Making the Glass Workstation Puzzle (Patreon)

hello folks, so you may have noticed that i've posted like fuck nothing in august this is because fire emblem and also minecraft, which i would have been slightly ashamed to say a week ago but now minecraft has bees and is popular again so i'd like to thank every bee in existence for sponsoring this post.

anyway, it's also because the stuff i'm doing on starlight is (when it's not exxeix) boring coding stuff that will eventually be very impressive to show visually but isn't there yet and occasionally involves me facerolling my keyboard hoping the code somehow works and then being incredibly surprised when it does
and also on reborn things like story for the cresselia quest, but we all know i can't say shit about story because that is SPOILERS

so instead of talking about the future and to make up for the lack of august posts i'm choosing to spend one of the posts that i've stocked up from before for just an occasion like this and will instead talk about the past. 

so today, we'll be talking about ....
drumroll....
cancel drumroll because it's already in the post title...
yeah it's the glass station's main room puzzle.

so, i always knew that i would do some kind of puzzle with glass because i apparently really like making underground dungeons based around glass for some reason. i had an old project that i was working on when i was ~12-15ish which is where most of my initial rpg maker experience was from and that project had a dungeon called the Glass Subterrane which i consider to be one of about two good dungeons in that project, and if you look at old posts about Reborn you might see the workstation occasionally referred to as that because I was just going to reuse the name entirely. i eventually decided to Not Do That which is why the name was changed to Workstation instead, and i also ended up reusing virtually nothing from the dungeon itself* so initially i had no idea what i was actually going to do with the puzzle for this place

*sort of untrue-- i reused nothing for the glass workstation in reborn, but actually reborn's mirage tower puzzle was directly taken from one of the puzzles in my old glass subterrane dungeon. it's a lot clearer and better behaved in the mirage tower though, lol...

so, i knew i'd have a puzzle that revolved around glass somehow and i knew i wanted to have lumi and eve help out the player somehow, and somehow the idea to combine those two never occured to me until it did and then it clicked wonderfully and i felt whole again.
also fun fact before i forget i was originally gonna have titania join the party for the workstation too but then she didn't because route splits and it felt better to hang out with florinia and frankly we've had a lot of titania screen time lately
anyway yeah so eevees.

i went and watched a video about how glass was actually made because wouldn't you know the glass dungeon my 14 year old self made was not exactly terribly accurate, and so i learned about how particles are melted down into a molten material and then the glass is floated along on a sort of conveyor of molten liquid tin.
and so i was like, okay, we have a glaceon, let's have glaceon freeze the molten pre-glass, and the molten-tin so that you can actually cross.

originally, i was going to have the path glaceon froze across the molt be temporary. after all, it would eventually melt again in a continual stream of heat, right? i think it would have been fun to create a scenario where you had to be quick about moving glass and then getting back to the other side before the path melts... in fact, i had actually fully implemented the frost breath path to do that at a point, but i had to back out of it because i realized that would create way too many opportunities to get stuck if you traded glaceon out for espeon (and having them both at once would be too free).
i tried to look at espeon's moveset and figure out if there were some way that it could like teleport to glaceon in those cases or warp you out... but being an eevee, it doesn't have rights, or any moves whatsoever, so i couldn't really do it.
actually, it did have ally switch! using ally switch, i was going to allow espeon to swap to glaceon so that the player could get themselves unstuck... but then there were cases where neither pokemon was with them because they had to climb a ladder, and using ally switch in the wrong cases could get the player stuck in glass areas.
basically, the active element had to be scrapped.

i also had the idea of making glaceon more helpful with heal bell because i thought it would be cute to wake up the other sleeping characters like hardy and the twins, but then this made glaceon have two helpful moves to espeon's one. so i was trying to figure out what i would do with espeon alongside it-- maybe wish? but between heal bell and wish both, it's basically a free full heal, so i thought that might trivialize the battles there. i eventually settled on future sight as a goal indicator when i realized that although i had made a rather complex sequence (free espeon, turn the elevator on, go get the meteor key, go to the atrium), there wasn't actually any dialogue indicating to the player what they were supposed to do next at any given time. so that was just a matter of connecting loose ends.

there were also various other ways i had to change the mapping and eventing after the puzzle to make it work, and i think some of those ways really ended up detracting from the final appeal of the puzzle... but let's take a moment to have me shut up and actually post the mapping screenshots that i've been sitting on for more than a year now.

so here's the initial lay of the room. pay little attention to the junk in the center-- i forgot to take the screen before immediately moving on to the next step ^^; 

you can see  had already more or less spaced out the room, and i drew that row of tiles in the center to mark where the molten trail would be. i knew glaceon would weave up and down around that and various other obstacles with frost breath. i also knew from the start that i wanted a set up with a lower level and an upper walk way, but that was mainly as a precedent to have zero and bennett be above the player's level in the cutscene to match how i had imagined that whole scene going. the other rooms there are already planned to because i feel like you can't have a glass puzzle if you don't break at least some of the glass.
you can also see i immediately mapped out the stack of stuff so glaceon could jump down there.

step 2, draw the rest of the fucking puzzle

green tiles are where i expected rewards to be. i had sketched that much out beforehand. pink is busted railways. blue is parts you need glaceon for, black is generic obstacles of any kind.  the purple areas right now are very generalized and not specific, but using junk tiles lets me think about the flow of the puzzle without worrying too much about details.

next i sectioned out the purple/red/other green sections to match the actual stacks of glass panes i'd be using. this came down to figuring out the actual details of those puzzle areas more than anyone else. you can see it especialy in the top center area where it has stopped being a literal sea of purple. also added indicator for healing room in the bottom right.

step 4, most of the hard work is done at this point, we're just replacing all of our placeholder tiles with real tiles. custom graphics for the glass and molten trails... rails and broken parts.. ladders.

now the processing sections along the trail, and the outer part of the inner rooms...  had to make a door graphic for the sides of those rooms too.
you'll note some of the junk tiles and such have been adjusted here so that we could knock large sections of them out at once with those processing rooms, but still have room to move.

custom detail along the parts of the walls, meteor logos, changed the molten trail to be half tin as originally intended.. almost there.

last is the least important step, but a big one-- replace all of our irrelevant junk tiles with generic machinery and storage containers. like we started with the processing rooms, we work big to small here-- if a section of the junk tiles can be occupied by a larger graphic, we let it be, with as much variance as possible, and work from 3x3 or 2x4 or whatever down to 2x2, and then 1x1 boxes or fuel barrels or whatever. suddenly, it looks like an actual map!

it did have to be changed more after this point for various technical reasons, but i considered it done by now.

as i said before though, actually implementing the puzzle proved to be pretty difficult, and not for terribly exciting reasons. for instance, essentials includes default handling for follower events-- great. the problem was if you took glaceon with you, and then told it to wait, it would just fucking disappear, because in essentials' handling of follower events removing a follower is the same as yeeting it into the void. a new glaceon event would respawn if the map was reloaded, but if you were on the same map, nothing is being reloaded.
unfortunately, this is why i had to add awkward fades-to-black at many parts of this puzzle. otherwise the events would just die. fading to black allowed me to refresh the map.

there was also the dreaded demon of lag. unfortunately i had to do a lot of shenanigans in order to make this place not lag to fuck-- and i think i was mostly successful. frankly the scrapyard could've benefited from some tricks i adapted here since the two puzzles are functionally very similar.
for instance, there's actually just one controller event for the whole place that drops impassable events wherever glass is-- which allows me to use one event for the glass graphic almost no matter how big it is (some had to be shortened due to essentials handling large graphics poorly), which allowed me to save on events for sections of the glass that the player couldn't get to at a given time.
we also did the same thing with eevees. the eevee events (for when you tell them to wait in a spot) actually just exist in the upper right corner of the void, and then whenever you enter the map, the controller event yeets them back to wherever you left them.
don't worry, it's totally safe.

...i think that's about all there is to say about challenges with making the puzzle, but i will also note some alternate universes involving the subsequent glass gauntlet. i wasn't actually the hugest fan of having the initial 6v12. originally, i thought hardy might wake up to help you with it-- but there wasn't really a place for him in the scene after that. in particular, he really needed to not get black hole'd.
i also considered trying to have the eevees themselves help you out. i thought it would be a nice gesture, even if it were just a small help. even an 8v12 would be better than 6v12, right? but that also meant after the two eevees went down, you'd be stuck with one pokemon against two since they'd count as a partner trainer... so it would have been detrimental in the long run. i was thinking, is there some way i can make them have three 'lives' each so it's more like 12v12? but in the end, i decided just to let it go.

so that's some stuff about how glass station became the hot mess it is today. i'm still happy on the hole (heh) with how it turned out, including the scene and maps, but i do wish the puzzle had been a little less problematic to implement specifically with regards to the map refresh.
it also made me wish i'd done more puzzles like that throughout the rest of the game-- where you're working together with pokemon. it is a pokemon game, after all...
alas.

for now, bye!