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Core Dump - Work In Progress
Episode 68June 4, 1998 : Okay... maybe less / Secrets!Dying in Core Dump - the revenge I quote myself (last time): "I changed something a while ago, and after ludricous amounts of testing decided that it'll remain like that in the final game. When you die, you can restart at the last door you passed through. Quite unlike the promo, where you had to replay the whole lot."Uh.. well no not quite. Now I've decided that this is too easy - you can get past difficult sections with luck - and that's not what I intended. So I thought up something new. A bit like credits. But different. When you begin the game, or arrive at a save-terminal room, you are given five "credits". Now, when you die, you can restart at the last door as many times as you've got credits. So essentially you're given five continues in between two restart points. The "five credits" can vary according to the difficulty setting. Maybe I'll even let the player decide how many he wants. Secret rooms Wait a minute! That's a new kind of door. And also, there are some kind of boxes on the right. They are new too, right? No. The boxes on the right are the new item containers. For the promo I used stylished item containers, like the ones that contained the grenades. When you ran into them, you automatically took the item from it. It didn't really like them, so I changed the code as well as the graphic. I turned them into these boxes, and when you run into them, nothing happens. You have to press "up", like the doors, to open the box. Then you'll receive whatever's inside. It plays better this way, I think. Hang on. How can I reach these secret rooms? If I told you they wouldn't be secret anymore, now would they? But you'll know when you reach something secret, trust me. I've got a lot of zones at the moment, and Aleph is turning out to be quite big! The next week I'll be adding the secret cloud zone. (Pictures of the secret cloud level in an older Work In Progress entry.) Dungeon Master Troubles The other week I received this mail (I mentioned it before). Someone really liked the promo, and said "You would make a great DM!". DM stands for dungeon master, that much I knew. But I didn't know what it meant exactly. Maybe it's something like "You would make a great donkey if you could swim!", who knows? Or maybe it meant "You would make a great president of Indonesia!" I might just be insulted without even knowing it. So, as you can never be sure, I asked some friends. First I asked Noud (Cytron for MSX freaks). "Noud, what's a dungeon master? I was called a DM, and now I want to know if that's an insult." Noud: "No, that's actually a compliment. A dungeon master has to make up stories as the game progresses, so he has to improvise a lot. It is very difficult." Okay, so Noud said it was a compliment. Good :) But, just to be sure, I asked Pat (Patrick Smeets) as well. On the phone. Cas: "Pat, someone said I would make a great dungeon master. Is that a good thing?" Pat: "Yes, it is." Cas: "What does a dungeon master do exactly?" Pat: "Erm.. let me explain. Let's say we're playing a table RPG, so
we're all elves and wizards and trolls and stuff." I now know what a dungeon master is.
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Now this should prove an interesting picture. It's one of the
first secret rooms you can reach. It shows the new player sprite
(uh oh... yes I changed it again) in the doorway.