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Another one of those crazy dreams/video game design
Another one of those crazy dreams/video game design
#1
Tongue 
So for this outing I was a stuffed toy or toon hedgehog in a 3d open-map pseudo-platformer/action RPG - not the blue one, a vaguely realistic light brown, mostly quadrupedal except when having hands would be useful for buttons and levers or trapeze swings etc., and shaped vaguely like a VW Beetle if one was a rubbery toon character that ran instead of rolled. This character had a name, but I can't remember what except that it did specifically include the word "hedgehog."

Accompanying me was a sidekick/"friend"/inverted escort-NPC Cabbie, a hot rod taxicab like in an old (WB?) cartoon I vaguely remember (most of which was spent as a chopped and dropped hot rod rebelling against his taxicab father) or the (Disney) Cars franchise, similarly small and brown and vaguely shaped like a larger, four door VW Beetle but very fast, and who is prone to getting board and running around the whole map at high speed, drawing aggro and setting off traps. This serves as the mechanism for the game's variable difficulty, as if he's far away this is useful but the closer he stays the more trouble it causes, and and the faster you go or the closer you get to the finish point the closer he tends to stick by, along with however many enemies he's gotten chasing him and not caught in traps.

This seemed like a very cool idea as a simultaneous observer even as it was annoying as a participant, and I was resentfully following a trail of footprints and face billboards left by Bonkers D Bobcat (also Disney) through a set of jumping puzzles to avoid all that on the ground for a fast time and bonus items, but had my typical amount of success with that much hated game mechanic and wandered off to consult with a couple of other world-hopping transmigration SIs in the forms of Shattered Glass Ravage (Transformers) and one of the few junior- and high-school classmates I wouldn't mind seeing again, while I T-1000 shifted into a fantasy-anime-elf-ish form, except we then got sidetracked into a discussion of insulting "trutharians" (in the form of a cult following various revelations, rather than the scientific methods of most RL examples of people claiming that title I searched up) and controlling what your next reincarnation would be and when it would awaken to past lives, which woke me up with its induced sense of falseness and pretense.

Because even in my dreams I can not have nice things, apparently. Mekton Zeta+-system Shapeshifter has been my latest "if I was getting an issekai protagonist blessing, I'd ask for..." concept, boiling down to "Bio-Energy poewered Oid with Morphable Mekton, then abusing Material Absorption, Dimensional Storage, and Expanding Plasma to get around the CP and mass limits" if you're familiar enough with the system to have that mean something. Space Magic nanotech shapeshifter only limited by how much I've consumed and stored for resources, basically, if not. Awesome enough to put up with an issekai fantasy mission from god over, certainly, and even be courteous enough to respect said god's preferences for how much tech to (not) introduce to their anachronistic fantasy planet until the mission is done and I could set myself up an FTL or Dimensional Teleport system to leave and go explore space/alternate universes/etc.

The bit with the variably helpful AI sidekick as difficulty control was the interesting part though, and what I wanted to talk about. Awake it still seems like a very cool idea and a way to avert the classic platformer "memorize each twitch on the controller for a perfect run" syndrome unless you're specifically following the bonus path, corralling enemies and keeping them occupied or outright eliminating them (Cabbie always zips past or through traps unharmed, unlike them and the player) more the longer and more often they give the player trouble, but awake the problem of actually getting that bahavior to work even with copious game-designer cheating by making the enemies go along with it seems like it would be challenging at best.

Still, it does sound like a nifty idea, and one I've never seen done... but I'm not much of a video gamer, especially not an action gamer as I didn't have the reflexes even before I started getting a severe case of numb-thumbs if I hold a controller for more than a few minutes. Has anyone else seen something similar, or have any thoughts on setting it up?
--
‎noli esse culus
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