Chapter 12 Page 17
February 8th, 2016Jassart finds the Vault on Chapter 12, Page 17. Unfortunately, it’s locked. And locked in an unconventional way.
Wednesday’s update is my surprise that we’ve been working on. I can’t wait to share it with you. (Evil laugh) No almanac update on Friday as I’ll be at Katsucon (see below). The next page on Monday is a scene shift. Guess who makes an appearance? To see, please vote for Snow by Night on Top Web Comics.
KATSUCON this weekend! This is a fun convention. I particularly like how it’s a 20 minute drive away. Diane and I will be there at the Snow by Night table (G12). Steph (E17) and Julie (O11 in the Dealers hall) will be there too. If you liked Kristin’s artwork from the most recent vignette, she’ll be at table D10. Come by and say hello!
Not just a sliding puzzle but one that will Drain you of your essence every time you touch a piece. Cienan likely has trained servants, like that maid shadowing him, to open the doors for him and trained Well so they can open it in a minimum of moves.
Oh I hate these things.
I play way too many escape games and this comes up more often than I care to solve.
Although they are usually pretty easy.
ohh i loved doing theese puzzles when i was a kid, though mine had numbers, and were a bit smaller.
Ugh, sliding puzzles. That must be a pain to manually mix around when you’re done.
Welp, I’m pretty sure Atrus designed this lock. Or some D’ni who believes in making everything way more complicated than it should be…. :D
Pretty Myst-erious, eh?
It feels mildly awkward, to see an all-too-familiar standard video game riddle in fantasy XVIIth Century Quebec. Still, Jassart is unimpressed, and Cienan seems to be exactly the kind of guy who’d hide his stuff behind that sort of stuff.
The 15 puzzle has been around since at least the late 1800s and predates video games by quite a bit. I did take a few liberties that Cienan would be aware of it in what is functionally the early 1700. But hey, Cienan is full of surprises.
What makes it seem to be from a game is the “build a pipe for the liquid” part. First seen in the games like “Pipe Mania”, it also served as a a minigame that represents hacking a door lock or vending machine in “Bioshock”. In fact, i was pretty sure this is an intentional Bioshock reference.
I’ve played Bioshock but that was many years ago and I was not consciously thinking of that game when I wrote this piece. My background is a RPG designer who wrote for Wizards of the Coast. I enjoy adding puzzles into my adventures. The webcomic medium allows me to play with the idea some in my stories too.
Ah, now I get it. Well, it happens all the time that people have same or similar ideas independently. I am pretty sure that it is nigh impossible to come up with anything that nobody ever thought of before, even if not exactly the same way. I remember talking to a friend how it would be interesting if a character would also die if MP drop to zero and figuring out some mechanics for it, when a year later Star Ocean 3 came out doing exactly that.
Puzzles in RPG’s (especially pen’npaper) are great, by the way. I mean, it’s not always easy to explain why someone would put a puzzle into a door instead of an actual lock (there’s always one player asking that), but it’s a lot of fun, both creating and solving them.
Myth: I KNEW IT. I said to myself, “that looks like something from a D&D campaign.” I SO KNEW IT. Very cool to hear this kind of puzzle has old real-life roots.
I gave my players a font puzzle in my home game. They had to figure out the secret code and the font choices on the different messages mattered.
The vault is a bluff – the good stuff is behind the religious statues Jassart ignored. Hear no evil, Speak no evil. So it must be behind a Statue that sees no evil. Probably…..
I think I found the vault.
What a coincidence! I think so too!
(can’t wait for the surprise!)