![]() ("Counterprogrammed" on page 1 was from a Spider Robinson story.) I make a lot of really obscure references in these notes. "And a free-for-all at the end." Anna Russell again, from her bit on writing your own Gilbert and Sullivan opera.The game includes five stories, plopped right down as walls of text, and you have to answer questions about them! Of course, in SysTwi I used it rather literally. In the large sense, this is what all adventure game design aspires to. I am misusing the term to refer to puzzles where you have to think about what's going on in the story world, not just the mechanics in front of you. "Thematic apperception" is a sort of storytelling-Rorschach test used by psychologists.But was there a specific disk illusion that I was thinking of when I wrote this? I can't remember. "The ever-expanding / ever-contracting disk": In the game, I used a looping animation which is exactly what this sounds like: an expanding or contracting set of concentric circles.That's also why I didn't use that idea in SysTwi. ![]() I haven't reposted Praser 6 because it wasn't very good. The idea was about trying to find chains of similar words in different parts of a story. "pra6 type thing": This, on the other hand, refers to a word puzzle that I wrote while I was in college.They appeared in Games Magazine in the 1980s. "Escape-the-forest type" puzzles refer to "Escape from the Dungeon" and "Escape from the Forest", classic word-maze puzzles designed by Scott Marley (and illustrated by Carter Goodrich).I wound up using nearly all of the puzzle ideas that I wrote down here.Also, you didn't have to use any tool more than once or maybe twice, so it wasn't a big deal anyway.) (But I don't think players wound up noticing this distinction very much.Once you have a program you can run it over and over! I think I was reacting to the old games like Ultima (and modern RPGs!) where a lockpick always breaks after one use. I was very keen on the idea that this is a computer, so no resource is ever limited except disk space.If you want a laugh, search any of my open-source projects for that string.) (Throughout my notes, "#" means "Fix this before shipping, Zarf!" I still do that."# check this": A note to myself to go back over the dialogue and make sure the characters were rigorously obeying the hidden rules.I probably wrote "A bunch of Powers." and then went back later and filled in the details. No, I didn't start out by planning the ten voodoo/computer gods.I never got into them much the first time around. I never did go back to re-read the William Gibson books.actually, I can't remember what he insisted, but it was probably something like "I won't play your damn game if I have to keep reloading my old save files." Good point. "Let Eric play": That's Eric Snider, who I knew from college.The Fool's Errand, my design inspiration, worked this way. The player can't die or make a fatal mistake. "Advancement-only": This was long before I wrote down the Zarfian Cruelty Scale, but everyone understood that you could write a puzzle game this way.Why didn't I use that line in the game itself? "A fairy tale from the other side of the screen": Man, that's good.(Which I knew mostly through the classic Anna Russell sketch, but hey.) The title "System's Twilight" was meant to allude to Ragnarok, "The Twilight of the Gods".Or, maybe I do, but it's on the hard drive on my old Mac Centris which I haven't booted up in twenty years. I don't think I have this document as a text file any more. They all affect each other, so they all show up mixed together like this. I usually (and to this day) start a game by writing a file like this - just ideas about setting, story, mechanics, and puzzles. And I kept all of the paper, because why not?įirst up: my design notes. I did nearly all of the work on paper - I mean, sketching stuff on graph paper with a bunch of colored pens, because it was 1993. But if you have, you might be interested in looking through my original design notes and sketches. If you haven't played System's Twilight, these scans won't mean much to you. System's Twilight Design Notes System's Twilight Design Notes
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