Mobius Finale is up

[cranebump]

 

NOTES:

• I'd say this is likely a work in progress, but it DOES seem to be pretty clean.
• Picking a decent map for the last mish was a bear. I wanted to use Baatzul Hell, but NPCs were annoying to get, and often got stuck in the scenery. The one I picked isn't as evocative, but it is unique, and seems to work.
• Break frees. Take some, if you're psi-defense deficient.
• Be sure to check clues (I'd have the box open and to the side, all the time [if you don't already]). Otherwise, you'll miss some story.

 

Let me know about any issues. It all ran pretty well in tests.

[Zhym]

I just finished this, and bravo, @cranebump—very well done.  It's a great story (although I don't think I understood half of it—my problem, not yours).   And that last clue for the final mission?  Prefect.  It's a shame it's not possible in AE to make that a cut scene. 

 

Overall, I thought the level of polish was pretty good.  I did notice several errors in the bios in the first mission, and a stray typo here and there.

 

A few notes on the missions:

 

Mission 1

Spoiler

• This one took me a long time—mostly because I had to stop and read all the bios!  There's some great stuff in there. 
• When I saw this could be run at up to level 46, I thought, "Oh, hey, cool—I can have all my incarnate powers!  I'll turn up the difficulty slider to +1/x8!"  I won't say that was a bad idea, necessarily, but hoo boy, I was not ready for how tough that mission would be.  The Shadow Supers are tough, especially in numbers, and their powers complement each other well.  I died multiple times, even with T4 incarnates, at least once shortly after firing up T4 Barrier.  I eventually completed the mission at +1/x8, but I dialed the difficulty down to +0/x4 after that.
• The mobs around the "spikes" were all moving in unison.  That was weird.  Like they were doing a line dance or something.
• Is "Eagle Eye" related to the NPC contact of the same name?  All the other Shadow Supers seem unique, so I don't know if "Eagle Eye" was an oversight or a reference.
• FWIW, I didn't find the ally until the very end.  Big map, lots of mobs at x8, so there was a bit of a hunt.  I'd suggest making the objective of finding the ally optional if possible.
• A few typos in bio/info text:
  • Hellbeast: s/b "His brother Hubert's arcane power" (no commas)
  • Heirloom: I think the commas around Hubert's name should be removed here too
  • Major Viktory: the comma after "government" shouldn't be there
  • Tidal Townes: s/b "Townes was a"
  • Kestral: should that say "most of her superpowered life?"
  • Moon Trooper: s/b "Founding members."  I'd also clean up the sentence fragments in that bio, personally.
  • There are some other grammatical choices I'd quibble with; you seem to use commas a lot more liberally than I think is technically correct.

 

Mission 2

Spoiler

• Another really cool mission.  The strands are great, with just one annoyance: they have some kind of power that makes them invulnerable for a time (Moment of Glory, maybe?).  Whatever it is, there's no animation to go along with it or other visible effect, so it's hard to see when one of the strands has gone unhittable.  It would be nice if there were some visible cue, like what you get with the Fake Nemesis FF bubble or Illusionists fading out. 
• Post-accpetance text: either need a space in "dead-" (or better yet, replace the hyphens with em-dashes—yes, that's a very nitpicky detail).

 

Mission 3

Spoiler

• Pre-acceptance text says "see your Clues screen before going on," but the clue doesn't show up until mission accepted.
• I should have paid attention to the mission levels—the drop in power level was a bit of a surprise!  Fortunately, most of the mobs were stock CoT, so they went down easy at 0/x4 even at level 37.
• Personally, I think that map is too big for the objectives.  I stealthed past a whole lot of mobs, but on a character without stealth I'd probably have gotten sick of fighting CoT on my way to the big fight at the end. 
• OTOH, there is some great "flavor" along the way in the Minion Minder and a hostage.  But I'd still suggest maybe a smaller map (but then, I'm not a big fan of Oranbega maps).

 

Mission 4

Spoiler

• The "Lieutenant" being a boss was confusing. :)
• When I ran this, Tecnique spawned further down the map than Dis did.  I had Dis and minions all defeated by the time I came across Tecnique.  I don't know if there's a way to reliably spawn the ally any earlier in the map.

 

Mission 5

Spoiler

• I really like what you've done with the mobs in this mission.  Really creative and evocative. 
• When the objective became "Get Aaron to the Focal Point," I was surprised that there wasn't a target on the map showing where to take him.
• I think that map worked—and as a player, I appreciate choosing playability over atmosphere.  The atmosphere on that map seems fine to me.   Although it's too bad there's no figure-8 map.

 

Finally, there are a couple of typos in the souvenir text:

Spoiler

• ...which sends 5 Shados of..." - needs a "w" in "Shadows"
• "...lived.you With 2..."  That "you" looks like it shouldn't be there.

 

Overall, a fine ending to the series.  I'm looking forward to seeing @TerroirNoir2 taking Engineria through it.

Edited December 13, 2022 by Zhym

[cranebump]

Great feedback, thank you. Here's some "behind the scenes" stuff on this:

 

M1:

Spoiler

Eagle Eye is based on tabletop character that a player of mine once made for a WW2 era play-by-post campaign. I originally used this specific NPC in a mission based on the Sand Kings. I totally forgot about Eagle Eye in KR, but I think it's probably okay to keep the name, since this Eagle Eye dates from WW2 and the current one is an 80s super. That's my rationale, anyway.:-) 

 

Hollow Point: Only thing he really does, mechanically, is allude to the disappearance of other supers, which is touched on by Dempsey at end of mish. His location really IS a crapshoot, though. Most of the time, I find him on upper level highway. Other times...well, you know about that, don't you?

 

Commas: well, there's standard English commas, journalistic commas, and then just doing whatever you want, which is what I do when creative writing. This includes employing sentence fragments if I like the rhythm of a full stop over a slight pause (or if someone is speaking, because people don't typically employ 100% correct grammar in everyday speech). Of course, some of those commas are just plain errors, too.:-)

M2:

Spoiler

Strands: I did not intentionally include the rez power. After making the base "minion" group, I used the same enemy, changed rank to the next higher level, then changed the save name. When you up the rank, the editor picks additional powers to account for the level shift. One of them musta been that rez power. I was surprised by it myself when it first happened in testing. Afterward, I thought briefly about changing it, then decided, "Well…my brain IS trying to kill me here, so…what the hell." Agree it'd be nice to signal the rez in some way.

 

M3:

Spoiler

That text should probably read, "See your Clues screen before entering mission" (or something like it). I just mainly wanted the player not to miss the interlude where Angevin shows up to rouse them from their hospital bed. Hopefully this is an easy change. I was running up against text limits a LOT in this arc. So, checking on small typos MIGHT be a huge pain in the ass to fix on some of the text screens (keeping my fingers crossed on that).

 

I agree about the map, in general. However, I do like the doors between areas, and I REALLY like that Zoria always pops up in that last room. Sometimes you catch him and his "dogs" there with an extra spawn, and then the fight gets interesting in those close quarters.

 

Anyhoo, as far as a shorter map, it wouldn't be hard to do, as I don't really need the whole "Dogs of War" angle, which is mainly there as window dressing. I also thought it'd be interesting if Zoria were up to something when the PC tracked them down (yet again), so there'd be this whole, WHY won't people leave me alone to conquer the damned world?

 

M4:

Spoiler

Lieutenant as boss: my rank structure for those guys is soldier, sergeant, LT, Captain. I guess since I was an NCO I feel they need to be in the leadership chain somewhere.:-)

 

Teknique spawn: You hit the nail on the head as to why she's optional. In initial runs, she spawned in one of the first big rooms, where the exits branch east and west, right there on the platform. This was 100% consistent for 2-3 runs. Then, all of a sudden, I started seeing her in the final room sometimes, close by Dis, but not at the back. I've never seen her at the VERY back, as you describe. But the fact that she bounced there in the test runs is the reason she's optional. I'd like to make her mandatory, because I want the player to aid her in her redemption. But she isn't really all that great of an add in the boss fight, since she's not super powerful to begin with.  That, plus the inconsistency of the spawn point is the main reason she's optional.

 

M5:

Spoiler

Man, an infinity symbol map would be awesome! I didn't even think of that. The mobs themselves are reused from the original Mobius arc, with the verbiage edited to jibe with Angevin's observation of the nature of the Mobius. I really wanted to use those guys as a curve ball at the end, esp. after Dempsey's like "we don't know what we'll find there." Originally, they were Guardians of Thought, Time, and some other thing, and you fought through them to find this "Watcher on High" NPC (who turned out to be Statesman). I wanted to keep the Statesman redemptive death aspect, while keeping this the last arc, so I decided about 2 arcs back that Angevin was, in fact, a vessel for Statesman, but wasn't fully aware of it. Since this was now a part of the story, I needed a proper task for him, so it was to "sacrifice" himself to close the Mobius while sending the PC back home.

 

Aaron: Oh, man this guy. In the first place, I really needed a reason why he was kidnapped multiple times. Since I new we'd the Wards would be recreating what The 5 originally did, I just decided, okay, this guy is important because he has Quikling's power, which were burnt out in the original process. They're unique powers, and cannot be replicated, like everything else. Therefore, Aaron must participate. Easy peazy. 

 

So now, we get to his big moment. I originally make him a straight up escort. Due to issues with circular spawns, though, I couldn't make him work as such (activating Aaron activated the focal point I needed to lead him to, so AE wouldn't do it without an intervening objective). This was giving me fits, along with navigating the Baatzul Map itself (Angevin and Cory kept getting stuck in the scenery, pretty much every time through). When finally I ditched that map for the very straightforward Tyrant map, I went ahead and dropped the mandatory escort, put the verbiage Get Aaron to the Focal Point on the glowie text, and left Aaron as a non-combat NPC so he'd survive the journey. Since there's only one way to go (well, except backward)I didn't worry about losing the Nav Point option that comes with Escort. From an objective perspective, though Proceed to the Focal Point, would probably work just as well as objective text, though. 

 

ON THE ESCORT SUBJECT: I think this objective could be turned back into an escort mish, esp since I converted Aaron to Ally before I re-chose maps and then worked on the last encounter. After porting over the Guardians and redoing all their desricption texts, I then spent a very long time trying out various end bosses. I originally had 5 distinct bosses, appearing sequentially, in a chain of objectives, before settling on multiple iterations of Sister Psyche spawning all at the same time, in the last room (went with that because I thought it would be a biggest surprise, while following Mobius's ability to pulll images from different time periods).  Anyway, long story short - by the time all this is done, it's 2:30 a.m. So I didn't even think about going back to Aaron as a possible escort, given the simplification of map and final room encounter.

 

So, now that I AM considering the question: I think it'd be more interesting to use him as an escort, because his arrival text for him could reveal  "It's not working!" THEN we get the multiple bosses fight, followed by the secondary glowie (which was my original vision for this anyway). I might test this notion at some point, since Aaron has no combat abilities and cannot be targeted (well…that's what AE assures me…). What annoys me, however, is having to add failure text, due to the escort, even though technically the mish cannot fail, because Aaron cannot be targeted, and there is no timer.

 

Edited December 13, 2022 by cranebump

[TerroirNoir2]

Must not read!!

 

 

[cranebump]

Hehehehehe...RESIST!