Mind dump

[davidn]

I haven't done a "current state of the whiteboard" post in a while. As I'm about to clear it up a bit, here's a preservation of its contents.



Everything scrawled on there has a meaning and a use. If only I could remember what half of them were.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I always love finding old scraps of paper like that, where I was working something out in my head and just needed some 'scratch space', and it still feels 'familiar' in some way even though it's totally inscrutable after so long. :)

[davidn]

For a very long time, I kept a notepad in my jacket pocket that served this purpose. I still remember the meaning behind most of it even with my awful note-taking style, but there is a line that simply says "FIVE? (1:4 X)" which I have been unable to decipher for many years.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Fantastic. :) We're aliens to our own selves, across enough time...

You just reminded me that to this day, my parents don't know what my first (multisyllabic) word was -- I would apparently insist "tenadee", growing more and more frustrated when no-one understood me. (My second word was 'pooka', which they finally interpreted when it expanded to 'compooka', which has been a nickname for 'computer' in my house ever since... they should have been worried then, I suppose. :P)

[kjorteo]

That or you were such a furry even then that you had the power to bend time and space to your will by making furry references to games over a decade before they were actually made. You being you, this is the theory I choose to believe.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Kjorteo, please. I think it's obvious that I'm such a furry that I influenced the subconscious name choices of video game developers half a world away, forward in time. :D

[davidn]

To me, a Pooka is an ugly Amiga spectre thing from Knightmare (an initial image search has been fruitless and I don't want to trawl through a billion pages of episode summaries). Still, the Odin Sphere version is much cuter.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

Trigonometry, my greatest nemesis!
Actually, I do that with post-it notes. Random scrawl that is difficult to interpret afterwards, not trigonometry.
I'm not entirely sure that a combo meter would be necessary (but I don't know what you had envisioned) but a stopwatch object to slow down time would be nifty. Maybe it could be a synthesisable item so you could use it whenever you want, but the use of one consuming the watch and with requirements just steep enough that you wouldn't have too many of them?

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

Actually, speaking of difficult-to-interpret scrawl... sometimes all I had handy at work (due to being terribly absent-minded with my pens) was a yellow marker... and yellow post-it paper. I could read it when I wrote it, barely, but I have no hope now that it's faded (and I have no inkling as to what I wrote, besides).

[davidn]

Self-destructive ink - and much cheaper than the way Mission Impossible did it. I like it :)

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

You like it because you're not the one trying to trace along bits of vaguely brighter yellow in a vain effort to restore legibility.

[davidn]

Ah, I forgot that there were people who could potentially interpret what was on the board :)

All of those four blue items on the right are actually separate, but you're right in guessing that they're synthesis rewards. The general idea of the CT2 synth rewards is that they're not consumable - you get the little synth item 'ingredients' that you find around the levels and can manufacture your own of some of them from other items, but the eventual goal items that you get are there permanently as trophies and might give you other abilities as side effects (for example, synthesizing the Quartz Flask gives you the Heal spell rather than acting as a one-use item). As far as I remember, the ideas were:

- A compass that would add a fourth arrow to the ones in the hub to aid your navigation (though admittedly not a very useful level)

Some sort of artefact that I hadn't decided on in order to give you a time-slowing spell (or more accurately the frame rate - I've tested an idea for this, it wouldn't speed you up in relation to most things but it would improve your effective reaction times on missions like the gems one that the testing forum had such trouble with)

- A stopwatch (though this would be appropriate as the above, wouldn't it?) which would unlock a sort of time attack mode in the levels and would only take another six million hours of work to implement

- And like you, I have absolutely no idea what I envisioned by the word "combometer". Possibly something similar to the above that counted your best/highest-scoring jumps.

It's quite remarkable how my computer fails every time I think about working on it, though.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

Thank you; I had no idea that word was "compass".

I much prefer the idea of permanent items as well; it's much more satisfying to create something that's not going to disappear in five minutes, especially if it's going to give you access to more spells and abilities. And having the item slow everything, instead of just everything else in relation to Bernard as I had assumed, sounds reasonable enough to include as a permanent ability.

I somehow feel there should be a synthesisable abacus. I have no idea what such a thing would be used for.

[davidn]

The A and the S sort of got blended together. My handwriting isn't an exact science and sometimes creates entirely new glyphs unintentionally.

Abacus... I'll think about that!

[(Anonymous)]

If I was debugging DavidN, that's what I would see.