Dream Stuff 2/12
Had a dream in a video game that had me running through a gauntlet of like...dimensional rifts to alternate realities chasing some sort of fire spirit. I had to try and stop the spirit screwing with each reality by activating a shrine, and then trying find its sister shrine in each level and activating that too.
Regardless of how many rifts I "failed" or succeeded at, the spirit would collapse every reality that I had failed at onto itself and into the current reality, resulting in a crazy mashup of objects being inside each other or jettisoning away from each other. Walls, buildings, and other structures would combine with or violently destroy each other when they occupied the same space, etc etc.
Anyway, the point is this is how the game randomized every playthrough. Objectives, pathing, enemies, mission locations, NPCs, etc etc, were all determined by how the each reality "randomly" collapsed on each other (I don't remember what game I heard it from, but they developed environmental mess and prefabs by dropping a whole bunch of objects together in their physics engine and letting that simulate the resulting mess when they all exploded violently. I think it was half-life 2 or another valve game where I heard it first. Anyway this was similar to that but on a world-building scale)
Anyway that was cool but I mostly just remember the conversation I had with a new player who just got dumped into the main bit of the game after all his realities collapsed together, which I will probably be embellishing a bit seeing as how it's been 2 days and I'm filling in memory blanks:
Me: "Now I'm not gonna spoil anything, but if you're okay with it, I'd like to give some advice on how to approach the game going forward. You might enjoy the game better that way"
They nod
Me: "From this point forward, the game is going to fuck with you. First, you're going to want to be very thorough in every single room from here on out, because things are going to be hidden in place you've never even dreamed of. Taped to the under side of desks, in cracks in the wall, under floorboards, behind statues, in liquids; it might even hide a key in the mouth of a person directly talking to you and you're gonna have to get it back, probably violently."
"Second, people wear face masks in this world for a variety of reasons: they're sick, they're hiding emotions or their face in general, or maybe it's magically protective or they just think it looks cool. Point is, anybody wearing one could be potentially significant."
`After that, they started looking for stuff and then I kinda just...ended up interacting with this one guy who was super obsessed with model train sets and wanted help building a track that was like 1000 miles long, and of course I started helping, because dream logic.
Anyway it all sounded pretty cool but also stupid impractical in reality. My brain wouldn't stop bothering me until I wrote it down, so I've spewed it onto the contents of this tumblr page.