Saturday, February 27, 2016

Echoes of the Old War - DevDiary #6 - Helping the Clave

What follows is a meditative that I wrote in an attempt to hammer ashort section in the fourth act of Echoes of the Old War.  This certainly contains spoilers, so consider yourself warned.  During this act, Auryon will need to help an antagonistic village in order to get in good (enough) with their Elders.  I wanted to spend a little time figuring out these short little puzzles that would, ideally, help do a little bit of world building by illustrating how Auryon's enemies live (in contrast to her own tribe).

Keep in mind that this is all stream-of-consciousness stuff.  Absolutely nothing of what follows is edited in any way aside from what I may have done on the fly.  There will be spelling and grammar mistakes, some of these sentences are guaranteed to make absolutely no sense, and many of these paragraphs will jump around.  This isn't to mention the fact that I've already completed writing this section within the story, and I'm fairly certain a few of these ideas have been changed already; add a few extra drafts into that and some of this stuff may change dramatically in the final product.

So... uh.  You've been warned.



I think for right now, I’m sold on this idea of Auryon proving that she - and Bandog as a whole - wants peace with the Clave by helping out the tribe with different tasks.  I don’t want these to be simple, arbitrary tasks where Auryon just uses one of her tools to solve a problem, and that’s it.  I want these tasks to feel somewhat important to the village as a whole - like what she’s doing is legitimately improving their living quality; even if just a bit.  These tasks should, ideally also teach the player how to think about Auryon’s tools beyond what they’re normally used for.  This should play in to the coming portion where Auryon is searching an old Conclave citadel bunker.

It seems that the Elders of the Clave are really just expecting Auryon to make some bread or help mend a roof or two and call it a day.  While this sort of tasks aren’t beyond Auryon, it seems that she may take this as a personal challenge and seek out greater tasks.  Although, it could be less that it’s a personal challenge and more that this is just kind of what she does.  She helps people, regardless of what the task is.

In terms of the actual tasks, she should help the village both on the individual level, as well as on the community level.  She should also progress their lives in some way, either by making a given task easier or quicker, or by taking some of the daily stress off.  Perhaps, some of the villager might think of these changes as being against tradition, but might eventually relent when they realize that they change makes their lives easier.

Since the Elders are most definitely traditionalists, these changes might be somewhat annoying to them.  The real reason that they might find Auryon aiding their people distasteful is because it removes some of their power over the people as well as making the people less reliant on the Elders.  This, of course, frightens them.  This would play into the idea that they would want some of Possl Tall’s power - even though they insist that they are far more powerful that he can hope to be - thus sending Auryon out to search for the source of his power. 

Finding the old citadel bunker would be the third way that she “helps” the Clave (even though this really only serves the Elders).  This would mean that an individual has been helped, the community has been helped, and the leaders have been helped.  I don’t know that I want it simplified to just three tasks like help a guy, help a bunch of guys, and then help some jerks.  I want the players to feel that Auryon did legitimately help several people.  To this end, maybe she has one task where she helps the community as a whole, and then three where she helps different individuals.

Like in Bandog earlier, each task should use a unique combination of the tools that she has thus far.  So far, she has the bow & arrow, the torch, the trenching tool, and the anchor.  It seems like she might get in trouble if she draws an arrow, but that could be part of the puzzle (such as figuring out a way to distract a guard).  It might be interesting if Kero chides Auryon for doing it, and she promises to not use an arrow again - and none of the other puzzle solutions require it (perhaps the game might even prevent Auryon from using an arrow until she leaves the Clave).  This would require that this be one of the first tasks that she comes across.
 


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