New age

[Marcello]

Hi all,

I've started concepting on a new age. It will be inspired by the Maya temples and ruines, but will features a few different surroundings in which the temples will be presented. At least that's the plan at the moment. Ideas about the purpose of the age are below. Surrounded by a spoiler tag in case u want to be suprised on your first exploration.

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Ok, the basic idea behind this age has been in my head for a while. I want to make an age in which the main purpose is to generate rainbow (linguists: what's rainbow in D'ni?). At first I wanted a meadows kinda place with clear blue sky, etc.. But reading articles on the Maya's in a recent National Geographic special gave me the idea to use the temples and give them a rainbow-generator purpose.

In short: the main age is where the rainbow will be shown in the end. Not sure yet what style I will use here and whether it will be more forestlike or not. From this age I intend to have three books to small ages. Each featuring a different small temple. In each age something should be collected to make the final rainbow. Not sure what yet... either three colors RGB or maybe air, rain and sunlight. The main color scheme and theme of each age will reflect what is to be collected. After having visited each age and having collected the elements (similar to collecting the pages in the original Myst) the rainbow can be activated.

Each age should have a small puzzle to get to the element or to the rainbow controlroom. The main age will be bigger and have at least one temple and a platform for community purposes and admiring the rainbow.

So that's the idea for now. Suggestions are welcome.

Oh yeah... concerning the 4 puzzles... no clue yet. I have one idea for a staircase in which part of the staircase if flat. The flat area consists of 5 panels, each with a number of steps. Each panel can be rotated by switching it's knob on a control panel opposite the stairs. The puzzle should be something like turn 1 and 2 others will turn too. You have to figure out how to get them to show the steps all at once. Must be a way to figure out a puzzle like this mathematically but haven't dug into it yet.

Again... ideas for puzzles are welcome too

[Marcello]

Been building my first temple yesterday. It's quite large and I am trying to figure out how much faces to use. Will copy the entire building into and agefile today or tomorrow and see if my stairs have the right scale. I decided on 0.6 height and 1 width, based on the hood stairs.

[Jojon]

Hmm, for this one I think you should stick with a single age (with multiple temple buildings) and ground it in solid-ish quasi-physics. (Given that I myself am considering an outright stupid mumbo-jumbo multiple age RGB thing with my AP shell, that would make me a hypocrite :P).

I hate puzzles that involves time in RL impractical or stressful manners, but with the Mayans so known for their astronomy and calendars (for all that your age concept is mostly about the architecture), it would seem neat to let one aspect of the puzzle be the figuring out, directly between which of a couple of mountain peaks a sun will rise alone and unoccluded, when it will rise and which spot would make for the best vantage point. If we are to create the mist by artificial means, on such a large scale, might it make sense to use the surrounding nature somehow? Maybe make the temples gigantic fountains, which can soak the hills around them with water, that will vapourise at dawn. Connect these with a huge scale high pressure pipe system and you have possibilites for another set of puzzles, as well as speedy transportation between the temples, in pods inside the pipes. Water supply would only suffice to a single full rainbow "summoning" per day, to make it harder to come up with the right answer(s) by chance.
Perhaps you could have a few suns/(reflective)planets with different spectral profiles, so that each could produce a rainbow, with certain characteristics -- you just need to figure out when they rise or set alone. I could see the creators of the system giving names to each of these rainbows and the locations in which they appear, maybe simply something translating to Daughter_of_Name-of-sun, Son_o_Name-of-valley.

Hmm, one special case when you could get several simultaneous individual rainbows in cardinal directions (because that day all suns/planets rise/set simultaneously, set far apart along the horizon), could be cool and have been a special holiday historically, but that would take overcoming the suggested water supply limitation.


Hope there's something in there... :7

[Marcello]

Some great ideas there Jojon! Thanx. I will definitely think about the one age instead of several idea among other stuff you mention. You got me thinking in new directions.

Thnx