Now the Iron Chif has shown more of his hand than had previously been seen, and has unleashed a new threat:
emergent gameplay.
By focusing on a coordinate-style system with a zone of influence spread out in a grid, he’s essentially created a board game with its own rules. This kind of system lends itself to exploration and seeing what kind of fun effects can happen. With multiple scrolls, we could get overlapping effects, and Venn-diagram-type interactions where we need exactly two scrolls overlapping in one room but three next door.
But we only see one scroll listed here in this code. What kind of effects could it have? If it changes doors, the zone of influence could open up different passageways in the game, lending itself to a limited-time game like Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder or The Lurking Horror 2 where finding the shortest distance is key.
Or, of course, it could be kept a lot simpler, and just affect an open map in a small neighborhood. But if that’s the case, why let it influence nearby rooms, if the player could just carry it around and see what changes? There must be something there. Maybe a room where the player can’t bring in the scroll, but can leave it nearby?
Whatever the case, constructing this system has already laid an interesting groundwork for the game that can flow into worldbuilding or plot or characters that would make the mechanic fun.
It’s an interesting contrast to our Challenger, who has posted lore brainstorming sessions. There is also some interest in mechanics there, but what we saw had a big emphasis on ‘how would it work in a story’. That approach could really help in providing a solid connection between narrative and gameplay. Of course, our Iron Chif has not revealed everything, and it may be that only carefully chosen morsels are being doled out to the public.
Only time will tell which approach is more effective (or, more likely, we will find that both are effective, but we will see to which readers the two effective strategies appeal to the most).