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Weekly Update - Flowerbed Quick Travel?

3 years ago1,469 words

I set up my new PC at long last, I'm still working on story decisions - including some fast/dream travel 'flowerbeds' - and it's a shame people aren't more receptive to - or even aware of - my post-MARDEK work!

I FINALLY set up the new computer I got like a billion years ago!! Transferring everything over - and creating a couple of backups because I was concerned about buggering something up and losing everything somehow - and then setting everything up and mentally adjusting to what feels like moving into a new house all took time, so I lost a couple of work days due to that (knowing that'd happen was why it took me so long to get around to it in the first place).

Wow, though, what an improvement! I used to have to wait like 20 minutes for my old PC just to start up or shut down, and almost as long for some things like Atonal Dreams to export. Now, startup takes 20 seconds, if that, and exporting AD is even quicker. Everything opens almost instantly; no horrible lags that used to eat up so much of my time. So that's great!

One thing I was really hoping for though was that Sibelius - my music composition program - would no longer randomly crash on export, as it had frequently been doing on my old PC over the past few months (though it never did before that). But it's still doing that, so that's annoying. I wonder whether the files are just corrupted or something; I haven't made anything new to test yet. Makes me want to just switch to something else - as I've written about before - but there are a bunch of issues with that.



Other than that, I've been continuing to work on Atonal Dreams' story, like ∞ I talked about last week ∞; everything in that post is still relevant.

I can't really go into detail without spoiling everything, unfortunately, but I might post on Patreon soon about some more not-hugely-spoilery details I'm still trying to work through. Here, I'll share something more conceptual, lore-related, rather than story-related per se:




I've been wondering for a while exactly how Savitr and Collie arrived at Crescent Rift, and how the nightmare prologue would transition to the 'tutorial island' section in the 'real world'. For a while, I had it so that Collie's nightmare ended with her being told to 'wake up', then she wakes up floating above the world map astride a figmon - Mysteed - with the real Savitr telling her to wake up and saying that they'd arrived at the island; she'd somehow drifted off to sleep on a flying horse thing on her first mission with her hero, which seems a bit silly really.



I also had elemental 'mausolea', in which pairs of characters would sleep on a bed together to enter into one person's psychepelago (dream world). It seemed a good opportunity for silly character scenes, but using a bed like that limited it to just two people.



I came up with this concept which combines those two things, kind of. They're large aster-shaped flowers, with the petals kind of like beds, on which up to six people can rest at once. The term flowerbed seems like an easy and satisfying pun. I imagined a couple of uses for them:

One was replacing the mausolea with these flowerbeds, so up to six characters could sleep at once, with one guiding the whole party to their personal psychepelago (which would correspond to the element of the flowerbed).

The other was using these as a kind of fast travel system. Essentially the lore would be that they were devices created by the Aolmna - the gods who made the world - where you could use your memory to navigate through the drealm to somewhere you'd previously visited. You'd use one by sitting and meditating, focusing your memories, and the crystal in the middle of the flower would turn you - and anyone on the other petals - into energy and transfer you through its roots - the 'memoroot network', or maybe 'deja root' or something - to another flowerbed.

It seemed very fitting with a lot of the themes and motifs, and like a nice play on how fast travel does work in games in general, plus it's a kind of commentary on how the waking world and drealm are essentially one and the same, the nature of reality and consciousness, things like that.

The game could begin with Collie waking up on one of these flowerbeds with the real Savitr, and he could explain that the reason she had such a vivid dream is because they did just travel through the drealm. It'd mean I wouldn't have to include the world map between the prologue and tutorial island sections. Plus Savitr being able to travel to this particular flowerbed would mean he has a memory of it, which has some story relevance.

So that all seems very elegant... but it presents problems where characters who are on your party would technically have memories of certain locations you haven't reached yet, so why don't they just use their memory to get you there via the memoroot network? Using the physical travel network to travel into dreams presents some possible issues too.

So that's something I'm having to come to decisions about!



Another thing: I irregularly get emails from fans of my old work, either expressing appreciation or asking me for something like whether they can have access to old files (to which I generally say no). Recently, some of them have said things suggesting they're not aware of this website, or any of my most recent work, which makes me wonder how to even reach fans of my old stuff.

I know I've written about this a bunch of times in this blog, but it's also always kind of disappointing how openly uninterested people seem to be in my new work. One person said that while he loved MARDEK, he didn't care for the new stuff, and likened it to how he had a dream when he was young involving decorating his living space to his liking, which he acted out when he moved into his own place, and then it was out of his system. In my reply, I wrote this:



It's a recurring theme, and it makes me think about how differently creators and non-creators see those creators' creations. How different the roles they play in their respective lives are. For me, MARDEK was a stepping stone; for players, it was an experience, tightly tied to fond memories. For me to return to old work would be unwalking a journey, for them it'd be a warm bath of nostalgia, a return to a pleasant part of their past.

I've been frustrated by this in the past, but I suppose I'm more accepting now, and just appreciative that people still care about stuff I made so long ago. I just wish I were better at putting out new stuff so then I didn't feel so embarrassed about being praised only for stuff I've long since grown beyond!