TBOE Tuesday Devlog

Good eighteenth everyone, today I have for you one progress report concerning the next archetype/ending, and some rumination on the direction I expect development to go long term.

Cognitor stuff

The visual design of this archetype is fairly described as 'latex drone with some mechanical aspects', and the fate of all successful cognitors is to be sealed away in tubes in the floor, joining a sort of bank of people constantly surveilling and influencing the facility that they are no longer free to wander, or to leave.

The job of the maids is to clean, and the job of the ponies is to move things to where they need to be. The job of the cognitor is to make decisions in favour of the cult where the leaders do not have the attention to do so. This is a bit more abstract and so takes a while to design a minigame around. What are these decisions? What if you make a bad decision? How often do they need to be made? Here's the skeleton of how I would like this to work: there are a few situations where you're punished for acting unmannerly, e.g. with the compliance cuffs. as the cognitor, you would be the one remotely implementing these punishments upon others. At the moment I am considering what level of simulation and visuals to present the other character's position with. I am liking the idea of this display with the radar blips for the other character and enemies around them.

Long term schemes

Some months ago I caused a poll to appear on this page asking whether development on TBOE should wrap up quickly, continue ad infinitum, or eventually reach a conclusive end. Generally an eventual conclusive end was most favourable, and I too am in favour of that approach. The two ways to do that are 1: to add some number of endings, items, enemies, etc to the point that the game is of a satisfactory size and then declare it ended; or 2: to work up to a greater 'final' ending, one that would probably involve Eliza confronting the leader(s) of the Cult of Challenge, or dismantling it in some other way, or perhaps joining said leadership team.

A consequence of attempting to release an upd8 every week is that development on larger single features rather falls by the wayside in favour of things that work nicely right now. The main example of this is the secret editor through which custom items can be made, which is secret because it's not yet very good. At some point reasonably soon, I intend to suspend the attempted weekly releases for a while in order to work on things like that, and on the everpresent chore of refactoring the codebase so things can be added and modified easier in the future.

Endings are a strange thing in this kind of game. Moving toward them is simultaneously something that the player wants, and that Eliza doesn't want. A reward and penalty at once. As a result, the existing ones are this weird mix of prize for going above and beyond; and punishment for doing badly in the game. That's going to have to change at some point but I'm not sure how. Possibly by making the pony/maid items purely rewards? Relatedly, the good point has also been raised that some folks are put off by these two archetypes and would rather not be forced to interact with them. Fair enough, I've been there. So I will probably eventually change the endings to opt-in systems so the disinterested can completely ignore them.

Alright that's all for this week, I will see the lot of you on tuesday.