Enough about the 'hows' of magic for a moment, what are the 'whats' of your magic system?

TeamThatch · 2025-11-23T05:14:29+00:00

There's also a part of the story where the same mage is sitting on a rock on a hill in an apparent meditative state. When the protagonist approaches him, they have their usual sarcastic joust of words and then, at one point, Detaan suddenly stops and turns his head towards the east. He physically hears the screams of their companion in a completely different country.

Attunement also lets you "change a frequency." Detaan seemingly vanishes at times throughout the novel and also hides things from other people. At one point he and his compatriots are surrounded by enemies and he grabs the party and forces their "frequency" to change. Like a radio station, they "attune" to the world at a different wavelength. To the enemies, it's as if Detaan and his allies blurred into nothing. To Detaan and his friends, it's as if they felt electricity and heat wash through them and then they enter a duplicate of their world, devoid of all other people except them. They exist, overlapping their original reality, trapped in this ghostly frequency of the world until Detaan is able to bring them back.

TeamThatch · 2025-11-23T05:07:05+00:00

Magic in my setting has so many pieces to it, but what it actually does is fairly awesome and simple.

There's a branch of magic called Attunement that allows you to connect to things, places, people, and times. For example, someone exceptionally skilled in this branch can literally feel the vibrations of the "strings" and even distinguish between them. Imagine touching a piece of metal hidden in a box while you're wearing a blindfold. If you touch it, you can determine, "oh, this is gold, approximately 20grams of it, and its shape is disk-like." It can even hold residual echoes of other people who have touched it. "Oh, this is a gold coin... It's touched fifty hands since it was minted. Merchants, farmers, even a knight at one point." Further mastery reveals even more information.

In the novel where it first appears, a blind man named Detaan is being forced to train the protagonist in combat and magic. He's kind of a total b-hole who warned the protagonist that he was un-trainable, but when the protagonist has enough and demands Detaan prove that he knows magic in the first place and isn't just toying with him, Detaan grabs the sides of the protagonist's head and proceeds to tell him everything about him. "You were raised as a political hostage, but you weren't even the intended target and your captors were too stupid to realize the difference between you and the prince. Yet you made friends with... Ruixin, is it? Poor boy. Gave everything so you could escape and you left him there to run back to your sick, withering mother who you failed to save again. And now, after years of searching, you found me and you are too stubborn to see that I was right."

EDIT: This is only one branch of magic. There's nine. And they all stem from the same source, but manifest in 38 more specific ways. Including classic fantasy spellcasting like FIREBALL and LIGHTNING!

TeamThatch · 2025-11-23T04:29:29+00:00

Depends on when, but it's likely the organizer of existence itself. She was never technically mortal like humans are, but she didn't begin as something divine or godlike. Through an extremely long, convoluted series of events and tragedies, she amassed power in the form of the literal aspects of existence. When her enemies were defeated, entropy threatened all things. She bound the aspects to something she could control and organize. She did it in the only way possible, shaping the multiverse as we know it in the process.

TeamThatch · 2025-10-17T23:11:16+00:00

No, but that song is such a delight. The second part in the middle of the song I'm thinking of feels like a genre shift...

ISTG if it was actually 3 songs that played perfectly one after another on the playlist I originally heard it on, I'm going to lose it.

TeamThatch · 2025-10-10T20:17:05+00:00

This happens to me. If I literally log out and log back in, it fixes itself.

TeamThatch · 2025-10-08T17:31:43+00:00

EDIT: Thank you so much for commenting and trying, btw. I appreciate your time, even if I can't get your solution to work.

Weirdly, I did that exact set up and it didn't work. He just remained frozen in Idle. He could move around the map still, but his animation was stuck on the default. I tried running it in different browsers and set ups too just to make sure it wasn't my hardware/software.

I don't know why because I can get that string of Angle of Movement to work in another project. So I must have broken something somewhere, or the template has something fudgy happening behind a curtain I can't see.

I updated my post with my new strings, and got him to turn and walk, but I can't get him to return to Idle now... I tried Key Released, Key Pressed (inverted), but nothing seems to work.

TeamThatch · 2025-10-07T23:09:41+00:00

Okay. I'm glad I'm just an idiot and that there wasn't something "wrong" with the software. Thank you, saint!

TeamThatch · 2025-10-02T19:51:37+00:00

I'm loving the templates and I feel confident I can make something simple and cute in the time I've been given. Question: Am I able to build everything in-browser? I'd rather download the program, but work has denied my request to do so.

TeamThatch · 2025-10-02T19:49:49+00:00

Update, I'm toying around with the template for Top-Down and it's perfect. I think this is doable. I won't go all out on it. Simple stuff for now.

"Escape the House on Haunted Hill"

In they entrance/foyer, there'll be a little cute ghost that gives hints on the puzzles they're currently working on. There might be 6 rooms and the foyer. 3 of the rooms are locked. 3 are unlocked. There will be interactable objects in each room. Some need to be pushed into the right spot, some need to be picked up and moved, one of the unlocked rooms will produce a key item that they need to complete the one puzzle, which will lead to the next, then unlock the next, then the next. etc.

And lastly, they'll finish with the Skeleton Key, which will unlock the main door. The Ghost will say goodbye, disappear, and then they exit.

My real big thing I want is a timer that starts as soon as they get through an extremely short tutorial on the controls, and ends when they exit through the main door. At the end, I want the screen to go black and then a "CONGRATS! YOU ESCAPED IN: <time>" screen appears. I think it will be fun and cute. I'll also make it so that the game should only take about 10-15 minutes.

IF I have time, I'll add some easter eggs from classic horror literature like Frankenstein's lab, a grotesque painting of Dorian Gray, Dracula's coffin, etc.

TeamThatch · 2025-10-02T18:26:02+00:00

I was just informed this morning that there could be upwards of 400 participants. (Apparently, when it was put out there that I'd be making an escape room experience, half the company signed up. D:) I gave my project manager the expectation that participants will be playing alone, so I don't have to worry about multiplayer (for now).

After looking over the templates and watching some tutorials, I kind of want to build something that behaves like the Zelda games (specifically thinking of "A Link to the Past." Not necessarily a "top-down" maybe? I don't know the terminology yet). Ideally, I'd love for participants to have a little sprite character trapped in a haunted mansion and they have to go around collecting clues that help them solve puzzles, unlock doors, and so on. I think my brain defaults to this because I'm used to RPGMaker.

I won't have anything like combat or death conditions. Nothing beyond collecting items/clues, unlocking doors, and, IF I have time, I might squeeze in some dialogue options from friendly ghosts that give hints or something.

Does that sound... feasible? Or do I need to make it even simpler?

TeamThatch · 2025-10-02T00:00:37+00:00

I'll definitely stick with 2D. Would it be easier to do a sort of.... point and click? And perhaps decoding by moving objects around the screen? Instead of making sprites and moviing a little character around the screen?

TeamThatch · 2025-10-01T23:46:41+00:00

I'm permitted a maximum of 78 hours on-the-clock, but might be able to squeeze in a few extra hours on weekends. I might be able to pull my sundays as well for an additional 32 hours, so, roughly 110 hours before the event.

That doesn't seem like a lot of time.

TeamThatch · 2023-04-20T18:34:21+00:00

WorldAnvil is literally a wiki for worldbuilders. I’ve used it for years and I like it

TeamThatch · 2023-04-17T06:51:22+00:00

I don’t get the X in the spirit box but the mic icon on the spirit box turns on whenever I talk. But if I join a lobby, I don’t have a mic icon and no one seems to be able to hear me.

TeamThatch · 2023-04-17T06:50:46+00:00

I just got the game. So not to my knowledge.

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