Continuing to document the making of Princéton: Bluff Version, today looking at the game-ending actions, and the final (repeatable) fight.
A bird's eye view of the west boardwalk. Rather than a single sprite, the truck consists of eight sprites, each of which becomes visible and un-crossable when both variables RopeBalloon = ON and TruckGossip ≥ 3. A fun easily-missed thing on the left-hand side: once Cattie has made her way to the Funnel Cake Stand, she parks her bicycle out front of it!
Until late in development, the Watch Truck was going to be parked on the boardwalk, with its wheel spilled off to one side (you can see the space it would take up in the image above!) This would mean that the game would force you to go north into town, proceeding in a roughly linear fashion through town and back north and south until you unlocked the East Beach, getting past the cop Hanke Crystal into the beach and then into the East Boardwalk, where the endgame takes place. You could then hang out the barrel organ square, dissuade Robbin' and the Bat Man, and finally arrive at the back of the truck where the truck driver cannot see you, and have Sank's assistance finally pulling off the heist.
Instead of a legendary Mew hiding under the truck, however, it is fitting for America's Playground for it to be a surprising puppet! Who could be the terrible puppet that was promised? Well, we want "gregarious" but at the same time "disturbing", and I think an infinite procession of Mr. Mime's does the trick. Yes, infinite - you can capture as many of the puppet as you like and there will still. be more. puppet. Just waiting for you, elongated, immortal, and long. Mr. Mime is the highest-level pokemon in the game, and Psychic attacks are super effective against our Water/Fighting Keldeo. However, Mr. Mime's moveset is like most of the set fights in the game: optimized for flavor, not power. Those moves are:
- Role Play, as the puppet is meant to be playing the role of US politician John Tyler
- Encore, because it keeps happening, over and over again
- Confusion, because this is the way it deals you damage: confusing you until you are dealt with or playing along
- Protect, because it is immortal, after all. the ACRYLIC/ELIXIR mentioned in Mr. Guppy's notes does a good job defending it from all harm.
And I think that, six months after the game released, is the end of the Princéton design diary! I ended up mostly covering the decision-making parts of game design (what goes where and why) rather than the process-parts of game design (how to make certain events/triggers/switches happen in the right sequence without breaking). That makes this series more digestible for the average reader, but less useful for someone working on their own pokemon fanhack project. If you fall into the latter category, do consider me an open resource in the topic. What's next for this space? We'll have to find out together! But in the meantime...
