scrapped yard (Patreon)

so continuing to post sketch/floor plans of E17 areas... and honestly part of me is like "why bother" for this one. the above is the scrapyard. it doesn't look very much like the in-game scrapyard at all. but i guess that is the reason in and of itself to talk about why it changed.

so, first the similarities: you can see the desert arena is already marked out there at the top right, although it's oriented a different way. i did know i wanted to fake the player out by making them think they had found the gym, and then lol jk actually the gym is through some other fustercluck of trains. 

you can also see at the bottom that the lines marked down there match the pattern of rails fanning out from tourmaline. both of these things were taken from the drawn map, so they were a given though. as in the end, you can see that the rail pattern again signaled the entrance to the scrapyard in several-- but not all cases.

you can also get a sense of the original idea for the scrapyard from those "flip switch" marks. the original idea involved a lot more going in and out of trains, and ramming trains into each other quite so directly you mostly just had to move them out of your way. these trains were also much less the single-engine-car speedrunners we got in game, but actually lengths of cars. and the switches were probably the entrances into the trains themselves to move them. 

each switch had to be flipped in order to get deeper and deeper into the scrapyard but the catch was that each one could only be accessed from a different entrance. you can see that aside from the entrances at the bottom, there was also one on the farrrr north end, and two on the east. in-game, the only entrance not on the south was on the east instead. so that got switched around considerably. 

so... why did this change so much?  a handful of reasons actually. there were a lot of problems with this plan:

• you can see in the sketch the dotted lines were the trains that could be moved, but almost all of them are on a diagonal. random angles makes sense for a scrapyard but not much sense for a tile-gridded game. we -do- have some diagonally oriented trains in-game but those trains don't move, since moving all of them together on a diagonal would be a disaster both in terms of work and execution.
• as you know from exploring tourmaline, walking alllllllllll the way around the scrapyard takes a bit of time. even if the player knew about the north entrance, getting there would be a journey, and getting back would be outright tedious.
• making interiors for that many more trains would have been a lot of work. i was pretty relieved when i figure out how to make the player appear to step in the engine car in-game without having to make a separate map. since we were going to be moving full length trains originally, that would have been much more too, since in most cases the entrance would have to be in the back to necessitate getting in from some weird entrance angle
• further, when inside it's difficult to show what actually changed outside. it's not as gratifying when the player can't see what changed-- and may be outright confusing. i could have the scene cut to the outside view but that's annoying to manage, especially multiple times. 

... so that stuff had to be changed. other factors that lead to it changing were:

• the bottom right corner that's empty was originally going to be taken up by a mountain... but the mountain ended up being sized so that there was actually plenty of room in that section still. i added that south east map to take up some space, and looping back around was an extra advantage later.
• the orientation of the arena was switched like i mentioned. i think this was to work it into a better shape for and separate the gym from train town. it also just looks better vertical imo. 
• when working out the desert map to separate the stretch of sand leading up to mirage tower from the rest (for map division purposes) i did so using cliffs. that meant it would be difficult to get around the mountain to the east side for that entrance anyway. in contrast the east side just kind of happened out of convenience.

and one more reason. my favorite reason in fact-- cuz of y'all.
or one of y'all at least, i don't remember who it was (feel free to volunteer yourself and remind me pls), but while i was doing a mapping stream someone mentioned they liked the idea of just riding a train as it crashed through a sea of other trains.
and i was like.
we can probably do that.

so after i had thrown most of the previous scrapyard plans out for the above reasons, that became my new guiding principle. i knew the train would have to start on a long stretch in order to build up enough momentum to get through like that, so i started putting that in game and built out from there, eventually connecting back to some of the new entrances.

i have some older notes saved from when i was actually making the scrapyard puzzle itself, since i was planning back then to tell you guys exactly how that all worked. seems like it'll be time for that soon. buuuuuut that won't be today.

-- 

speaking of sketches, i have the next area i'll be mapping sketched out now. i wasn't sure for a while what i wanted to do for a puzzle for it, but then it came to me in a #ShowerThoughts session and was tempered through several vague half-naps and has quickly became one of my favorite puzzle concepts in the game. i hope the execution works out as well.