SBURBDEV Forum

[Legendary]

Let's start with the obvious:

Sprites can be prototyped twice.
ONE of these prototypings must be with a dead or doomed object.
The other may be with an inanimate object.
Frogs are prototypable. This causes the Queen to flip the fuck out.
It is possible to prototype yourself, yourself from a doomed future, or your dreamself.
The above is very stupid to do.
Sprites provide information to the player once the second prototyping has occured.
Sprites can heal the player.
Sprites can battle with the player.
Sprites may not go through gates.
Sprites may help the server player in manipulating a client's environment.
After a particular rung, the sprite will give the player a medal with which to summon them.
Sprites inevitably die. This does not have to happen where the player can see.

Gosh! This is a lot. I will leave the details of prototyping out for right now, except as far as they concern Sprites. For gameplay purposes, I suggest that we remove the self-prototyping option. Prototyping yourself directly makes it impossible to head through the gates unless you happen to have a robot to possess, and that is very unlikely with humans. Prototyping your future self gives you time players a weird advantage in that you can basically get all the info ahead of time. It's also very difficult to pull off since you know, time travel is something we can't actually simulate here. Finally, dreamself prototypings render a sprite useless.

So, with that said, it is obvious that Sprites handle, to some extent, like consorts. They manipulate the house and they have battling capabilities. It will be wise to carry that over. They also are desperately necessary for balance purposes in the early parts of the game, and to some extent will help balance players who have consort followers with players who do not.

I also believe there have been implications that each sprite has custom information based on the player: Nannasprite tells John about how to be the Heir, and Jade complains that Jadesprite told her nothing about what a Hero of Space was supposed to do. Thus, we need custom conversations for each class and domain. We should also make several kinds of classifications for the dead/doomed individual prototyped I can think of:

Non-human: A plant, animal, or other which has been prototyped. These should be relatively stupid and child-like in script, ala Jaspersprite. They also tend to repeat their stereotypical noise ("Caw caw, motherfuckers").
Old Guardian: Nannasprite, basically. They focus on their generated interests and fight with them (the cookies), and also talk in an old-timey way, often jokingly.
Young Guardian: A hypothetical Dadsprite. Again focused on interests, but tends towards a regular speech pattern.
Self: Possible still, but I advise against it for reasons above.
?????: Possible option to account for Calsprite. This would be very useless and harmful to the player so I don't recommend we code it, but I think it's worth noting.

Again, I invite thoughts, comments, contributions, and arguments. Let's figure this out!

[demosthenes2k8]

> CC: Veto the Calsprite option
You fail to veto the Calsprite option. You simply don't have the rank to.
> CC: Politely state your opinions

As you can tell, I think that a Calsprite option would be a bad idea...
Other than that, I like it. Just two little things I've been thinking about:

First of all, self-prototyping would indeed be hard to do. Same with future-self prototyping and dream-self. A simple solution, like you stated, would be just to outright disallow it.

Second, I like that they help manage a house for a player, but I'm not sure having a server player control them is the most realistic solution. I just don't know how else it might work...

[Legendary]

I suspect, based on Rose's comments, that the simplest mechanic would be that there's a random number generator and if you don't roll the right number the sprite outright refuses to follow commands. Note of course that also a client player's summoning their sprite supersedes any action a server might choose.

[The Cool]

A thing that I noticed: Kernelsprite preferences.

Not just preference to dead things, but apreference for things the player has actively attacked, whether on purpose or due to mishandling the controls.

John maimed the harlequin doll by accidentally reelasing shards o glass fron his sylladex.
John toppled Nanna's urn.
Rose devestated the Princess doll to mae it all cthulhuy.
Rose desecraed Jaspers's tomb.
Dave LAUNCHED A SWORD at the crow.
Alternate Future Dave sliced the shit out of Cal.
Jade SHOT BULLETS at Bec.


The only exceptions are selfprototyping, and maybe some of the lusii.

[Interloper]

Interesting find, but I think it would be too complex for what we're doing here - I assume a lot of that was for dramatic purposes, and the kids did attack other things (ie, their other guardians).

[The Cool]

Thing I noticed about it was that these were things that would be interpreted by the game as 'things the players dont mind attacking'.
thus: prime material for making enemies out of!