Continuing to document the making of Princéton: Bluff Version. (see previous entries here.) Gadgets by Guppy is one of the three "boss" rooms to visit on the Kingfish Pier to help your friends escape their summer jobs, with some silly item text and an optional random encounter area for steel-type Pokemon in the middle of the floor.
One big change after the first feature-complete draft of the game was to give the players a few extra signposts. For each of the "bosses", that meant letting you know what level or type of Pokemon you're going to have to deal with; for Melinda and Eloise, I changed the layout of the maps so that when you first enter this area, you see them before you see their dad. The player will gravitate towards the first NPC they see, so having the kid say "Help me out here: here's what you're going to deal with" was a way for players not to feel surprised or ambushed by a fight they aren't prepared or healed for.
The other signposting that playtesters needed was help knowing to go back to the starting area, and something spelling out that that initial area was the Funnel Cake stand. This might seem obvious to some players, so having Melinda say "hey you know, that place you work? in that specific part of the map?" after you've beaten her father/as she leaves might feel silly. But while it's contrived, it's worth the text to help some players not feel lost!
This list of words was my attempt to follow classic pokemon writing, where you gesture at an idea but the protagonist has no expert knowledge on the subject to actually understand it:
- ACRYLIC and ELIXIR are an obvious reference to the idea that the paint on the Immortal Puppet never dries, "acrylic" being a shorthand for typically-used paints, and "elixir" beckoning at an "elixir of life" or "elixir of immortality"
- OPERANT and TUNNEL are a loose suggestion of the Tunnel Project Bluff S2 meta-plot, not intended to actually mean anything...
- however, during the livestream, @jdq says "Marlon Guppy does go on to work on the Tunnel Project, right Art?"
- which! is almost certainly just the fact that America's Playground was recorded so long ago, plus the suggestion from the the text here, causing them to remember something that isn't necessarily in the original text. Memory is malleable, art is fluid, this isn't a "big scoop" of some amazing secret about the meta-plot.
- It's probably just an offhand comment, but it's fun to think about as a neat peek behind the scenes for what could be. Who could say what is actually true - especially when it comes to Bluff City?