what's behind amy's gym? (Patreon)

but besides those!....
no yeah mostly just those. 

i didn't know what i wanted to do for amy's gym puzzle when i first made fiore mansion, but i figured it out a long time before E17-- if imprecisely (as is often the way things go). i knew i wanted it to be some kind of an underwater playground, and i knew that specifically, i wanted it to work in 3 dimensions. and in the mean time i had a specific base for it that everyone who struggled with amy's gym is going to actively roll their eyes at:

Ocarina of Time's Water Temple.
[crowd boos, tomatoes fly]

I know the Water Temple is like, one of the literal most hated dungeons in video gaming history. In fact, to make sure that wasn't my biased upbringing I just checked a couple random "most hated dungeons in video games" lists and the Water Temple was first on both of them. And I feel that.
Playing through it is balls. It was actually a show-stopper for me the first time I played OoT buuut that was mainly just cuz I was on emulator and didn't know you could adjust the control sensitivity so you could actually hit that one eye thing with the hookshot. I've heard I'm not the only one to have that issue on emulator.

But I do like it conceptually. Most of what I liked was actually all these little rooms that you had to swim in, not just navigating four directions but going up and down too. that 3d space thing i mentioned. and... that was also a pain to deal with because of the drowning mechanics. but like, it was cool to me.

like, those ones.

It felt like I could get lost in there. I love the feeling of being lost-- moreso in reality than video games, but I am unfortunately blessed with a very keen innate sense of direction, so it is very difficult for me to get lost IRL. Sometimes when I visit new cities I just take off in  random directions and try to not pay attention to where I'm going... but it's usually way too easy to find my way back still :C
On the other hand, my directional sense does not seem to apply whatsoever to video games. i am often hopeless at navigating 3d games.... i blame camera control.
But I guess it's okay since getting lost in video games tends to be much more interesting, rewarding, and safer than doing it in reality.
not as cool through grumble grumble...

so anyway, a network of those water temple tunnels was my initial conception for amy's gym that i sat on for a long time. I was also thinking of including a water-level-changing mechanic as well, but in the end I decided not to because unlike in OoT there's actually not a lot that one can do out of water that they can't do in the water, so my options for obstacles that went away would be limited to just like, rushing water (i.e pacifidlog area) which I wasn't keen on, for several reasons, including:

• we basically just did that kind of tile in Devonyx, 
• lowering water levels to break rushing water seemed odd, 
• there wasn't an underwater version of that tile so I'd have to visually represent it, 
• and it didn't exactly seem as serene playground-ish as I wanted.

Though in retrospect I guess I could've made a water slide of it.
Eh.

Still, when it came time to make her gym, I wasn't really sure how to make that into a puzzle, per se. Even not changing the water level, I still didn't exactly have many options for obstacles. I thought of just letting there be wild Pokemon down there, but it didn't seem right (also strongly considered wild pokemon in the grass in her multi-pool area, up until the end). In short, I wasn't sure what to do.

I wrote about this here at the time, but my creative process for this gym was basically just depression napping for three days straight.
it was really not among my better experiences, but i guess since it was for a character who is, herself, depressed, it was not a bad way to method act for it.
during a lot of that time I was drifting in and out of consciousness, trying to stay awake long enough to find a solution I was satisfied with, inevitably failing and taking those thoughts of the gym back to sleep with me. somehow that and whatever half-dreams i was having collided into the idea i went with--
that the gym itself could be her personal escape. somewhere she went to get lost. to relax. to be with her precious, miserable self.

ultimately the idea of a maze puzzle is so simplistic it feels a little silly for me to write this much about it. on the other hand, i have a lot of personal emotions wrapped up in the e17 content in specific. I'll go into them more thoroughly after the game is done though. anyway, I very much wanted to recreate Amy's feeling of being lost for the player.
If they felt hopeless about it, that was just a bonus.

So I sketched the area out as I always do. Here was my sketch for it, with the contrast jammed up to a million so you guys have any chance of seeing the pencil--

it doesn't show the underneath-structure in detail-- have a feeling I just made that in RPG Maker and hoped for the best, but it does show the main structure that made it into the game, with the multipools, and how the center way leads up waterfalls to the arena, while the side paths take two long, tall tunnels downwards to the larger area underneath. sort of like a U shape. this was how it did work out in-game.

I'll translate my notes as well, though most of them will not be terribly surprising...

• "Surface in arena"
• "Titania was here"
• "Waterfalls into dive area"
• "Pools of water layered up"
• "Down into labyrinth dive chamber"
• "Are there Pokemon here ??? (added later) Nah."
• "Lit with stained glass, etc"
• "have to find Amy in labyrinth and convince her to go back"
• "3 for branch, 5 for other"

I had forgotten I was going to have her need to be found more for the Reshiram but I guess dropped for being (rightfully) worried about tedium. I also recall considering having Amaria throw "wild" Pokemon (catchable or otherwise) at the trainer to distract them while she swam away to the next place. But I didn't want them to be -her- pokemon and that would've implied wilds down there. "Nah."

The stained glass thing was the original concept for the lighting down there (though I think she just as soon would not object to swimming through all but pitch blackness). I figured if this was her get away, she'd probably have built it to be as relaxing as possible. Colored lights, air pockets (if there were any) scented with essential oils. And maybe like some kind of hokey celtic ambient track that you would expect to hear in a hair salon or massage parlor run by a Highly Spiritual single white woman steadily advancing through her 40's.
but that would be too extra so i didn't put that last part in.

So, originally, I was going to make a bunch of stain glass tiles to line her gym with, and I was playing with the idea of having the light patterns reflecting off of the white walls in there. I was fixing to sprite it all when I was like,
hm.
what if there's an easier way?

So I remembered a way to make a decent glassy look that I accident'd into earlier in development. When importing tilesets, RMXP lets you choose a transparent color and a semi-transparent color. Essentials makes liberal use of the semitransparent color but Reborn generally does not-- where it is used is early on from development when we were still more Essentials than our own beast. Unfortunately, because of how messy some tilesets are, there have been a number of cases where shades have accidentally picked up the semitransparent color. One case of this was in the pipes in the Factory tileset, which I noted after fixing it one time made them look very much like glass pipes.

I tucked this away in my backpocket, planning to use that look for some things in the relevant place in E18.
I did not use that look for things in that place. I forgot until the whole thing was mapped already and then looked back at it to add as an afterthought and realized there was literally no simple opportunity for it because the layers were already so messy from that main puzzle.

But I did use it here. Was able to make some decent looking glass overlays using that and the transparency to make the windows. Then all I had to do was find a stained glass background to use.

Google hooked me up pretty quickly. I found this:

cool, right? I thought it would be perfect. I could just use RPG Maker's rotation property to slowly spin the background the entire time the player was underwater and it would look like a spinning stained glass wheel. But first, that image would be way out of place looking like that.

First, I shifted the hue to colours more friendly for Amy. Secondly, I gave it a strong blur effect to make it more abstract. Then I zoomed and cropped it to a point that I thought would be passable for rotation, and then crammed the whole thing into 8-bit color mode to match the game's lower-resolution style. 

The end result was this:

It displays at a larger size in game, so that would help as well.

So I threw it into RPG Maker, loaded it up for the map, made an event to handle the rotation........
and then realized that panorama rotation is not a thing that exists in RPG Maker. maybe a past version. or a future version. or maybe i'm cray and just mixed it up with pictures.
but one way or another that was not happening here.
The only option afforded to Panoramas is to change the hue. I had already done this to get to this point.... Doing it again meant that I couldn't hang onto this palette of colors for amy specifically... but go off, I guess. If I wanted it to be animated at all, that was how I was going to have to do it.

So the event basically just shifted the hue by like 1/36th every however many frames or so. Then I made a matching event that adjusted the room's tint likewise to match the background. All the tiles in-editor are perfectly white to enable this. That way it could look like the color was flooding into the room from the stained glass. I think it didn't always match up famously, and it was a little overpowering anyway... Ah well.

As those of you who were in the E17 testing period recall, I ended up changing the screen tint from working all the time always to only working when Amy was in the given room. This is pretty disappointing to me because the static color is not nearly as cool, and it doesn't seem like something she would do to make the change follow her... but the player needed some more indication as to when she was around.

I really underestimated how much difficulty people would have not only finding her, but navigating the place. Like, I made it to get lost in, so mission a-fucking-complished, but it was never supposed to be this big tedious thing. I thought players might be down there for 5-10 minutes to get all 3 Amies after they first navigated to the arena. Not the like 20+ god forbid hour+ lenghts I was initially seeing. Hell, sometimes I was getting stuck down there for those longer times, and I made the damn thing. 

In the end I consider this "puzzle" a pretty resolute failure.  

There are two lessons I've taken from it in that respect. The first is that I now see that it is much easier to get lost in an area that has a lot of connecting paths than it is to get lost in an area that has a lot of dead ends. With dead ends, there's lots of wrong ways to go, and one right one that will eventually be found. With connecting paths, there are no right ways. Only despair.

The second is actually a result of an error. I am aware of an issue in Amy's gym where I actually mixed up the teleport events. I'm not precisely sure where otherwise I would have fixed it already, but somehow the two descending tunnels on left/right of the gym that lead to the rat's nest below have gotten twisted. A player will enter on the left, stay on the left, and come out on the right. And visa versa.  
I was aware of this during testing for E17, but I chose to leave it in since it contributed to the feeling of being lost down there. I've since come to the opinion, however, that that mix up is one of the main reasons so many people struggle with this underwater area. Even for those who spend time navigating and learning it, I think this error is making it feel incomprehensible. I started to observe something similar for myself when comparing the experience of playing through a certain confounding forest in Pokemon Clockwork to looking at its map in the editor. I think when normal navigational physics don't work, some non-cognitive navigational part of the brain just throws in the bloody towel. I didn't anticipate the effect being that dramatic, but I consider it something to be aware of in the future, and to use selectively.
I'll fix it for E19 and hope that it makes the area/puzzle much less frustrating to navigate.

In the meantime I've been relieved by and personally appreciate the handful of people who say they loved amy's gym-- for the design and not the gameplay, no doubt.
That's good enough for me.
Failure or not, I suppose it's one way of feeling her misery.