mrimer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster
Rank Points: 5141
Registered: 02-04-2003
IP: Logged
|
DROD: The City Beneath not released as planned (+2)
The crack Caravel dev team has been working round the clock from all parts of the world to bring The City Beneath to you. We had bar excitement leading up to JtRH, and Matt helped take that to the next level with TCB's DeadlyBarOfDeath, then bar goodies, which led to Mr. Bar, poser bars, all variety of bar secrets, and the Riddle of the Bar.
People have been reading in all kinds of secret meaning into the periodic, fractional bar progress updates. Some people think there's some subtle or blatant trickery going on, and obviously you're expecting some kind of joke.
Well, the truth of the matter is that we couldn't come up with an April Fool's joke to top the one from two years ago. We could do something like release a big message saying, "TCB IS OUT!", and then, you know, it's not really out. So everyone gets confused and looks around for it, but they don't find anything, cause, well, it's not out, after all. But we're not going to do something like that this year.
I've been long shooting for a March release, and lately have gained the extra incentive of eagerly expecting BeefontheBone to eat his words, along with his hat. I was envisioning that he would have someone film him doing it and then he could upload it somewhere for us to see. (That was the plan, right?)
But we don't have things in place, and I'm disappointed it won't come to pass as expected. We're not dropping the project -- we've just got more things to take care of, you know, before it's really available.
There are lots of crazy people to meet and wild puzzles in TCB, and we hope you'll be surprised and amazed when you see it. For inspiration in story design, I turned to Godel, Escher, Bach. I recall reading a chapter in that book where Achilles and the Tortoise are chatting, as usual, about surprise story endings, and then the police break into their place and haul one of them off or something like that. As they had (coincidentally) been discussing, bizarre events like that, which didn't make any sense, carrying no cohesion or precedent with the earlier story, were supposed to be a sign that at some earlier point in the text, the story had actually ended.
It was written that way just to make sure that people weren't expecting the ending to occur right where the words ended. So they added some "word padding" to the end of the text and only people who had really been paying attention would have noticed where the "real" story ended and the padding began. So that's a bit like how things will be with TCB. So I'm going to get back to playing WoW now, and once I get my druid to level 70, then I'll finish coding up the unicycle track and building those last few puzzle rooms.
____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.
|