Episode 3 Part 3 Sneak Peek #18

Hi all! 

I’m sorry for missing last Friday’s sneak peek. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what to share since without revealing even more spoilers for the next update. Coding is coming along, but it is a slow process since there are a lot of finnicky things I have to re-learn. Last September was the last time I did any major work on the build; it’s funny how easily skills start to slip when you don’t use them. Thankfully, I have very extensive notes and a spreadsheet full of variables to keep track of, so whenever I get lost, Past Me has it covered! 

In Route 1, there are several stages where the MC can choose to investigate some the bizarre phenomena that exists within Diradan thanks to the explosion. In this sequence, they choose to examine a library. 

Cycling choices and checks are not new in Wayfarer; there are several times where dialogue or actions loop around and the player has to decide what they want to prioritize in case their checks fail. The library loop is most similar to the stamina check in Episode 1, when the MC and Aeran are climbing the cliff face outside the Viridian Lady’s villa. Though the checks are spammable (you can keep clicking them even if you fail), there is a silent counter and once the counter hits its maximum, the MC falls off the cliff. 

There’s a similar mechanic here—there is a time limit in terms of how long the MC has to investigate, and how high that counter gets determines a specific outcome later. 

This is the current visual map for Episode 3 Part 3:

Yellow bars represent passages with autosave; purple bars represent passages where an important thing that needs to be flagged happens. This doesn't serve any in-game purpose other than making the visual map easier for me to read when I need to go looking for something.

This is the code for the library check (I threw it into Notepad++ to get a little bit of syntax highlighting on it since the version of the Twine editor I use doesn’t come with it; some day I am going to have to upload SugarCube as a language to Notepad++ so I can actually see things properly):

This whole passage ended up being 107 lines in total.

This is the passage in the game itself (in test mode):