Stygian Sentinel 11
Issue #11, September 28th 2015
Curious Conversations at the OtherSide Lunch Table[edit]
There are lots of great things about working at a game development studio, especially a small scrappy studio like OtherSide Entertainment. Cool people, casual dress, the chance to build the game of your dreams...
One of the best perks is the quirky discussions you find yourself in on a regular basis. From conversations about the latest movies to recent scientific discoveries to which fantasy author is the best of all time, these discussions are an entertaining hotbed of nerdy fanboy fun. Especially when the group starts talking about whacky design directions for the game they are making. Things start to get weird and quick!
This week we thought we'd share a couple of these whacky conversations with you, to let you in on what goes on at the OtherSide lunch table!
"How do you tell time in the Underworld?"
Since the Underworld exists underground, how would its inhabitants know what time of day it was without a sun, moon or stars to go by? When this question was casually asked one afternoon it immediately spawned a slew of responses ranging from reasonable to ...unorthodox. And before we concluded that this wasn't necessarily an issue we needed to solve (after all, people got by perfectly fine in the real world for thousands of years without watches, even on cloudy days!) we went down so many design rabbit-holes we started growing cotton tails.
The first solution was to have a character, likely a dwarf, be the "Time Keeper" of the Underworld. His sole job, day in and day out, would be to watch the one functioning hourglass in the Abyss and to turn it over immediately when its sands ran their course. All other people in the Underworld would rely upon this esteemed figure to determine when to pull their bread out of the oven, or how long they had been on guard duty.
Reasonable but perhaps a little boring. So, someone brought up flatulence. What if Deepslugs, the Underworld's equivalent of domesticated cows, had gassy discharges every hour on the hour? Interesting solution, if an unpleasant one for Underworld herdsmen. This in turn spawned the idea of telepathic fungi that lets out a psychic scream every half hour that everyone in the Underworld can "hear", like a terrifying grandfather clock.
Predictable fissures, like Ole Faithful, came up, as well as plant life that blooms at exactly noon and midnight each day. Another solution was the idea of an increase and decrease to the flow of lava throughout the Underworld based on the time of day. Markings on the channel walls would let everyone know if it was "highlava" or "lowtrickle" time.
Who knows, some of these ideas might even make it into the game. Not the flatulence one, though. We promise.
"What can you do with a giant mushroom?"
As part of our early prototype of the game, we had a character cast a Grow Mushroom spell to block a swarm of spiders coming down a passageway. We thought that was an interesting and different use for such a spell. Naturally, it immediately got us talking about what other uses there might be for giant mushrooms, or their caps...
A spongey shield, a comfortable helmet, a boat for crossing water, an umbrella for when it rains in the Underworld (?!?), a trampoline for jumping up to secret ledges, a Frisbee for...uh...playing ultimate mushroom, snowshoes for when traveling in the ice caves, a sled for traveling even faster in ice caves, a plug for spider holes, a Shambler costume, a signpost ("Caution, Lurker"), a drum, a pillow.
Then someone brought up that magic mushrooms would likely have some special properties. This opened up a whole new line of thinking:
A fireproof mushroom boat for crossing lava, a mushroom to eat and make you small, a mushroom to eat and make you big, glowing mushrooms to light up a room, super big mushrooms to dam a river, super big fireproof mushrooms to dam a lava flow, super big mushrooms to build a house from, singing mushrooms as alarm systems, exploding mushrooms as booby-traps, and psychic screaming mushrooms as clocks.
Turns out, this might just be the most important spell in all the Underworld!
What do you think? Have anything to add to either of these conversations? If so, head on over to the forums and tell us!
Other News[edit]
Last Newsletter we gave a shout out to Outer Wilds, an innovative space exploration game that was oh so close to reaching it's funding with just 3 days to go. Great to see they were able to fund in their final days, no doubt with a bit of help from our fans.
The Martian is coming out on film this week in the States, and looks to be quite promising. Turns out there is an OtherSide connection. Andy Weir, the author of the book, worked with some of us at Floodgate, the game studio Paul ran before OtherSide. Andy was a lead programmer at Floodgate, quite talented. We did not realize at the time that he had another talent, as a writer. Wonderful to see the success of the book, and how it and the upcoming film are spurring renewed interest in space exploration.
The OtherSide Team