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...thankyou to both wormwood and to wadjet eye games.

there were bits where i got a little stuck, because some of the crispin "hints" weren't /quite/ as clear as they could have been, but overall, it was a wonderful, wonderful experience and i played it slowly across a week and a half to maximize my pleasure.

a very pleasant little treat and i'm glad i finally picked it up.
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lostwolfe: ...thankyou to both wormwood and to wadjet eye games.

there were bits where i got a little stuck, because some of the crispin "hints" weren't /quite/ as clear as they could have been, but overall, it was a wonderful, wonderful experience and i played it slowly across a week and a half to maximize my pleasure.

a very pleasant little treat and i'm glad i finally picked it up.
Thanks so much! I'm glad you enjoyed it, and we really appreciate your encouragement. The Crispin hint system definitely had more than a few flaws. I'm not sure I'd ever undertake such a feature again, at least not without considerably better planning. :D
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lostwolfe: ...thankyou to both wormwood and to wadjet eye games.

there were bits where i got a little stuck, because some of the crispin "hints" weren't /quite/ as clear as they could have been, but overall, it was a wonderful, wonderful experience and i played it slowly across a week and a half to maximize my pleasure.

a very pleasant little treat and i'm glad i finally picked it up.
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WormwoodStudios: Thanks so much! I'm glad you enjoyed it, and we really appreciate your encouragement. The Crispin hint system definitely had more than a few flaws. I'm not sure I'd ever undertake such a feature again, at least not without considerably better planning. :D
i loved crispin as a character, [he was way better than cedric, the owl from king's quest five, who was also "sort of a hint keeper."] and i loved the idea of him actually giving you hints. but a lot of what he says is too vague. or sometimes open to interpretation.

for example, the terminal haiku's clue is: "it can be read in two ways." it can? how do you mean? i scratched my head on that one for a /long/ time before i realized that the solution to that puzzle had /nothing/ to do with reading it two ways and everything to do with "decoding the text."

if you do a hint system like this again, do it as a kind of tongue-in-cheek thing /exactly/ like crispin, but make it less vague. one idea would be - very early on in the adventure - for the characters to stumble across a "hint book" like the sierra ones you used to be able to buy. you can make all kinds of funny meta jokes with that, but you can set it up so that it gives absolute and direct hints through a breadcrumb trail:

ie:
level one: "there's this cow standing in the meadow and the farmer says it's hungry, what should i do?"
answer: "well, what do cows normally eat?"

level two: "so, i think i found some hay, and i've put it in front of the cow, but he refuses to eat it, what gives?
answer: remember that knife you got from the kitchen? maybe you should cut the bale's drawstring so that the hay can scatter all around and about.

i think you can see what i'm driving at. these are concise answers to actual problems delivered in a way that the game player "asks" for the hints.

also: having thought about it more, i think i want to mirror what some of the reviews have said: i loved the game world and i loved the mythos, but i think you could have done /far/ more with it.

SPOILER ALERT FOR PEOPLE STILL PLAYING THE GAME. DO NOT READ THIS PART.

i /really/ wanted to go and visit the church and it turned out i couldn't. i think it would have been interesting for both the game player and horatio to discover this particular building and to see what was going on with man.

[but to be fair, lots of games like this purposefully make that vague.]

SPOILER ENDS HERE.

if you guys at wormwood continue to make slow, thinky, neat games like this, consider me a fan.
Thanks for the feedback!

I think you and I both have in mind the same general kind of hint system -- built something like the old UHS tiered hint systems. The way Crispin was SUPPOSED to work was:

(1) Every action that constituted progress (getting a new item, finding a new room, getting a new line of dialogue with an NPC, successfully using an item on a hotspot, etc., etc.) would give you a "point" on a hidden counter.

(2) If a certain amount of time (I think five minutes?) passed without the player scoring a "point," Crispin would give a weak hint. The available hints would be determined according to a long table of hints, each one having a "turn on" and a "turn off"; so once you saw a hungry cow, it would turn on the "what does a cow eat?" hint and once you had fed it, it would turn off that hint (whether you saw it or not). The hint system would prefer giving you NEW hints that you hadn't seen before.

(3) If you clicked Crispin, he would check the available hints and give you a new hint. If a weak hint was available, he would give you a weak one. But if all the player had already seen all the weak hints, he would give a strong hint. ("Feed him some grass, for goodness sake!")

As it turned out, there were several problems. On a mechanical level, there were glitches with:

- The table's on/off switches.
- The point counter and the associated timer.

We mostly fixed the latter, but I think there are still some problems with the former.

The bigger problem was that five minutes, or whatever limit we had set, turned out to be WAY too long. Once a player was stuck for, like, a minute, he would want a hint. So players always spammed Crispin asking for hints, and then they were frustrated to get weak, elusive hints (which were meant to just nudge you in the right direction, rather than solving it). But then sometimes they'd be frustrated and surprised that, suddenly, Crispin solved a puzzle for them because they had been accustomed to clicking on him and getting weak hints.

In other words, the way it was supposed to work was that players would mostly solve puzzles on their own, with Crispin occasionally nudging them so they didn't get stuck for long, and if they were really, really stuck, they could click Crispin and get a strong hint. But that wasn't how it worked.

One of the challenges of writing the hints was having them "in character." You're right that an in-game hint book would be easier; if I went that route, it wouldn't be a physical object in game. It would expressly be a meta-game item (like, from the options menu or something) the way it is in interactive fiction games. I wouldn't want an in-game object that broke the fourth wall like that.

I'll add more about lore later!
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WormwoodStudios: I think you and I both have in mind the same general kind of hint system -- built something like the old UHS tiered hint systems. The way Crispin was SUPPOSED to work was:
i was, indeed, thinking of something like uhs. sierra used to sell actual, physical books and those used to sort of be collectibles along side the games [because no one really makes that kind of thing anymore]
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WormwoodStudios: - The table's on/off switches.
- The point counter and the associated timer.
yeah. since you're using ags, that'd be problematic, at best.

this is the kind of thing that might have been better served with a database behind it, just doing little queries.
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WormwoodStudios: One of the challenges of writing the hints was having them "in character." You're right that an in-game hint book would be easier; if I went that route, it wouldn't be a physical object in game. It would expressly be a meta-game item (like, from the options menu or something) the way it is in interactive fiction games. I wouldn't want an in-game object that broke the fourth wall like that.
i /loved/ crispin's tone. a couple of reviews i read suggested that it was "jarring" that horatio would build a sidekick that had that much snark, but i like to think that - in this particular universe, while someone like horatio could "code up" and "build" something like a crispin, the "animated spark" that actually ends up giving the robots "life" [because, let's face it, most "current" robots, left to their own devices wouldn't question things like man and the like - so there has to be "something going on behind the scenes"] would make crispin's actual personality be something out of horatio's control.

i like your idea of a points system and a metagame hints option, but to my mind, all that stuff should be transparent. [how you gain and lose points] - being at a "developer's mercy" and not knowing how or where to score the "hint points" just makes it an exercise in frustration for the player.
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WormwoodStudios: I'll add more about lore later!
i'd be curious to hear more about that and i think other people would be too.

[edited, because i'm silly and saw the soundtrack in the goodies section of the game ;) i originally asked if that was something we could get.]
Post edited July 15, 2014 by lostwolfe
i like your idea of a points system and a metagame hints option, but to my mind, all that stuff should be transparent.
Oh, by "metagame" I meant -- I guess "exogame" -- that the hint system wouldn't be integrated into the lore of the game itself, as Crispin's system was (or, say, a crystal ball or fortune-teller), but instead would be something "external" like a hint menu. The reason why is that making the hints work as something that someone/something in-game can convey to you is a big part of why they were sometimes cryptic or indirect. If it's too "on the nose" then it makes it clear that it's not *Crispin* talking to you, but The Hint System. As long as The Hint System isn't an in-game entity, that's not a problem, though.
being at a "developer's mercy" and not knowing how or where to score the "hint points" just makes it an exercise in frustration for the player.
I actually disagree. If the hint system had worked as intended, the point was simply that "hint points" would be used to determine if the player was actually stuck, and if he was, they would give a hint. You could always click on Crispin to get a hint if you needed one.

The problem with a "hint menu" system that isn't tied to a tracker of the player's progress is that it is replete with spoilers. Even if the high-level options are general "Dunes" vs. "Metropol" or whatever, you're still spoiling.

LORE

As for the lore stuff, I'll start by cross-posting something I wrote on the Steam forums:
It's more that I just am not particularly interested in continuing Horatio's story, and while I'm *somewhat* more interested in the setting, even that doesn't hold huge appeal for me. Primordia was the best story I could tell in the setting; Fallen was the second-best story. The graphic novel idea -- about a robot built by Horatio v.1 ("First Horusbuilt") who sets out to complete the destruction of Metropol, forcing MetroMind to deploy an Autonomous robot to try to stop First -- is the third-best story I can come up with, and it's not enough to reasonably sustain a game. If I were going to make a "sequel" game, it would probably be about Autonomous 8 trying to find Horatio and maybe hinting in bits and pieces what happened to Horatio and the rest of the Horus crew after Primordia.

But therein is the exact reason it holds so little appeal to me: what was most fun about building Primordia, for me (aside from the particular word-play and word-crafting involved in the specific lines of dialogue), was building the world anew and, to some degree, sharing in its mysteries. Any sequel would inevitably be about answering those mysteries. Where *are* they going to go in the UNNIIC? What happened to Civitas and the Choir? What was the War of the Four Cities about? Will the moon-bound humans succeed in repopulating the world? Etc.

Not only do I think such a narrative would be inherently less interesting for the player, it would be much less interesting for me. For me, all those questions aren't really questions: they're "Ideal Forms." The War of the Four Cities, fought to the last death for unknown reasons between four polities whose names are all synonymous, was never meant to have any content to it; it's an Ideal Form of war for no good reason, to no good end. Civitas and the Choir were just a mechanism for establishing the alienness of Gimbal and highlighting that robots-as-humans wasn't the only path that robot-kind could take. Since Gimbal seems non-violent (albeit litigious) and basically nice, the Choir is a kind of best-case-scenario for the "union" that MetroMind is pushing. And as for "Wherever we want, Crispin" -- it's not that there's meant to be someplace else *particular* worth flying to in the UNNIIC: it's the fantasy of "slipping the surly bonds of earth" and finding freedom in some other, better home. Showing that Clarity died fending off a horde of robo-scavengers in a gulch while Horatio herded the other passengers to safety,, showing that they safely made it to a robo-utopia where they could live in peace and freedom and plenty, or really showing *anything* about where they went would change it from an Ideal Form into a particular thing.

It's not that I think Primordia's story is some brilliant piece of Platonic philosophy or the next Pilgrim's Progress. It's just that I never crafted it as a literal travelogue in a fully-realized science fictional setting. But any sequel would have to start from that premise. And, in my experience, such an approach almost always leads not just to a worse sequel, but to a sequel that reaches back in time and hurts the original work, the way the efforts to answer the mysteries of Star Wars endlessly degraded the movie until, rather than a beautiful rendering of the essence of fairy tales and fantasy, it wound up just being a sci-fi story about mitochondria and politics as usual and sexually repressed super-soldiers.

What I would much rather do -- and what we were trying to do (unfortunately, as I'll explain in a later post, various things have forced this project to go on hold) -- is build a *new* setting, one big and "real" enough to sustain multiple stories if need be.
That said, I think the decision to put the Cathedral "off camera" was probably the wrong one. It's probably my single largest regret about the game (other than not fighting harder to make sure that the Clarity vs. Scraper fight was more polished). In hindsight, rather than a vertical emergency elevator out of the Council Tower, there should have been an emergency lateral cable car (something Vic had wanted from the first day of the project) that carried Horatio and Crispin to the Cathedral. Then there could be some puzzles in the Cathedral, followed by Horatio following a subway tunnel from the Cathedral back to the station where you first arrive in Metropol. (This would've required a slight tweak to the kiosk, which identifies Cathedral Station as being on the Blue Line; it would've had to be on the Red Line.)

While I had lumped the Cathedral in with the other "cool things just past the horizon" (the rocket launch pads, Civitas and Urbani, Factor's sleeping army, etc.), including it would've enriched Horatio's religious journey, paced out the endgame a little better, and provided some striking visuals. I don't think I was *crazy* to have the emergency elevator go straight down -- I thought at that point in the game, players would be frustrated with another long series of puzzle-obstacles and insist on getting directly to avenging / rescuing Clarity, and the added development time for another four or five rooms would've been non-trivial. Still, on balance I think it would've been good to include it.

That said, for what it's worth, the Cathedral was going to be the main setting in the graphic novel I mused about above.

Plus, cutting awesome cathedrals from melancholy, atmospheric games is part of a proud tradition. (http://legacyofkain.wikia.com/wiki/Silenced_Cathedral)
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WormwoodStudios: Oh, by "metagame" I meant -- I guess "exogame" -- that the hint system wouldn't be integrated into the lore of the game itself, as Crispin's system was (or, say, a crystal ball or fortune-teller), but instead would be something "external" like a hint menu. The reason why is that making the hints work as something that someone/something in-game can convey to you is a big part of why they were sometimes cryptic or indirect. If it's too "on the nose" then it makes it clear that it's not *Crispin* talking to you, but The Hint System. As long as The Hint System isn't an in-game entity, that's not a problem, though.
yeah. we're in agreement here. now that you explain it a little more, it makes some amount of sense to me. for what it's worth, the real issue really is: how much of a hint system do you build in? the trouble, too, is that the internet exists. it's not like it used to be where people would be stuck for a /long/ time on a puzzle until someone in their circie of friends solved it.

my feeling is - if you're going to have a hint system [of any sort] inside the game then it must stay inside the game. crispin's banter was awesome, but sometimes, he was too cryptic and it made me end up looking for help outside the game.
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WormwoodStudios: I actually disagree. If the hint system had worked as intended, the point was simply that "hint points" would be used to determine if the player was actually stuck, and if he was, they would give a hint. You could always click on Crispin to get a hint if you needed one.

The problem with a "hint menu" system that isn't tied to a tracker of the player's progress is that it is replete with spoilers. Even if the high-level options are general "Dunes" vs. "Metropol" or whatever, you're still spoiling.
fair enough. this is the kind of thing where i can't really offer further input unless i actually saw it working. i tend to like more "above board" numbers than hidden ones, though. so it's just my feeling that "hiding" how to "earn" and "lose" points isn't very fair on the player.

and i agree completely. with a hint menu that has no context, you may as well not even be there, playing the game. it may as well play itself.

pardon me if i do a massive snip, here.
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WormwoodStudios: It's not that I think Primordia's story is some brilliant piece of Platonic philosophy or the next Pilgrim's Progress. It's just that I never crafted it as a literal travelogue in a fully-realized science fictional setting. But any sequel would have to start from that premise. And, in my experience, such an approach almost always leads not just to a worse sequel, but to a sequel that reaches back in time and hurts the original work, the way the efforts to answer the mysteries of Star Wars endlessly degraded the movie until, rather than a beautiful rendering of the essence of fairy tales and fantasy, it wound up just being a sci-fi story about mitochondria and politics as usual and sexually repressed super-soldiers.
i am /completely/ in agreement here. some stories are just excellent as a one-off. some lend themselves to further stories. for my part, i simply wanted a little more to see in the game there was. and a little more - i guess - philosophy. which is exactly why i wanted to see the church.
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WormwoodStudios: What I would much rather do -- and what we were trying to do (unfortunately, as I'll explain in a later post, various things have forced this project to go on hold) -- is build a *new* setting, one big and "real" enough to sustain multiple stories if need be.
i am /very/ much looking forward to that. this game was a pleasure to play through because of the setting and because of your articulate writing and the fun dialogue. i am very curious to see where you go next.
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WormwoodStudios: That said, I think the decision to put the Cathedral "off camera" was probably the wrong one. It's probably my single largest regret about the game (other than not fighting harder to make sure that the Clarity vs. Scraper fight was more polished). In hindsight, rather than a vertical emergency elevator out of the Council Tower, there should have been an emergency lateral cable car (something Vic had wanted from the first day of the project) that carried Horatio and Crispin to the Cathedral. Then there could be some puzzles in the Cathedral, followed by Horatio following a subway tunnel from the Cathedral back to the station where you first arrive in Metropol. (This would've required a slight tweak to the kiosk, which identifies Cathedral Station as being on the Blue Line; it would've had to be on the Red Line.)
well, that makes me curious. is there any kind of design stuff like that still left over? and would it be something you'd be willing to share? or was that all just stuff you thought about and never implemented?
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WormwoodStudios: While I had lumped the Cathedral in with the other "cool things just past the horizon" (the rocket launch pads, Civitas and Urbani, Factor's sleeping army, etc.), including it would've enriched Horatio's religious journey, paced out the endgame a little better, and provided some striking visuals. I don't think I was *crazy* to have the emergency elevator go straight down -- I thought at that point in the game, players would be frustrated with another long series of puzzle-obstacles and insist on getting directly to avenging / rescuing Clarity, and the added development time for another four or five rooms would've been non-trivial. Still, on balance I think it would've been good to include it.
speaking of factor's sleeping army: i was thinking that half of the reason the radio was there in the first place was to broadcast down to factor to get him up there and deal with metropol in grand, blowup style. that radio had me flummoxed for a while, in fact ;)

that's about the only thing i really wanted: a little more fleshing out of the "man" stuff. and i agree, showing the cathedral would have helped that along. i was /very/ interested to learn about that through the terminal and then even /more/ interested when i saw it on the subway, but alas, it wasn't there
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WormwoodStudios: That said, for what it's worth, the Cathedral was going to be the main setting in the graphic novel I mused about above.
ah. well, it would have gotten in there some way, then :)
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WormwoodStudios: Plus, cutting awesome cathedrals from melancholy, atmospheric games is part of a proud tradition. (http://legacyofkain.wikia.com/wiki/Silenced_Cathedral)
i didn't know that. that's awesome. thankyou.
Thanks!
well, that makes me curious. is there any kind of design stuff like that still left over? and would it be something you'd be willing to share? or was that all just stuff you thought about and never implemented?
Not really. There is one extra background Vic drew, and some various concept pieces (there's a Youtube video he made with all of them in it). The conduit puzzle originally had a UI where you could try (unsuccessfully) to assemble it by matching them up, forcing you to figure out an Alexandrine solution to the "Gordium" problem.

The ending originally contemplated a "victory lap" where you could walk around Metropol after scaring off / killing MetroMind, and the way you would save Clarity was by putting her head into Charity's body. You'd also be able to hook Clarity's head (or Crispin's personality matrix) into the network left by destroying MetroMind's mainframe in her secret lair. But none of that got past the spit-balling stage.

At one point Vic wanted the Dunes to not use fast travel but instead to require you to explore a la King's Quest V. And there would be a hard timer in which you had to beat the game or you would permanently lose by running out of energy. Over Vic's strong protests, I insisted on taking those out.

Hmm. What else?

The auto-note feature originally was something you had to manually make entries to.

Very early on in brainstorming, Horatio would get decimal upgrades (e.g., "version 5.1") based on upgrading his features, which would be kind of like the spells in Kyrandia, I suppose.

I can't really remember anything else off the top of my head. There's a thread somewhere in this forum of all my emails to Vic during the planning stages, though.
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WormwoodStudios: Thanks!

Not really. There is one extra background Vic drew, and some various concept pieces (there's a Youtube video he made with all of them in it). The conduit puzzle originally had a UI where you could try (unsuccessfully) to assemble it by matching them up, forcing you to figure out an Alexandrine solution to the "Gordium" problem.

The ending originally contemplated a "victory lap" where you could walk around Metropol after scaring off / killing MetroMind, and the way you would save Clarity was by putting her head into Charity's body. You'd also be able to hook Clarity's head (or Crispin's personality matrix) into the network left by destroying MetroMind's mainframe in her secret lair. But none of that got past the spit-balling stage.
this is all pretty cool. thank you for sharing.
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WormwoodStudios: At one point Vic wanted the Dunes to not use fast travel but instead to require you to explore a la King's Quest V. And there would be a hard timer in which you had to beat the game or you would permanently lose by running out of energy. Over Vic's strong protests, I insisted on taking those out.
did vic just not play king's quest v? haha. that exploring the desert and mapping it out was just terrible. i understand /why/ it was in there, but i didn't think it was a good idea - even back then.

and urgh. timers. at first, i was a little worried that this /was/ going to be a problem, actually, but then i looked in the help file and it basically said: there's no way to die and there's no way to get into a situation where you /can't/ proceed forward and i guessed from that that there would be no death that way.

i am /so/ glad you talked him down from both of those. they would have ruined the experience.
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WormwoodStudios: Hmm. What else?

The auto-note feature originally was something you had to manually make entries to.

Very early on in brainstorming, Horatio would get decimal upgrades (e.g., "version 5.1") based on upgrading his features, which would be kind of like the spells in Kyrandia, I suppose.

I can't really remember anything else off the top of my head. There's a thread somewhere in this forum of all my emails to Vic during the planning stages, though.
this is all pretty cool. i especially like the idea of horatio "upgrading" as you go along. it seemed to me like going from v1 of horatio to v5 changed him on the inside - and he wasn't aware of that. would that have been something the player was privy to? like: v2 is very sarcastic and v3 is more dour?
i am /so/ glad you talked him down from both of those. they would have ruined the experience.
They would've changed it. Given that two of my favorite game (series), Black Isle's Fallout and Sierra's QFG, both contain (generous) timers and open-ended exploration, I think it's possible to do it right. I just think it would've been possible, though tricky, to make it a good feature.
this is all pretty cool. i especially like the idea of horatio "upgrading" as you go along. it seemed to me like going from v1 of horatio to v5 changed him on the inside - and he wasn't aware of that. would that have been something the player was privy to? like: v2 is very sarcastic and v3 is more dour?
Well, you would go from v5 to v6, with the final upgrade being the one where Horatio learns about Horus. No personality change would happen till then. But the older versions did have different personalities (akin to my all-time favorite game, PS:T), and there's some suggestion of that when you talk to EFL for the first time. My instinct is that Horatio v1 actually still had a fairly strong residual desire to destroy Metropol, for example.
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WormwoodStudios: They would've changed it. Given that two of my favorite game (series), Black Isle's Fallout and Sierra's QFG, both contain (generous) timers and open-ended exploration, I think it's possible to do it right. I just think it would've been possible, though tricky, to make it a good feature.
i always dread games with timers. mostly because i'm a very leisurely sort of player. i like to do things and smell the roses as i go.

i am going to be playing quest for glory ii at some point [which, i believe, is the game you're alluding to] and i /dread/ the timer in that game. ah well. ;) - i'll just have to plan how i play /very/ carefully.

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WormwoodStudios: Well, you would go from v5 to v6, with the final upgrade being the one where Horatio learns about Horus. No personality change would happen till then. But the older versions did have different personalities (akin to my all-time favorite game, PS:T), and there's some suggestion of that when you talk to EFL for the first time. My instinct is that Horatio v1 actually still had a fairly strong residual desire to destroy Metropol, for example.
i actually noticed that, yeah. goliath - for example - suggested that horatio wasn't /quite/ the same guy we meet. and efl says much the same. i felt /very/ sorry for horatio at the end, there, where he discovered what was going on.

speaking of planescape: torment [i believe that's what you're referring to, at any rate] - do you have any long term plans to make a rpg at all?

i loved the tone and cadence of your writing throughout primordia and we haven't had a good, thought-provoking rpg in a /long/ time [in the vein of planescape: torment/ultima 4.]
My current project is an RPG, but nothing like PS:T. Rather than being a single long adventure in which there are well-defined characters and deep systems for interacting with the world, it is a replayable game with relatively short adventures, no real "characters," and relatively shallow systems. The backbone of the game consists of multiple-choice "vignettes" -- in this sense, it's similar to a stripped-down Darklands or to FTL, though the vignettes are much more elaborate.

That said, my goal in the game is to examine ethical considerations in a fashion similar to Primordia's, albeit using a different mechanism. Sorry this is all so cryptic. Hopefully I'll have something to show soon.
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WormwoodStudios: My current project is an RPG, but nothing like PS:T. Rather than being a single long adventure in which there are well-defined characters and deep systems for interacting with the world, it is a replayable game with relatively short adventures, no real "characters," and relatively shallow systems. The backbone of the game consists of multiple-choice "vignettes" -- in this sense, it's similar to a stripped-down Darklands or to FTL, though the vignettes are much more elaborate.

That said, my goal in the game is to examine ethical considerations in a fashion similar to Primordia's, albeit using a different mechanism. Sorry this is all so cryptic. Hopefully I'll have something to show soon.
Mark, whatever you have to show us, we Wormwood Studios fans will enjoy it for sure! :D

I'm certainly intrigued and piqued by your description, albeit a bit vague as of yet.
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WormwoodStudios: My current project is an RPG, but nothing like PS:T. Rather than being a single long adventure in which there are well-defined characters and deep systems for interacting with the world, it is a replayable game with relatively short adventures, no real "characters," and relatively shallow systems. The backbone of the game consists of multiple-choice "vignettes" -- in this sense, it's similar to a stripped-down Darklands or to FTL, though the vignettes are much more elaborate.

That said, my goal in the game is to examine ethical considerations in a fashion similar to Primordia's, albeit using a different mechanism. Sorry this is all so cryptic. Hopefully I'll have something to show soon.
sounds intriguing. i'm certainly looking forward to it.

when and as you're ready to reveal what you're up to, i'm pretty sure those of us who enjoyed primordia will be ready and waiting and happy to see what you have brewing.

good luck and thanks again for a wonderful game.
Thanks guys!