing is a way of doing this, but it could get very annoying very quickly.
Having designed a puzzle with a Hamiltonian path myself (in an unpublished game, so don’t go looking for it), I recognise the difficulty of hinting this or getting into an unwinnable situation.
3 Likes
You’re talking about putting an NP-hard problem in an IF work?!
In seriousness I like those puzzles as long as the graph is small. When it hits “write a program to brute-force the Hamiltonian path” size (Acheton, famously) that may be fun but also tends to ruin players’ flow and sense of pacing.
3 Likes
Thanks for both of your responses! I think I’ll keep it in and tweak it after player responses, possibly shortening it or changing the paths.
For anyone interested, this is the current map:
Map
2 Likes
Oh yeah that looks perfectly fine to me. The player just needs to draw a map.
Is this the intended solution?
Click to reveal
If so, that’s not bad at all. I’d still recommend having an accessibility option to bypass it, because people with screen readers could find the mapping part far harder, but I don’t think many players will complain.
3 Likes