Chapter Ten: Battling the Shadows
One week before Zan Xinyi’s deadline, the window’s still lit with an unknown green light, the monsters roaming the streets are getting larger and larger, and the three of them are gathering together on the couch for the first attempted complete playthrough of the game level. Personally, Zan Xinyi doesn’t know why either of them needed to be there for it or make a big deal about it, but when she dropped the news of what she was doing yesterday during dinner, it was like she suddenly had two bouncy puppy dogs with huge eyes and noses just big enough to stick into her business.
“It probably won’t work,” Zan Xinyi repeats testily. “And the one music track I’ve received thus far might not even play. You don’t have to watch.”
“Tilt the screen a little more this way,” Wei Shengyuan says.
Jiang Jin smiles brightly at her, leaning over her right shoulder to stare at the video screen. Currently, the starting screen is just a copied version of the Door to Night that Wei Shengyuan drew for her.
When she presses down on the spacebar, the screen goes black and then loads in the first level.
“Wow, this is so exciting. It really feels like we’re actually making a game.”
“We are actually making a game,” Zan Xinyi says.
With their back to the camera, the Lantern-Bearer’s only visible traits are their long hooded cloak and the bright lantern that hangs off of their staff, which they lift ahead of them when they walk and only put it down when they are standing still.
The azure glow from the lantern does not actually illuminate any part of the dark road, merely tinting parts of it a lighter shade of blue.
Zan Xinyi presses down on the forward arrow key on her keyboard, and the Lantern-Bearer begins to move forward through the only part of the screen not clogged by trees. The UI in the right upper corner of the screen has a small circle with a cloud in it.
“I should’ve made the path more visible,” Wei Shengyuan mutters. “Can’t we put a sign with an arrow?”
“No, the user experience isn’t a priority,” Zan Xinyi says. Continuing into the tunnel of dark trees, the Lantern Bearer keeps walking as the cloud cover creating almost total darkness fades away, the gloom becoming brighter and brighter until--
Two shadowy monsters appear in front of the Lantern-Bearer, light from a single beam of sunlight illuminating their part of the path. Though again, it’s just a yellow filter.
LANTERN-BEARER: To think the dawn would come so soon...and with it, the monsters born from sunlight.
LANTERN-BEARER: I didn’t want to call for them so early. It seems like every step further from the Door to Night is a struggle.
“How mysterious!” Jiang Jin says cheerfully.
“I didn’t realize you were actually going to write dialogue,” Wei Shengyuan says. He’s pulled out his tablet and is making notes. “I’ll redo the font on those. It’s hard to read.”
“I could do voices for them!”
“You can voice other characters. The Lantern-Bearer won’t be voiced.”
Zan Xinyi hunches her shoulders, hesitating over clicking the next button. That was the easy part. Now, it’s her battle system that has to function.
LANTERN-BEARER: WITCH BENEATH CLEAR SKIES! SIREN HIDDEN FROM THE STORM! Guide me as I will guide others. Grant me the grace I will give others. Protect me as you have protected others!
The screen once again fades out, showing only the Door to Night.
Then a black silhouette of a witch appears.
WITCH: Another fool begins their journey. We should let this one die, so they don’t struggle in vain.
A second silhouette with a cane appears next to her.
SIREN: We promised.
WITCH: I don’t remember any promise.
The door and silhouettes vanish, and the battlefield with an accompanying battlefield UI begins.
On the left, two shadowy monsters. On the right, the Witch and the Siren both appear in full color. One golden sparkle appears over the Siren’s head, with none over the Witch. In the center of the screen, 4 cards appear.
Zan Xinyi breathes out a deep sigh of relief. Thank fuck. For a while, the cards had simply not appeared properly on screen because she hadn’t realized that one of the randomizer options was ‘null’. E.g, instead of each character having two available card slots from which the randomizer would select two cards (duplicates possible) out of their two card pool and display them, there was a third option where the system would select null and no card would be drawn.
This problem had taken multiple days to resolve.
“Huh?” Jiang Jin says. “Yiyi, it looks like the Witch doesn’t have a sparkle. Is that bad?”
“That’s fine. If you check their character details--”
Ah, there’s no way for someone to check character details. Zan Xinyi had just been manually setting stuff in the backend.
“Well. If you could check their character details, you’d see that’s on purpose. All characters are set to have a max of six sparkles, gaining one automatically every turn. The Witch has an ability that grants her an extra sparkle when an enemy she’s cursed is damaged, and--”
“Do they have to be called sparkles,” Wei Shengyuan says.
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“Yes,” Zan Xinyi says. Duh. “Because it’s in the title. Well, I don’t need to explain more, since it should play out.”
Of the four cards on the screen, both of the Witch’s are the same card: Vicious Curse. For the Siren, he’s lucked out and gotten both of his abilities, Silenced Song and Dance of Hot Coals.
Vicious Curse is zoomed into a headshot of the lower part of the Witch’s face, the upper half hidden by the shadows cast by the brim of her hat. Silenced Song has a cracked seashell. Dance of Hot Coals shows steam rising from the Siren’s boots.
Wei Shengyuan actually named all of these abilities before he handed the designs over to her. Useful.
Vicious Curse is a zero sparkle cost ability, whereas Silenced Song costs one sparkle and Dance of Hot Coals costs four.
Zan Xinyi selects Vicious Curse for the witch’s first go, and then presses start because both of the Siren’s abilities aren’t accessible.
Then she realizes something the moment one of the shadows takes their first swipe at the Siren.
“The health bars aren’t visible...”
“So that actually did deal damage,” Jiang Jin says. “I thought the Siren dodged!”
She has not implemented a mechanic wherein characters have a random chance to just not get hit. Random dodging is evil.
“No. He got hit, you just can’t tell that it did anything.”
“How many hits can one of them take?” Wei Shengyuan asks.
“Around three or four...?” Probably. She can’t remember.
“And there’s two enemies?? Zan Xinyi, isn’t this dangerous for a tutorial? What happens if the monsters win?”
So many annoying questions.
“It’s not a tutorial, it’s a first level. And if the monsters win the game breaks.”
“Oh.”
“I’m working on it. Anyway, the game is easy once you understand it, so I won’t lose.”
“You could use a sound effect instead of a visible health bar,” Jiang Jin says.
“No,” Wei Shengyuan says hastily when he sees Zan Xinyi actually contemplate it. “No, that will be more work. Putting a number on screen is easy, tying music cues to a specific number is much harder. Don’t do it.”
Well he is right, but she hates it when other people say she can’t do things.
“I’ll think about it,” Zan Xinyi says.
While that debate is settled, it’s time for the Witch to take her turn. With a jerk of one arm— Zan Xinyi winces as the broom clips through both the Witch’s own outfit and some of the Siren’s— a red circle appears to burn around one of the shadows for a moment.
The Siren’s turn is completely skipped.
”Why doesn’t he have any zero sparkle moves?” Wei Shengyuan says. He cringes a bit when he says the word sparkle. “Like a basic attack.”
“Because you didn’t give him one,” Zan Xinyi says.
”Because you didn’t describe how the battle system worked!”
“The battle system is constantly evolving.”
During the argument, the shadows had both gone again, one hitting the Witch and one hitting the Siren.
But when the cards appear to let Zan Xinyi select the next move, there’s only three of them.
Zan Xinyi slowly closes her eyes and imagines swinging a crowbar at her computer screen a few times. She takes a calming, meditative deep breath.
It doesn’t help.
“The Witch only has one card this turn,” Jiang Jin observes.
Did she only fix the bug for the first draw. That’s ridiculous. Or is this a different bug where the replenishment of previously used cards stops working? Why would that even happen?
Zan Xinyi picks Silenced Song and then lets the turn play out again.
Silenced Song prevents one of the monsters from attacking for one turn. The Siren lifts his cane up, and a green circle appears around the non-cursed shadow monster.
Out of the corner of her eye she sees Wei Shengyuan jot down ‘work on 3D animation.’
He doesn’t like how janky the character animations are...He’s lucky the circles are different colors.
The rounds settle into mundanity as the bug that caused only 3 cards to spawn in turns out to be a one off.
Which is good for the game and bad for her, because it will be harder to figure out what’s wrong.
“Why has it been four rounds and we’ve never seen the Witch’s other card?” Jiang Jing asks. “This is kind of bad, isn’t it. Neither the Witch or the Siren have done any damage. I think. Unless the curse does damage?”
“It doesn’t.”
Zan Xinyi scowls at her cards.
“And it’s not a problem. The Siren finally has enough sparkles to do something useful.”
“Without his previous ability, you’d both be dead by now,” Wei Shengyuan says testily.
”You’re really defensive over this guy,” Zan Xinyi says. “And you don’t know that, you can’t see the health bars.” She clicks on Dance of Hot Coals and the Witch's curse card again.
With that addition, there are now two red rings on each of the shadows.
“What does the Vicious Curse even do?” Jiang Jin asks. “Do you have a way of conveying to the player what they do? I’m sure there’s a written description somewhere.”
That somewhere is in Zan Xinyi’s personal notes.
“There’s a double tap function,” Zan Xinyi says vaguely. “Let’s not test that right now. Anyway, Vicious Curse is a vulnerability debuff ability that lasts for a couple of turns. Makes the enemy weak. So when you use an AoE ability like Dance on Hot Coals, this happens.”
The Siren lifts up his cane and does a very slight shuffle.
”That’s not a dance,” Wei Shengyuan says. “He didn’t even lift up his feet!”
”The Siren must be in a lot of pain to have such restricted movements,” Jiang Jin says. “How sad.”
This shuts Wei Shengyuan up long enough for the damage to actually go through.
Simultaneously, both shadows erupt in green fire and turn to dust, and the battle screen blinks out, returning to the Lantern-Bearer being the only navigable player. In front of him, the Unknown Door appears.
”Ah, I forgot that we were technically playing the Lantern-Bearer during that fight,” Jiang Jin observes. “It kinda felt like the other two characters were the ones picking their own moves.”
Wei Shengyuan has a different complaint.
”There aren’t any rewards for winning?”
Everybody is such a critic.
”The reward is that the game didn’t break,” Zan Xinyi says, and pushes the Lantern-Bearer onwards the last few steps to the end of the level. As the player avatar steps into the white fog, a distant cello begins to play, piano joining in for a haunting melody as the screen goes black and returns to the start.
Jiang Jin had helpfully titled the piece The Unknown Distance.
“Let’s play again!” Jiang Jin says. “This time, I want to see what the Witch’s other move is. Wei Shengyuan, what is it?”
“It’s called Skies Beyond Skies. I don’t know what it does.”
“It’s meant to interface with the weather tag by forcing the current weather pattern to become ‘clear’,” Zan Xinyi says. “Which can have a number of effects. Then it initiates a giant blast. Is that obvious enough?”
“Jiang Jin,” Wei Shengyuan says slowly. “Do you...hear something?”
“I’m hearing lots of things!”
But Zan Xinyi can no longer be bothered with her subordinates' complaints and discussions.
>Progress is being analyzed.
Y/N Observation Diary
patreon-- thank you so much to the ones that joined!
And also, I feel like I don't say this enough. I feel really lucky to have so many active commenters and people engaged with the work, and I truly love reading everyone's comments. Sometimes I don't respond to longer comments if anything I say would feel like a spoiler, but I still love to read them and enjoy the speculation!
Wow, this gameplay...
