Tag Archives: Chronoquest

May 31, 2022 · 19:43

9 options were lining up

Wow! I got some feedback from yesterday, mostly from people who want a free ride and had no idea what they were watching. The sudoku part is a handlebar, an optional shortcut to a much larger stage that was a puzzle and I turned it into an almost simple exercise. But for the Microsoft minded (the non thinkers) lets go over it.

Story
No matter what the story is, there are plenty of elements that can be generated. It’s like creating 180 unique chapters and you only need 9 of them, basically you might create 81 at launch time and get the others created whilst the program is running. Yet getting the 180 (or so) done beforehand makes lighter work afterwards. You see, any story is set to chapters, each chapter is set to paragraphs. So why this many? In case you want a never ending start of quests, you need the ammunition.

No matter how clever you are, there is always another way and I merely presented one. In the previous image you saw the stage of what story to run, it HAS to start with ‘1’, so whether you take the row or the column, you will have one of each. In my example the blue one is less appealing as the second number is an ‘8’, so it will be a lot less in line. The green one (a coincidence, I swear) gives us 1,4,5,7,2,6,8,9,3 so there is more line and per location you will get one part of the story (via interactions) and the story will shape for the player. So after the third world the player will have parts 1,4 and 5. This is one of the effects of anachronism and linearity is utterly pointless in that setting. And as we realise that we have 150 chapters, we merely randomise the chapters, we sort them and select the 9 highest (or lowest) and as such you would have to play the game 20 times to see EVERY story at the earliest.

Items
This is a different setting. Let’s state that all the items are the numbers (another use of the SAME numbers). So all the items for world 1 are all the ones in play, but not every world needs to have 9 items. And you might want to focus on what numbers are in play, but remember, each number is only used once, so the Sudoku method HELPS us to shape what we want, but it is not a solution for everything, and every sudoku is different.

We have Items, people, the story, the location puzzles and the whole comes to a point when we unite them. A new version and a unique version of a game that started in 1988, and with the Forgotten city we are optionally breathing it new life. The Sudoku part is just a handlebar to create a station of almost never ending originality. Especially when you realise that there are “6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 possible solvable Sudoku grids”. I used a simple way to create in simplicity what too many will try to complicate. Not a bad hour, was it?

And this can be done on the streamers, it can be done on a PS5. I reckon that this is also possible on the Nintendo Switch. All this and all done in the limit of a TV show. Can life get any simpler? Well yes, but that is up to Adobe (for a price) and I think I have a nice idea for them to really screw up the margins of profit for Microsoft (because that is how I roll). And now it is time for a healthy meal (chicken rolls).

Three IP’s to make a fourth

That is what I contemplated today. I got a little bit lucky. 2 PS5 titles for $30. A good deal to say the least. The first one was the Forbidden city.

When it was released I was on a budget (a tight one) I had seen some parts on YouTube, saw some reviews all positive. The story is (as far as I got) captivating, but something was nagging at me, nothing negative. Merely the setting that once played, that is it. That is how most games go and there is nothing wrong with that. But what if it was not the end? It reminded me of a game I had on the Amiga. It was a Psygnosis title named Chronoquest.

I’ve forgotten most of the game, but this one got me back to those days. Travelling through time, finding clues to the real killer of your father. It made me think. That kind of game is now outdated, but the idea might not be. So when we think of Sudoku, we might remember the simple grid of nine, making horizontal, vertical and diagonal add up to 15.

Most people learned quickly that the centre needs to be the ‘5’, then it becomes a simple setting of making the other 2 squares add to 10. Yet Sudoku gives us 9 grids of 9 and now it becomes a challenge, even more so when you realise that there are more options than most people can throw their hat at.

So what happens when we take the first game as an engine and create 9 levels. There are so many options. Greek, Roman, Goth, Spanish, Japanese, Scandinavia, Aztec, Mayan, Native American, and that list can go on for a while. Now we create the objects that are required, the stage is set, but this is not merely a whodunnit, this is a larger stage, but with a Chronoquest setting, we merely added steroids to the equation. Then we add an omnibus of storylines and we connect them. Like the Sudoku, we have 9 levels, but the numbers can be anything, and it is that seeding that gives us the options. Consider Chronoquest, places in time, that also implies anachronism, objects in the WRONG tine. It opts for dialogues, it opts for puzzles and if done correctly there will always be the chance that something has been seen before, but if every time has dozens of objects, we end up with 200+ objects The storylines need to be generic, like a dozen stories per time, yet the names can alter, the objects alter and the puzzles will alter.

Time to fly
Now consider the larger sudoku. We could set the sequence of where we go by the centre square (as an example) so we now get 1,1,3,5,7,7,8,8,9 Now we get the tricky side, how do we enable area 2,4, and 6? Simple, the first double up (1,1) will open all 3, so now we get a puzzle that is slightly more challenging and not linear. The nice part is that 1 through 9 can mean anything and there are dozens of Sudoku creator scripts out there, all ready to be used for the eager maker of puzzles. I merely wonder whether anyone considered this application. Now do not let the style of writing fool you, this will still be a challenge making it and it will be subject to redraws, redesigns and back to the drawing board moments. But when solved, the maker will have a new style of game, a new IP and one that streamers will fight over to get, because replayability will be the streamer scream of 2024. When they learn and find out what the power of ACTUAL long term gaming is, they will get on board fast. So that took less than an hour and even now my mind is trying to implement a new side to using the Sudoku routine without making the game flat or predictable. And it needs to be able to redesign the new game with every matrix created, because that is the foundation of Sudoku, a unique number matrix.

So look out for what is next and look to what YOU could make to become the next game maker all the others want.

Anachronism

Yes, it sounds cool and for the most, if you are aware, it is cool. The ability to spot these elements are pretty out of this world. There was a group of people near Sardinia, it was 1212. If someone took a real good look, they might have noticed a boy, yet he was wearing a pair of jeans and a Timex. There was a witness, her name was Thea Beckman. Yet it does not end well, the bulk of these minors ended up with William of Posqueres and were shipped to Tunis to become slaves. They never ended anywhere near the Crusades. There is also the alleged setting of the Key of all intelligence. It is a British thing. The key is a tablet like device, it needs to be filled with encryption elements by GCHQ, MI5 and MI6. Only then will the wielder be able to unlock one special computer to add to it, it is its own system, never linking to anything, at the bottom of the sea, a system with more security than the crown jewels in the tower. But these elements are mere window dressing. Anachronism is a dangerous thing, it is an even weirder concept.

To see this we need to consider Anachronism, it means “a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned”. Yet when you dig deeper there is positive anachronism and negative anachronism. An example of positive anachronism is not about time travel, it is when something resurfaces. Something like the Irish Crown Jewels, or the poems of the poet Sappho. They were lost in the past, yet there is no indication that they are permanently lost. Negative anachronism is different, it is the stage of elements found at crusades, the setting of Celestrium found in a lab, or perhaps the Hsin Yu, a Chinese steamer sunk in 1916 where 1,000 died. What is more interesting is that dives allegedly revealed that the steamer allegedly had a support system to fit a mortar, one that would not be seen until WW2, that would be (if enough evidence found) a case of Negative Anachronism. Yet in all these years there is only one game on the subject (to some sort of degree). It was Psygnosis who released Chronoquest in 1988. Yet in RPG’s it has never happened. I got this idea, where we need to see an RPG, just like any other. Yet in the game we find books, certain books that have a second side, like the the other side of a page, but it contains some form of a puzzle, not merely opening the ‘page’, it could involve breaking or ripping the page, it could be folding the page and removing a part and remove the item. The item could be anything, more likely an anachronism that alters all, almost like an SD card, but when this item is added in the right place, the anachronism adjusts time without paradox elements. Suddenly we see art is added, items are added and optionally devices are added. The NPC’s are unaware, but we see the difference and now we see the start of a much larger field of play. Consider that someone prevented Leila Denmark form living, removing her stops the bacterium Bordetella Pertussis from being invented from 1926 to 1953, the WW2 statistics take a drastic turn and it would hit US troops in Korea to an almost disastrous degree. Now a person like Leila Denmark is a massive impact, the inventor of the Asphalt cutter not as much, but the timelines still shift. Now consider an RPG where your game world is in danger, a lot more than you know and even as you are like the NPC’s unaware of some things, the stage you are in, you get to learn that things were removed and you get to repair some of it, or all of it. And this is where the game takes a turn. I wrote earlier “it contains some form of a puzzle, not merely opening the ‘page’, it could involve breaking or ripping the page, it could be folding the page and removing a part and remove the item”, so when you break the page open the wrong way, the information is warped. So instead of merely resetting the life of the maker of the Asphalt cutter, he remains alone, so what comes next is lessened and optionally someone else comes up with the goods and as such the economy of your land is changed. It is interesting that a concept as powerful as anachronism was never added to any RPG game. I wonder if someone will take up that slack in a decent way.

#JustSaying

Tag Archives: Chronoquest

9 options were lining up

Three IP’s to make a fourth

Anachronism

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