Wicklog #13 - Cosmic jokes, new limbs, and a sense of scale

OMSI mini-maker fair one-year anniversary

It can get lonely working on something by yourself for a year, so the external-validation boost from showcases is always a welcome punctuation to the process. I can’t think of a more perfect way to get closure on a year of work than how this weekend went.

I’ve heard some skepticism that Crescent Loom would be accessible to younger audiences, that the process of weaving a functional brain would be too complicated for them. This weekend thoroughly vanquished that concern. This weekend, I saw players with a curiosity and willingness to experiment that led them to make creatures far more sophisticated than those made by older crowds.

Another lesson that I learned is that different people come to the game looking for different things. Kids that could barely hold a mouse had a blast just smashing creatures together like action figures.

My absolute favorite scene from the entire weekend was from the very last visitors to the booth, a father & son. The kid was having a lot of fun crushing/trapping creatures against walls. The father leaned down and started pointing at the brain, “Now, these are little bits of electricity that are being passed around-”

At which point the child just screamed, “I WANNA EAT IT!”

I almost knocked into a bystander from bowling over in laughter. Sometimes the universe just gives you little clear-cut cosmic jokes. I’ve been building up this complicated game with all these words and sciences and systems, and been trying to clumsily explain what’s going on, but people are going to come into it with very simple desires and an understanding based in their earthly humanity.

New Stuff

I wanted something exciting to make some gifs of, so I spent some time fixing and adding body parts:

1. Harpoon! Catch prey from a distance or just swing around like spider-man.

2. Sucker! Anchor to the ground or hitch rides on unsuspecting bystanders.

3. An inflatable balloon that lets you control the buoyancy of the creature / bounce along the ocean floor (pay no mind to the floating boulders):

4. A symmetry tool, finally. Making larger creatures that can swim straight suddenly got a lot easier:

5. I added the ability to pull specific types of creatures from the server. This allows me to automatically organize and add creatures by how they perform, which is key if I want to eventually set up some kind of natural selection (e.g. creatures that win races will show up in more races).

Cryopods & Creature Scale

As per the Kickstarter reward, I made a cryopod object that pops up the name of the person sleeping inside when you touch it. However, a friend pointed out that having a human-sized reference implies a scale for the creatures. Up till now, I’ve left it ambiguous, but now I have to choose. Are the creatures small, pet-sized beasties...

...or are they huge, tentacle’d monsters?