Crystal Towers 2 - Floundering around

As I keep working on this, I realize more and more that I'm writing an RPG by accident. Stat-boosting, side quests and various other rewards are spread around the levels, and it's becoming difficult to keep track of them and all potential paths through the game. To solve that I wrote up a spreadsheet last weekend to list all the missions, enemies, levels and drop items in the game and how they relate to each other. I never considered how careful the planning would need to be to make the game make sense as a whole - really, the only way to make sure it's balanced is to build it all up and then change the bits that don't work. So I should really do some new levels - at the moment I'm just fiddling with everything I've got so far and not making a lot of progress.

For that reason, this journal's been pretty silent recently because of the lack of screenshots to upload - for the most part all work has been at the back end of the game and I've still only got four levels. However, in addition to this, I've completely reworked the projectile spells so that they're easier to expand on, written an entire synthesis side quest that will go throughout the game, and so on. I still need to work out the progress trees through them, but there are now a couple of things with a point to them there instead of just dummy names like "Old boots" and so on.

There's also the issue of when I'm going to introduce it to the game - it should be fairly early on, but once the player has gone through five levels or so without the additional complexity of it. Enemies will start dropping items once you reach the large machine in the middle of the Music Castle - which is a synthesizer, of course.

That reminds me - the Music Castle needs to be made a lot more musical. There are a couple of themed backdrops around it at the moment, but I'm envisioning giant Zool-like keyboards and instruments as obstacles.

The trouble is that for a lot of the plans for the game, I'm going to have to think up ways to do them now rather than later so that I don't have to go back and change a heap of things to get them working. The online element I'm planning should have a simple submission mechanism as I can just write a big parser to put the entire save information in a POST line, but the real issue is making sure that users can't modify the saves themselves (or indeed the mission list, which was included externally precisely for the reason that I wanted it to be editable by me). That's going to be difficult, but will probably involve a lot of MD5 checking.

Clipboard-Wielding Maniacs

I can't remember whether I've detailed this before, but on most weekdays outside our office, there is a group of people in green and blue shirts holding a clump of forms under their arms, trying to get the attention of passers-by when they're on their way through Davis Square. Most of them are, naturally, from Greenpeace.

I should point out that they aren't there because of anything to do with the building that I work in - most of the Vanguard building is a health centre, and I don't think even Greenpeace could complain about that. There is the matter of the gigantic backup power system kept in our server room that dims the street lights a bit whenever it's turned on, but they don't know about that. Instead, their preferred location is outside this building because it happens to be on the corner next to a subway station - which is fantastic for when you're going to work in the rain, but not when you have a flock of canvassers watching the door ready to pounce.

It's possible to avoid them by going out the side door, around to the subway and out the other entrance on the opposite side of the square, but they often have people lining the road down to where everyone gets lunch as well. And before you say it, the simple solution of not talking to them or saying you're not interested just doesn't work - I tried that a couple of times and instead of taking the hint they cling to you like limpets. One of them followed me all the way back to the office once despite my elaborate web of deceit about having a membership with them in Norway.

Therefore, the only sure way to escape is to think up something to say that makes it clear you're not interested, and at the same time makes them actively want to never talk to you again. This is easy on rainy days, where you can wear your jacket zipped up to the nose and muffle incoherently at them until they give up. However, we haven't had any of those in the last couple of months. Pretending to be foreign is a decent fallback, but you have to be able to swiftly make up your own dialect or it's possible that they'll be able to continue the conversation in your chosen language.

So the pressure is on you to think up good, plausible but undeniably urgent excuses while hurrying past. Looking at those criteria written down, I suppose "Sorry, I've got five minutes to stop nuclear war with China" probably wasn't the highest-ranking on this list, but it provides the moment of surprise necessary for you to make your escape. Most of the time I've fallen back to "I've got to meet my wife" which has been true on about half the occasions that I've used it. After getting past with that one a couple of times, I thought of saying that I was late for my appointment for killing puppies with hammers, which would give them a shock but I haven't dared try that one yet.

Sometimes, what you're carrying can help you out - on Wednesdays I usually get a ball of mozzarella from the Farmers' Market down the road. (To my astonishment I noticed that the signs had the apostrophe in the right place last week - I could practically hear the choir of angels singing "Hallelujah" in the background.) It was blisteringly hot on most days during the past month, so on the way back, I could just hold up the rapidly dying wad of cheese and say that I had to get it back to the office fridge before it disintegrated.

By far my most elaborate scheme was an extension to this - when carrying lunch in a brown paper bag back down the road, I decided to say to the man outside the health centre that it contained a new liver that had to be in someone's chest within the next few minutes. While walking back I thought up more and more elaborate details to the story, eventually deciding that when questioned I would admit that it used to belong to a cow but if you put enough volts through it then all livers were pretty much interchangeable. I would then ask if he'd seen the proton accelerator dish on the roof, point upwards and run away while his attention was diverted.

He enthusiastically approached me and started off, but sadly, on delivery of the opening line he believed me without question and apologized for delaying me.

But starting last Monday, Davis Square has become home to an entirely new class of clipboard-wielding maniac. This lot call themselves Masspirg and I took the time to listen to one of them at the beginning of the week (largely because they're a lot better at covering the entire area and leaving no gaps for you to use to strategically cross roads). What they're trying to get money for is a stop to fare raises on the subway as well as pressuring the MBTA to organize the Big Dig a little better and stop bits falling off. The second of these goals is agreeable as at the moment the tunnel is as unstable as most of my websites, but the recent price rise brought the monthly ticket cost up to fully one quarter of what I would pay if I still lived in Scotland, so they can stop their moaning there.