5.3.- The signs
This location shows you two possibilities for moving, to the Lady, or to Death; that does not seem a very difficult decision. But we’re human, and once we’ve put our exploration instincts to work, it’s not that easy for a simple death warning to stop us. Good Boy Scouts players will probably go to “the death” location and try to interact with it until they decide they have died enough.
At this point I thought that perhaps the starting location could be the one with signs, so the player will start with the most elemental “puzzle” of moving, but I thought that the starting image of the player and the tree was very powerful, so I decided to start there.
During the development time I had an idea for this location that would give some interaction with sense, but I didn’t have time to implement that. That was change or “turn signs” to make them point to the other side. This would change the world and the navigation, so the castle will be to the right and the dead to the left. It could also be an optional easy way to arrive at the castle without the need of jumping the pit, making the castle accessible just walking right. I finally decided not to implement this last one, as it would break the idea of the “two worlds”, the childish and the adult one. I decided that if I had time, I would allow the signs to turn as a way to make a silly joke to change the world’s directions right to left. Too much time required for just a stupid joke that I had no time to complete.