Quoll Work Thread, 2024-10-15 #2 - 2024-10-15 14:58
A bit of a longer work session to start out with, but I wanted to get to a point where I had most of the flavor text in for the initial test of the scaffolding and could thus check in code since I had a lot in the air. But I’m going to have to make slight jaunt to handle some basic signalling around taffification.
WARNING: Might have a few light world spoilers for this part that I talk about.
See, that’s why I said “most” of the flavor text, because as I was about to pull in some of the stuff I had written for Taffany talking about herself, I realized that there were some remarks from Ada about how she had been conducting conversations. See, my intention is that present Ada can’t actually do things in the past, merely sort of force past Ada to do them. I haven’t really decided from a writing perspective if this is something forced by the laws of physics or just a choice that mages make to avoid issues, but either way, Ada remarks that for conversations with Glitch and the Annoying Skunktaur puppet, her present-day version has been having them, which makes sense for those characters.
But Taffany is supposed to represent a “real” past person who has no knowledge of the present, so it doesn’t make sense for present Ada to talk to her. (Plus, with how Taffany talks, present Ada can’t actually understand her, but past Ada can.)
Plus, there’s this whole thing with Ada getting taffificated by talking to Taffany that I need to make sure gets communicated when the Playerr skips the tutorial. I figure that Ada is smart enough to figure it out eventually, so I’m also going to have a subject she can know and forget as the timeline resets. This means I may need to slightly write a variation of the tutorial here in case a Playerr first asks for the exercise, goes talks to Taffany, gets Ada taffificated, is like “what the heck” and decides to take the tutorial then.
Pretty tricky to juggle all this, eh? Oh well, that’s what I signed up for, I guess.