April Showers OOC Chatter Thread

[Gelquie]

Re: latest post -
I did indeed solve the puzzle! ...No spoilers even here. 8D Just a response!

SPOILER: Click to show

Indeed, it did take us a while! Darn our pacifistic tendencies. xDD I'm sure knowing kudzu, we'll still have our work cut out for us, don't worry, Chia Pets.

[Lizica]

We're down to the final-final boss!! \ o / Please note that this turn will very likely be the final turn of this puzzle.

Its deadline is Saturday, June 27th, at 10:00 pm EST.



((Oh hey, cool, my 2,000th post! \ o /))

[Pixie]

Big congrats everyone, on solving the final puzzle! We need some time for crafting the narratorpost and arting, so it will all go up some time tomorrow.

[Celestial]

Lizica Pixie, when are you planning to move on? I am really wanting to make a post but have to fight a lot of bad brain stuff right now. I hope to do it tomorrow but..?

[Lizica]

Hey everyone! Congrats again on winning your boss fight!! \ o / The next post will lay out how the timeline for the rest of the denouement will work, but in the meantime, if you’re interested, here’s some inspiration and metagame stuff about the plant fight.

SPOILER: Click to show

So each item ability did have a specific use. Obviously you guys figured most of them out, but there were a few twists that didn’t happen (which was probably good for you, but).

Let’s start with the bamboo. We had a whole system set up if players hadn’t figured it out right away:
After two turns, a Bamboo Shoot would grow into a Medium Bamboo. A Medium Bamboo would take two more turns to grow into a Large Bamboo. And while a Large Bamboo required two physical hits from the Shears to be defeated, a Medium Bamboo required just one physical hit from the Shears. And also, every third turn, a new shoot would pop up.

So, you see now why we labeled each of the bamboo enemies as A and B and such, because if you all hadn’t immediately used the Gardening Gauntlets to pull one up and simultaneously used the Ethereal Earplugs to stop the growth of the other, you might have allowed the Shoots to grow up into bigger forms that required the Sheer Shears to cut them down over multiple turns. (Originally we had the growing intervals be every turn, but we realized during an early test run that if players didn’t use the correct items right away, they’d be overrun super quickly. x'D)

Speaking of overrun, the bamboo had some RL inspiration. For a while in April, the camera roll on Lizica’s phone looked like this:

Bamboo shoots just kept coming up in the yard and growing like mad, they seemed endless at first. But if you pull them up young, you can boil them in rice water and eat them in a good stir fry. But also yeah, when they get to a certain height, ain’t no way you’re gonna pull that thing up with your bare hands or even gloves. That’s when you have to saw it down.

Anyway, onto the snake plant. After the bamboo, if players had been overconfident in the Shears’ physical ability, using it on the Snake Plant would have split it like a hydra. The cutting would have been sliced off and immediately taken root in the ground, producing a second Snake Plant. So a less physically cutting attack like the Shears’ magical move would be needed to defeat them.

However, if the Gardening Gauntlets’ magical ability was used on the Snake Plant at the same time as the Shears cutting it, the Gauntlets’ magic would have been able to securely catch the Snake Plant Cutting and prevent it from taking root.

This plant had some RL inspiration as well. Pixie’s family’s living room is actually full of snake plants. Long ago there was only one, but they grow from cuttings to be several feet tall, and they really tend to multiply.

When they get this tall, they sometimes bend and break, and then there is a fresh cutting to grow new roots elsewhere. In addition to the reptilian name, this trait made it a good fit for a hydra-like opponent.

And then there’s our buddy the kudzu golem. Mostly just inspired by seeing this stuff growing over everything and creating strange, hulking shapes from what’s underneath. (Thank you, April Showers, for allowing us to take advantage of this very old mental image of magical beast kudzu.) And yeah, pretty relatively simple to subdue (unlike its nonmagical RL counterpart)--just needed to give it the physical Ethereal Earplugs to pacify it and get it to calm down. (If anyone’s keen on rereading the narratorpost where we introduced the guard plants, we did try to vaguely allude to how the kudzu reacted with increasing discomfort in proportion to the level of noise, culminating when multiple people shrieked about Mr. Snuggles. So yeah, it turns out it was actually not Mr. Snuggles that set it off, but the sound everyone made in response. Was it too vague? Maybe. Was it a puzzle at all? *uncertain jazz hands* But it was an intimidating final boss, and we were excited you guys saved that one for last!)

So anyway, to break down this boss fight into the power items’ moves alone:
Sheer Shears: (Physical) used to cut Medium and Large Bamboo, splits Snake Plant; (Magical) defeats Snake Plant
Gardening Gauntlets: (Physical) pulls up Bamboo Shoots; (Magical) prevents a Snake Plant Cutting from taking root
Ethereal Earplugs: (Physical) pacifies the Kudzu Golem; (Magical) prevents Bamboo Shoots and Medium Bamboo from growing

And that was the main gist of the boss fight! Hopefully it was fun for you all to navigate, even if it was a little confusing at first. ^^

[Gelquie]

Ooh, thank you, that's a neat run-down! =D

SPOILER: Click to show

I had no idea you could eat bamboo shoots; that sounds like that could be good! ^^ *Internet searches it.* ...Heavy emphasis on the need to boil them, though, for casual readers!

(But also, how do they taste?)
(EDIT: ...Wait, I belatedly remember that I have definitely had at least the pre-prepared variety from a mongolian grill place, so I guess scratch that question unless someone else is curious. xD )

Anyway, yeah, that makes a lot of sense on cutting it down now; I nearly forgot their composition. Not sure if I ever encountered any IRL. The more I know! \ o /

Same with the snake plants; those seem extremely cool! =D I did consider using the physical ability on the snake plants, and now I'm glad I went with magical.

Also, yeah, it does seem like the kudzu could make some interesting shapes! Makes a great choice for a monster and final boss. ^^

This was a fun fight/puzzle to do; thanks for all the work on this!

[Pixie]

Coming out of the endgame, you may have questions about the timeframe for finishing up the story-- we have answers! If the schedule below doesn’t answer them all, just ask!

-The next narrator post will be either Saturday (7/4) or Sunday (7/5), to allow time for responses.

-After that, there will be 4-5 days left for players to wrap up and handle whatever revelations are to come in the greenhouse.

-Finally, we will have a timeskip for our epilogue-- either one or two months based on your feedback in the newest poll that is going up-- and let the game wind down to its conclusion.

[Gelquie]

I see you have a timeskip preference thing! (Which I originally interpreted as "how long in real-time the epilogue should last"; that's my bad, oops!)

I honestly don't know if I have a preference. And it might depend on the narratorpost, so I'll probably wait for that before voting. (I gave a vote before, but then I realized I don't actually know, so I retracted it.) I'll ultimately go with whatever majority!
But I may poke you coordinators a bit later about what I'm thinking for a character arc epilogue. ^^

(After the Narratorpost.)

[Lizica]

Hey, just a quick copy-paste note--

Due to some players wanting more time to reply to Iris, we’ve divided the narratorpost into two parts. For now we've posted just the first part, and more will come next time in the second part in a few days. Thanks for rolling with us!!

And now we must bed. *ollies out*

[Gelquie]

Re: my latest post - ...It is so, so tempting to make a "don't swipe to the next file!" joke re: Era letting Iris borrow their phone. xD But honestly, Era's files are probably pretty clean, and probably chock full of weather stuff anyway, so that'd probably just pull up another photo or video of the weather. (Probably smaller filesize by comparison because lol phone storage space; I imagine Era just wanted a compiled video on hand for easy referencing and put the rest of the big ones onto an external storage drive. Or uploaded them somewhere, but that's not an option right now anyway.)

Unless Iris for some reason foregoes the entire video watching and swipes a billion files until she finds Era's old tipsy karaoke rendition of "High Hopes" that they could've sworn they deleted but forgot to.

[Lizica]

Hey everyone! We're nearing completion with the upcoming narratorpost. Sorry for the delay, and thanks for being patient with us--this is gonna be a monster post, but hopefully an enjoyable one! XD

[Gelquie]

Woo, Narratorpost! \ o / That was really great to read!

My comments are pretty surface at the moment as I read it recently and it's close to bedtime, but I just wanted to say something for now. ^^

SPOILER: Click to show

It was really cool how we all had to come together to figure it out, and the method to do so! It makes me a happy scientist. Era has a lot of thoughts on this too! But I'll let that come out through an upcoming post. I imagine they stayed in the center area, because weather expert-to-be, and also, they didn't particularly want to keep moving around anyway.

And aah, this explains a lot in hindsight about the quarrels between Holiday and Airin! Yay for Holiday finally being free. ^^

[Pixie]

Our denouement monsterpost went up in the very early morning! Huzzah! Now, we will stick to the schedule of 4-5 days before the epilouge, which will give some time to read our glorious behemoth.

While we were writing, I had an idea for a spoilery meme-- it's now below, for viewing after the latest update.

SPOILER: Click to show

(I thought a line in the big reveal was funny out of context, so it's a reference to The Treachery of Images)

[Lizica]

*jazz hands up at the post above me* =D

And also... *slides over* *whispers* No one has mentioned the bonus puzzle in a while. =o And we're allowed to say that now, that it's a bonus puzzle and not a red herring or something. It's not necessarily in-universe, and nothing will happen in-universe when it's solved. But you should have all the pieces. =O

*waggles hands mysteriously and slides back out*

[PFA]

Jul 12, 2020 16:37:29 GMT -5 Lizica said:

And also... *slides over* *whispers* No one has mentioned the bonus puzzle in a while. =o And we're allowed to say that now, that it's a bonus puzzle and not a red herring or something. It's not necessarily in-universe, and nothing will happen in-universe when it's solved. But you should have all the pieces. =O

*waggles hands mysteriously and slides back out*

I definitely haven't forgotten about it, I just neglected to point it out because I was waiting for it to show up in-story so I wouldn't be over here tinfoil hatting in the corner. XD

BUT NOW I HAVE PERMISSION TO TINFOIL *dons hat*

Here's all the ones I found:

SPOILER: Click to show

Kinda harder to see than anticipated, so uh:
1-10-6
3-10-3
5-4-2
2-11-7
8-7-3
4-2-2
6-3-6
7-17-3 (I'm not 100% sure about 17)