The_Cheshire_Cat

Yeah, they really need to come up with a system to cull old unmaintained/unplayed arcs. Right now, you can cut out "work in progress" from your search options to eliminate a lot of them, but that doesn't wipe out any post i16(I think?) farms or any other recent junky arcs.

That's a good suggestion. This is kind of an annoying change for me since it means I can't use Adamastor anymore - I use him in two arcs, both of which scale him down.

The identity of the tall man is intentionally vague. If you've played my arc "The Beating Heart of Astoria", you might be inclined to think he's Mot. That's one possible answer but it's not necessarily the "correct" one. I like to leave things open ended and let the player decide their significance. One thing I can say is he's meant to be someone who's obviously untrustworthy, but you end up following because the only other person you meet is insane.


The arc really pushes the idea that Dark Astoria is sort of displaced from time, which is why all the radio recordings you find through history say the fog has been there for "about a week". The DJ could have been there for a thousand years and it wouldn't really make too much of a difference.

Well, that's the big question, isn't it? :P I don't want to say what happened to the people, but I can say that they didn't turn into mannequins. The mannequins are something left behind to taunt the DJ and the player about their isolation. If you've seen I Am Legend, it's a similar idea, where the mannequins are scattered around so that you can feel like you're not alone, but since they're mannequins it's pretty obviously artificial.

To be honest these are really just a jump scare for the first mission. I should tie them into the story better.

I'm still here too. I've just been busy with other things lately. I've actually got a few ideas for arcs I'd like to make now that I17 is out.

Right I forgot about that one, I had to fix that in my Tomorrownauts arc.

That said I replaced it with a tube, which ties in with all the "vacuum tube" references in the arc, so I think it's kind of better now (No I don't think generators ever actually used vacuum tubes, it makes sense in the context of the arc).

Aren't DC supposed to be grandfathered so that they aren't affected by AE system updates (Because of the fact that authors have no ability to fix anything that's broken)?

Darn, I always found your reviews helpful as an author. You were the only reviewer I'd request reviews from.

Hopefully your new MA project is interesting, though!

The "Part 6" is actually a joke. The arc is very tongue in cheek. I'd recommend giving it a run, it's one of the few humour arcs I actually find funny.

A big part of being creative is being able to write within a set of restrictions.

Yeah, the name is meant to reference Mary Shelley (Hence the unusual spelling of Shelley) for the obvious Frankenstein link. I didn't want to go with something quite as obvious as "Dr. Frank" or something.

Yeah, the main reason is to prevent an instant auto-complete of the objective, but the Council also ties into the story later on so I wanted to have them show up consistantly throughout the arc. I've gotten a few ideas for clues to add to the first mission from your review to give more reason as to why the Council are there.

The Shell logo is a good idea. The truth is I don't know the emblem choices very well because the list is so LONG, I don't tend to have the patience to look through the whole thing. Also, I went with "Shell" instead of "Shelly" deliberately, just because the word "Shell" has so many different alternate meanings.

You're the second person to mention the problem with finding hostages on this map, and I found the same thing when I was testing. I think what I might do is only make it one hostage, and maybe toss in a few other objective types to fill out the map a bit.

This is another point a few people have mentioned that I should clarify somewhat in clues - the idea is that Burkholder actually isn't IN Steel Canyon until you rescue Shell, because the the robot guarding her sends a scan of her back to Council HQ and the technology in her catches Burkholder's attention, so he arrives to join the invasion. The invasion itself is kind of just a standard "Council invade Steel Canyon to kidnap people or whatever!" sort of thing.

I think I might re-write this bit so that when you rescue Dr. Shelley, he says that the Council caught him off guard and threatened him to give them Shell, and Shell went with them willingly in order to protect him. This would both solve you concern that it's not quite clear that Shell is missing until the end of the mission, and also fill the plot hole of why Shell didn't just nuke the crap out of the invading robots.

I wrote this arc a while ago and can't really remember why I gave the mission this title, but you're right, it really doesn't make a lot of sense.

The skipping of his catch phrase was actually intentional, as a way of showing "Things just got serious". Up to this point the arc has a pretty joke-y tone, but his tone here is meant to imply "This is no time for catch phrases".

This was something that I'd felt about the arc the whole time, but you're the first person to have mentioned it - so until now I figured maybe I was just overthinking it and people weren't noticing, but since that's not the case I do agree with you here; Shell needs more characterization if the arc is going to focus on her. I've got a few ideas about how to do this - some computer console glowies in the first mission with logs from dr. Shelley might help to establish a bit of what her development was like. Adding some dialogue for her in clues in the second mission would also help solve the problem of the fact that it's hard to have an ally say a lot since you only really get 4 lines with them.

Interesting note, all the robots I've used in this arc actually ARE rogue robots, because for some reason the actual robots from the Council don't have a level range where you get an overlap of minions/LTs/Bosses, while the rogue robots do. The reason they aren't Rogue vs. Council in the battles is because from what I remember writing the arc, I think this is meant to be Shell having wirelessly hacked into the Council computer systems and turning some of the AI against itself, so they're technically all still Council robots.

I actually wanted to avoid the standard "Garbled computer nonsense" that a lot of people use for "Insane AI" because I find it's kind of overdone, and I wanted to suggest that something different than just "Really complex computer program" was going on with Shell. You're right in that this probably wasn't the best way to do it, but I've gotten a few ideas of ways to better suggest that.

Not ALL of them... just... 4/5ths of them? I don't think I have any in The Beating Heart of Astoria.

The "It" is deliberate - the idea that with the outer layer stripped away, it becomes a lot more obvious that Shell isn't a "she" and never was - the idea is that just because something appears male or female doesn't make it so, and a machine doesn't have concepts like gender identity.

In the arc description when it says the arc is "Hard", it's actually just referring to trying to complete this last mission as intended, with rescuing Shell. It's actually not that difficult if you just clear the back room and leave her behind to clear out the rest of the mission, but that's kind of going against the spirit of the thing.

I may add some dialogue to make this more obvious - or perhaps change it so that it was Dr. Shelley who hacked into the Council systems and reprogrammed some of the robots to help you out.

It is basically the same ending if you manage to rescue her - the key difference is basically that in the "Good" ending, Dr. Shelley gets a chance to say goodbye to Shell.

Burkholder wanting to cannabalize the technology is meant to be his key motivation, but you're right that it needs to be more overt. I think I should add some clues to the 3rd and 4th mission to make their objectives more clear.