The Moon Spire (& a call for art assets!)

[charmsRace]

I've started development on complex NP and the Moon Spire, as discussed in #1417. It centers around Spire construction and the Lunacy boost category. The general philosophy is that Lunacy content is playable as a supplement to whatever else you're doing in the game. It starts upon earning Ceiling Broken, and players at any stage can benefit. The first ~20 floors will have to be constructed by the player, but after that, construction can be automated and won't require as much active participation.

It's going very smoothly! I'm estimating it to be around 10-15% done at the moment. I have most of it under control, as far as I can see. Here's a list of the things that should be brought up for discussion, though.

• Release speed/versioning. 4.0 was really recent, so I dunno how soon we want to release a big chunk of new content again. Thoughts?
• Puzzle generation. @pickten is in charge of this for now, so it should be under control.
• Art assets. Unlike kitty draining and t1iPix, I don't think there's any getting around creating new art for the moon tower interior. AFAIK, it's been quite a while since SCB got any new art assets at all. That's unfortunate but pretty much fine for boost icons, but Moon Spire NP images are fairly crucial. I'll go ahead and state a little bit about my idea for the NPs, and hope it's not too tall an order.
  • They should be semi-randomly generated (ideally with seed, though). There are going to be hundreds of Spire floors.
  • Here is a (n extremely) rough sketch of what I have in mind. Depending on whether you're on the top floor, the stairs upwards exist or they don't. As you ascend, the third image gradually fades in, so by the time you reach (say) 200, it's fully opaque. Maybe part of the night sky panels could be commandeered (it would make sense).
  • Little techno bits coming out of the walls or something idk. A couple different styles that can be flipped and put at some random positions along the sides.
  • It would be nice if we could also get some arts of various contraption boosts, like the Stellar Refinery and the Retroaccelerator to smack in the middle of the corresponding floor if the player has the boost, but that's much more optional.

So, in all, the art assets required are

• A template frame, with walls and the stairs down (which will always be present)
• A stairway sprite that will be placed if you're not on the top floor
• A night sky panel to gradually fade in between floors 100-200
• Some random techno bits to put along the walls, to give things some flavor
• (Maybe) some sprites for a couple contraptions for certain floors (probably about 8-10 of these).

I have no idea if anyone actively contributing can art and also knows how to emulate the XKCD art style. But hopefully there's someone! Is anyone up to handling this?

[IHaveNoFunnyName]

Just spit balling something that'll probably be way too much of a pain to implement, but the first thing that I thought about when reading complex NPs were xkcd comics like Click & Drag/Hoverboard, that you could fluidly drag around with the mouse. Since the whole game is a homage to time, why not include xkcd's other way-too-much-effort-to-be-worth-it comics?

If not, there are ripable some art assets out of those comics, the Star Destroyer in hoverboard and the normal/radio tower in click and drag (that look a lot less like what aesthetic I think you are going for)

There's also this What If that has some nice xkcd tower designs. Or homestuck. That might be close to what you are going for with the whole slightly chaotic thing

[pickten]

I'd be down for implementing a timeline using complex numbers that pans through click and drag (or hoverboard), but I don't think they're really good for a moon tower with the exceptions you noted and not worth doing separately atm, since I'm busy with this.

It could be interesting to use that What If in the design of the tower, though.

[Dragonayzer]

Just a little note (I hope it's not too late if the fix is required): Lunacy - insanity; mental disorder. Lunar - of or relating to the moon.

[charmsRace]

It's definitely not too late - the first draft of the content is around 85% complete, and testing will need to happen. But I definitely do know what the words mean. 'Lunacy' actually comes from 'lunar' etymologically, and I think it fits the eclectic nature if the content. If you'd like, you can check out my fork and see if you agree. Calling the group "lunar tech" sounds kinda tired to me at this point.

[Dragonayzer]

Oh well, after thinking about it for a while I must agree: [Lunacy] even sounds better than [Lunar Tech].

[pickten]

At long last, the whole sokoban thing is close to ready (needs more primitives, but that's essentially it), but I need some input from people on stuff, especially @Calamitizer:

• What function should finishing the puzzle trigger? As a placeholder, I have Molpy.Sokoban.complete, which does nothing
• Should I use the savescum-preventing optimization or not? (essentially, massive boost to speed, but makes people wait a significant amount of time after each load before getting a puzzle, simply by breaking computation up and caching generated puzzles)
• How should players interact with sokoban? I haven't yet written a boost or whatever to visually display it or stuff like that. Any thoughts?